Rob Reiner Remembers Norman Lear: We’ve Lost ‘a Real Champion of America’
With “All in the Family,” Lear “tapped into something that nobody had ever done before or even since,” the star of the hit sitcom said.
Reflecting on Norman Lear’s death, Rob Reiner was understandably heartbroken on Wednesday. Not only because he loved Lear, whom he’d first met as an 8-year-old, like a second father, as Reiner put it, but because Lear exited this world during a resurgence of many of the problems he’d tried to air out and squash through his television shows — namely, intolerance and bigotry.
“He just couldn’t believe that this was happening to America,” said Reiner, who had seen Lear several times in the past couple of months, in a phone interview on Wednesday. “He would always say, ‘This is not the America that I grew up in and that we fought for to preserve. Something’s happened to this country that’s gone so far away from everything it stands for.’”
“We’d talk about this, and he would say, ‘It’s like Alice in Wonderland,’” said Reiner, 76, an Oscar-nominated director. Reiner won two Emmy Awards for playing the liberal son-in-law, Michael, of the close-minded racist Archie Bunker on Lear’s most famous sitcom, “All in the Family,” which ran from 1971 to 1979 on CBS.
The show aired in the era of appointment viewing, when there were only a handful of TV channels and households across the United States tuned in to the same programs at the same time. The shifting habits of American viewers, who can much more easily silo themselves in echo chambers when it comes to viewing habits, has only contributed to the fracturing and divisions, Reiner said.
