"I'm damned glad to be Norman Lear," says Norman Lear. "I'm having a helluva good time being me." But which Norman Lear? The creator of Archie Bunker, superbigot? The real-life Udall liberal? Lear the TV assembly-line vulgarian? Or Lear the audacious idea man who zaps taboos all the way to the top of the ratings?
With eight shows on the air, watched by an estimated 120 million Americans weekly, Lear is the most successful entrepreneur in the history of the medium. However, he considers himself "a writer, first and foremost," and is the most trenchant, uninhibited and influential of the TV breed. Not since Disney has a single showman invaded the screen and the national imagination with such a collection of memorable characters. Indeed, perhaps no American entertainer has created so raucous or raunchy a crew as Archie and Edith, Maude and Walter, J.J., the Jeffersons, Sanford and son—and this season's most improbable heroine, Mary Hartman. Next season the monarch of sitcom will have two new shows on the air, and these too seem likely to slice through prime-time jabberwocky to hit Americans in nerve end and funny bone.
Stratified Sitcoms. One reason for his long reign has been Lear's almost teleological ability to have at least one new talk-provoking show on the air before his last hit has settled into acceptance. In January 1972, just a year after All in the Family made its debut, Lear produced Sanford and Son, his first black sitcom, and watched it soar into the top ten rated shows. It was followed that September by Maude, a spin-off from Family, whose mercurial, politically liberal protagonist taught a nation's housewives the imprecation: "God'll getcha for this." Then came two more socially stratified black sitcoms: Good Times, wherein J.J. and his ghetto clan give a new meaning—and pronunciation—to dynamite, and the middle-class Jeffersons, which demonstrates weekly that blacks also can be bigoted. This year there were signs of Lear jet lag. One Day at a Time, a story of a divorced woman's travails with her two unlovable teen-age daughters, has fairly healthy ratings, but The Dumplings, a somewhat unbelievable celebration of love and cholesterol, seems unlikely to survive.
Last January came Lear's most tantalizing show, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman—MHII, as it is known in the trade—the parody soap opera. Because the networks, according to Lear, were afraid of the freaky show, MH II is syndicated to almost 100 stations. It often runs late in the evening and is thereby changing the viewing habits of millions of Americans. (In Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, where it appears at 11 p.m., it regularly beats out one or two news shows.) Its success, confounding the early critics (including TIME), fills Lear with unholy joy.
"I love Mary Hartman," he told TIME'S Leo Janos last week. "It's outrageous . . . outrageous! And the freedom! It's a story that goes on forever. No first-act curtain to worry about; no second-act resolution scene. Soap opera is a hell of an exciting form. Especially the way we are doing it, on two levels. Funny on one level and an intense human interest story on the other."