Norman Lear, the TV writer and producer who transformed the bland porridge of situation comedy into a zesty stew of sociopolitical strife and brutally funny speech and who gave the world such embattled comic archetypes as Archie Bunker, Fred Sanford, Maude Findlay and George Jefferson, died Dec. 5 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 101.

A family spokeswoman, Lara Bergthold, announced the death but did not provide an immediate cause.

Mr. Lear’s entertainment career spanned the late 1940s to the 21st century, and he also found prominence in later life as a liberal political activist. But his legend was sealed in the 1970s, when he created a handful of shows that transformed the television medium into a fractious national town meeting and showcased the American family in all its hopes and dysfunctions.

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Racial prejudice, divorce, rape, Black inner-city struggle, upward social mobility — themes almost nonexistent on commercial television — were suddenly brought to compelling life through Mr. Lear’s juggernaut of hits, including “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” and “One Day at a Time.”

Far from sermonizing, the shows were master classes in broad comedy. Their success was undeniably due in large measure to the actors, who brought shadings of empathy to troubled, worried and often deeply flawed characters.

“Norman Lear took television away from the pimps, hookers, hustlers, private eyes, junkies, cowboys and rustlers that constituted television chaos, and, in their place, he put the American people,” screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky once observed. “He took the audience and put them on the [TV] set.”

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By the 1990s, the adult sensibility that Mr. Lear brought to television found a new home in cable drama. “You can trace the impact of his shows in ‘The Sopranos,’ ‘The Shield,’ ‘The Wire,’ wherever you have complex characters of questionable morality,” said Ron Simon, a curator at the Paley Center for Media in New York. “Nothing was ever neatly wrapped up in Lear’s world.”

At his professional peak, Mr. Lear had seven hit sitcoms on the air at one time, and his face recognition was nearly equal to that of his shows’ stars. (He was even a guest host on “Saturday Night Live.”) It was a heady ascent for a jokesmith and screenwriter who toiled for many years in show business’s second tier, and it all began with an idea nobody at first wanted: an adaptation of the BBC comedy series “Till Death Us Do Part,” about a working-class troglodyte and his long-suffering family.

When Mr. Lear pitched the idea to ABC in 1969, the network commissioned him to write two pilots but then abandoned the project as too risky. Mickey Rooney, who was Mr. Lear’s first thought to play the lead, told him: “You’re going to get killed in the streets. They’re going to shoot you dead.”

Undaunted, Mr. Lear took the show to CBS, which was in the market for younger urban viewers. The series, retitled “All in the Family,” premiered in January 1971 and introduced viewers to a blue-collar bigot named Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), who berated his angelic wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton), outraged his activist daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), and heaped invective on his “pinko Polack” son-in-law, Mike (Rob Reiner), a.k.a. Meathead.

Lord of his own semi-attached rowhouse in Queens, Archie Bunker railed against the prevailing social winds in language that still has the power to shock. In one characteristic exchange from the first episode, Archie snarls: “If your spics and your spades want their rightful share of the American Dream, let them get out there and hustle for it like I done. I didn’t have no people marchin’ and protestin’ to get me my job.”

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“No,” Edith says, “his uncle got it for him.”

Archie was the butt of every episode, but, thanks in part to O’Connor’s layered performance, he also became a scrappily lovable figure — so much so that some liberal critics accused the show of giving aid and comfort to real-life bigots. Mr. Lear claimed that the character was based on his father, who regularly told his wife to “stifle it” and who called his son “the laziest White kid I ever seen.”

“My father and I fought all those battles,” Mr. Lear told the New York Times in 1973. “I thought: ‘My God, if I could only get this kind of thing on American television.’”

Within five months of its debut, “All in the Family” was the No. 1 show in the country. It held that position for five years and ran for several years after that, garnering multiple Emmy Awards and making stars of its largely unknown cast. It also gave birth to a dynasty of CBS spinoffs.

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“Maude” (1972-1978) starred Bea Arthur as Maude Findlay, a much-divorced feminist firebrand (and cousin to Edith Bunker). “Good Times” (1974-1979) followed the family life of Maude’s former housekeeper, Florida Evans (Esther Rolle), in a Chicago housing project. And “The Jeffersons” (1975-1985), starring Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford, tracked the upward mobility of the Bunkers’ African American neighbors, George and Louise Jefferson.

