A Hundred Reasons to Celebrate a TV Innovator In his 2014 memoir Even This I Get To Experience, producer Norman Lear wrote the following about his television-changing career-defining 1970s series All in the Family: I’ve never heard that anybody conducted his or her life differently after seeing an episode of All in the Family. If two thousand years of the Judeo-Christian ethic hadn’t eradicated bigotry and intolerance, I didn’t think a half-hour sitcom was going to do it. Still, as my grandfather was fond of saying — and as physicists confirm — when you throw a pebble in a lake the water rises. It’s far too infinitesimal for our eyes to register, so all we can see is the ripple. People still say to me, ‘We watched Archie as a family and I’ll never forget the discussions we had after that show.’ And so that was the ripple of All in the Family. Families talked.”

A True Tale from the Front Line of Online Dating (…Or So I’m Told…) SUNDAY 10:52am LifeOutThere: Morning. Hopeful50s: Morning! LIFEOUTTHERE: Thanks for swiping right. Nice profile. Hopeful50s: Thx. And thx! LIFEOUTTHERE: How are you doing this morning? Hopeful50s: Hrny. U? […] LIFEOUTTHERE: Shy, aren’t you? Hopeful50s: Huh? LIFEOUTTHERE: A joke. Sorry. …

The Short Bright Career That Was Freddie Prinze, Ending on This Day in 1977 Of the many ways to look at the sad end of comedian Freddie Prinze’s life by his own hand back in the 1970s — the loss of a son / husband / father to a ten-month-old…

The headline on March 13, 1933, was a bold-face national one: Banks across the country were set to re-open following a week-long forced holiday brought on by Depression-fueled panic. But there was other news around the country this Monday. In D.C., the Volstead Act was amended to allow for the…

Who’s Buried in Grant’s Toomb? An Historic Prime-Time Character We’ve Long Forgotten, for Starters… Swallowed up this past weekend by the gaping maw that is social-media-presented news (not to be confused with Wolf Blitzer-presented Breaking News on CNN, the network that’s re-defined the term once reserved for assassinations and earthquakes…

Who Knows Where Great TV Moments Can Come From It lasted just 90 episodes over barely four seasons, at a time when sub-100 totals were deemed failures and runs of seven-plus years were the norm. Still, WKRP in Cincinnati, which aired on CBS from 1978 to 1982, made its mark. …

Another sign of Hollywood’s changing times A long time ago on a TV network far away — CBS, during the 1970s — one of its most popular series was The Carol Burnett Show. Broadcast starting in 1967, the variety showcase was produced at CBS, too. On a soundstage at its…

The Year That Satan Crashed the Holiday Party The stories aren’t just legend. Some people did actually become ill in their seats. Others did actually pass out. In December 1973, moviegoers were having a devil of a time getting through screenings of a new film called The Exorcist. Forty-five years…

Archie, Kunta, Latka … Holocaust, Sybil, Manson…Hooterville, Munich, Dallas … Women’s Lib, Wounded Knee, Brown Pride … The 1970s had it all, and TV showed it all, warts and all. In the very first week of the very first year of an entirely new decade — the 1970s — these…