You're in the business - when you are a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.- Norman Lear
When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.
We got ratings. It is not that they would not quarrel with you, or say you are always right. But as long as you stay strong and the ratings are good and you are reasonable - I do not think we fought unreasonably. We basically won that right.
We did an episode on Good Times which came out of a newspaper article about the incidence of hypertension in black males being higher than whites, and increasing. So we did a show in which James, the father on Good Times, had hypertension.
We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition.
TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary.
There was no real controversy with All In The Family. That came from the people on the business end.
The trafficking of sex and violence is comes after the demand for ratings.
The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.
That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people.
So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.
Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.
Nobody doubts my partisanship, but a lot of the activity is nonpartisan.
Maybe they continued to agree with Archie Bunker - as I said earlier, you can't change people's minds, but you can get them to think.
Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you do not collect all these tiny successes, the big ones do not really mean anything.
