Celebrating Norman Lear’s Midas touch: his immeasurable impact on pop culture

nypost.com:

Lear died Tuesday at home, surrounded by his family. But this much is clear: He worked right up to the very end, even though he burnished his legend as the personification of classic TV comedy over 50 years ago, with shows he either created or produced: “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons,” “One Day at a Time.” And that was only the tip of his creative iceberg.Lear seemed to accelerate his television output even with advancing age (or maybe in spite of it), including the Netflix reboot of “One Day at a Time,” an upcoming re-imagining of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” — his satirical late-night soap — and live stagings of his classic sitcoms via ABC, in which he proudly showcased those works with all-star casts alongside host Jimmy Kimmel.

Heck, he inked a new deal to create more TV shows … when he turned 96. How cool is that for a man whose résumé dated back to writing scripts for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin on “The Colgate Comedy Hour” when television was in its infancy?

Along the way, Lear also wrote for Danny Thomas and “The Martha Raye Show” and wrote or co-wrote several movies, including “Divorce American Style,” “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” and “Cold Turkey” (starring Dick Van Dyke and Bob Newhart, both still with us).I was lucky enough to interview Lear (for me, it was always “Mr.

Lear,” never “Norman” — he was too iconic for first-name familiarity), both for my 2011 biography of Redd Foxx and several times for The Post, including for the 50th anniversary of “All in the Family” and for a state-of-the-state discussion when he was 97.