Remembering Norman Lear, Whose Legacy Is Even More Important to Protect at This Fragile Point in American History
variety.comMichael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Norman Lear changed television. That, we know, is an absolute fact, and I’ll get to it in a moment.
But what really saddens me at the news of Norman Lear’s death, at 101, is he won’t be here anymore to serve as a voice of reason as the United States continues to lose its mind.
Lear was a World War II hero who spent much of his life defending democracy via what he put on our television screens and also in his high-profile advocacy work.
He often talked of what inspired him to be politically active: At 9 years old, Lear was tinkering with his radio when he discovered the bile spewing from anti-Semitic broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin over the airwaves. “I think about it all the time,” Lear told me in 2019, when I had the pleasure of interviewing him multiple times for a Variety cover (among the several times I had the pleasure and honor of interviewing Lear over the last several years).
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