The small screen is in mourning. Norman Lear, the man who changed television comedies forever, has died at the age of 101. This was announced by his family through a statement whose lines said goodbye to the man who told real American life, not a magazine ideal. The truth is that he turned the concept of the sitcom on its head, sowing the seed of situation comedies as we know them today, thereby facing everything that a revolutionary must face: change the present.
His career spanned three aspects and during. Screenwriter, director and producer; the cinematic triple entente. Under this creative display, Los Jefferson, All in family, Maude o Once upon a timeamong other immortals of North American television. His television career began in 1954 and since then there have been eight decades of inventions that culminated in the turbulent seventies.where the comedies of canned laughter and the same sets as the main ingredients of the sitcom by definition were cooked in a low-budget breeding ground that had as seasoning what Lear introduced to the scene: crtica social.
The framework for an entire gallery
Los comments on politics and the controversial issues in social terms They were conspicuous by their absence in the series of the time, which sought a kind of return to the past in a type of genre that revived the golden years of the short history of a country that knew itself to be the owner and lord of the world order. Laughter could be introduced into the serious; the serious could welcome laughter.
In this way, Lear began to introduce issues such as homosexuality, racism or the role of ethnic minorities in the scripts that he himself made. It was creating the framework for countless subsequent sitcoms to portray the North American scene with a critical lens that would result in breaking the ceiling of audience records. But the first painting was made by Lear with his palette.
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Hollywood has praised one of the fathers of American comedy. The rational world has lost its greatest defender and our family has lost a dear friend.George Clooney has lamented; the greatest of the greats, Albert Brooks has summarized. His family had the last word: Norman lived a life of creativity, tenacity and empathy. He deeply loved our country and spent his life helping to preserve its founding ideas of justice and equality..
The death of a pioneer who at 101 leaves some ongoing projects orphaned, as well as a mark that is now impossible to shake from any series. Wherever there is a humorous comment about immigration, a military joke typical of a new counterculture, There was a Lear who made black humor the best weapon to combat a just idea.
