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"The flip side of Archie," is the way Lear describes Maude. "She is a Roosevelt liberal who has her feet firmly planted in the '40s." Maude knows how to arrange all the right-thinking enlightened attitudes around herself, but when she is challenged they open up like gunwales on a galleon, and she blazes away with broadsides at feckless repairmen, greedy cab drivers and her priggish right-wing neighbor.
She first hove into view on a Family episode last season. The entire Bunker family fell ill and Maude took over the household—especially Archie ("You can either get up off that couch and eat your breakfast or lie there and feed off your own fat...and if you choose the latter you can probably lie there for months"). The CBS brass was watching and, in Norman Lear's words, "saw a star." A second episode—in effect a pilot —was concocted, in which Archie and Edith visited Maude on the eve of her daughter's wedding to a Jew: it clinched the deal for a new series.
"Maude breaks every rule of television from the start," says Robert Wood, head of CBS-TV. "She's on her fourth husband, and she is living with a divorced daughter who has a son. It's not so long ago that you couldn't show a woman divorced from one husband, let alone three." In last week's opening episode, Maude had fairly tame set-tos with a door-to-door salesman and a psychiatrist, but her future outings will include a look at legalizing marijuana and a fling at black-radical-chic party giving à la Leonard Bernstein. In one episode not yet okayed by the network, she even gets pregnant and decides to seek an abortion, while her shaken husband looks into the vasectomy market.
With Family, Sanford and Maude going for them, Yorkin and Lear have emerged in a big way from the twilight of anonymity behind the scenes in TV. Johnny Carson was barely exaggerating when he introduced this year's Emmy Award ceremonies as "an evening with Norman Lear." After Lear had collected one of the seven Emmys won by Family, Carson quipped: "I understand Norman has just sold his acceptance speech as a new series."
Of course it isn't just the recognition; it's the money. Yorkin and Lear's profits from their three shows this year could reach $5,000,000, not counting the take from books, records and other byproduct merchandising. With offers of further projects pouring in, their Tandem headquarters is the hottest TV production office in Hollywood. So busy are the partners nowadays that they rarely get a chance to be in the office. They run the business by remote control, communicating with each other by memo. Occasionally they rendezvous for a quick huddle in the parking lot of a studio where one or the other is coming from or going to work.