Mr. Lear’s hits also included NBC’s “Sanford and Son” (1972-1977), based on the British series “Steptoe and Son,” which starred Redd Foxx as a crusty old junk dealer, and the CBS sitcom “One Day at a Time” (1975-1984), with Bonnie Franklin as a divorced mother struggling to raise two teenage daughters.

Under the guise of humor, Mr. Lear managed to destroy some of television’s most entrenched taboos: “All in the Family” was the first series to broadcast the sound of a flushing toilet. His shows addressed racism, terrorism, impotence and homosexuality. Edith Bunker was nearly raped by an intruder, and Maude Findlay became the first sitcom heroine to get an abortion — in a two-part episode that prompted pickets and boycott threats.

Defending his plots in a 1973 speech to the International Radio and Television Society, Mr. Lear said: “The so-called adult themes that television is currently dealing in are themes for which the American people have always been ready. We in television simply weren’t trusting the people … to accept or reject as they saw fit.”

An erratic childhood

Norman Milton Lear was born in New Haven, Conn., on July 27, 1922. He described his father, a ne’er-do-well salesman, as “one of those fellows who was going to have a million dollars in 10 days to two weeks.”

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The elder Lear’s schemes got him sent to prison for three years. The young Norman lived for stretches with relatives and found refuge from his strained family life in radio comics including Jack Benny and Fred Allen. (As a Jew, he said coming across the antisemitic radio personality Father Charles E. Coughlin helped awaken him to a strain of right-wing bigotry in American life that he sought to counter with his later activism.)

He won a scholarship to Emerson College in Boston but left to serve in the Army Air Forces during World War II. As a radio operator and gunner, he flew more than 50 combat missions in the Mediterranean theater.

After the war, he moved to Los Angeles and worked as a door-to-door furniture salesman and sidewalk photographer. To earn extra money, he and a friend began writing comedy skits.

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Operating on what he later called “sheer determination and a lot of gall,” Mr. Lear made a blind phone call to comedian Danny Thomas, offering to write a routine for Thomas’s appearance that night at Ciro’s, a nightclub on the Sunset Strip.

“How long will it run?” Thomas asked.

“How long do you need?” Mr. Lear shot back.

The seven-minute routine Mr. Lear delivered caught the attention of agent David Susskind, who signed him as a writer for the NBC variety show “Ford Star Revue.” Mr. Lear went on to craft jokes for the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, as well as for entertainers including Martha Raye and George Gobel.

After forming Tandem Productions with director Alan “Bud” Yorkin in 1959, Mr. Lear gravitated toward feature films, writing the screenplays for “Come Blow Your Horn” (1963), “Divorce American Style” (1967), “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” (1968) and “Cold Turkey” (1971).

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Later, Mr. Lear served as producer of such popular films as “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “Fried Green Tomatoes” (1991), but his fame and wealth derived largely from his work on the small screen.

Mr. Lear created his most famous shows for the big networks, but when CBS turned down his pilot for the soap-opera satire “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” he flew independent-television executives to his home in Brentwood, Calif., and pitched the show to them.

In January 1976, the show premiered on nearly 100 stations across the country, and it won a devoted following. It spawned two talk-show parodies featuring Martin Mull and Fred Willard: “Fernwood 2Night” (1977) and “America 2-Night” (1978). CBS would later air “Mary Hartman” in late-night reruns.

His touch wasn’t always golden. The controversial “Hot l Baltimore” (1975), whose characters included prostitutes and one of TV’s first gay couples, was canceled after 13 episodes. “All’s Fair,” “The Nancy Walker Show,” “All That Glitters” and “A Year at the Top” likewise flopped.

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As for “All in the Family,” it became “Archie Bunker’s Place” in 1979 and carried on through 1983. But it launched without Struthers and Reiner, and, after the first season, Stapleton, too, was gone.

Mr. Lear would never again have a hit show, despite comeback vehicles such as “a.k.a. Pablo” (1984) and “Sunday Dinner” (1991).

Entering the civic arena

By then, his energies had been diverted into a new arena. In 1980, alarmed by the growing political clout of the Moral Majority, he founded People For the American Way, a liberal advocacy group aimed at preserving the separation of church and state. In short order, the group had 200,000 members, a $5 million budget and a hard-working publicity machine that generated op-eds, public-service announcements and media appearances.

Mr. Lear’s group helped defeat Robert H. Bork’s 1987 nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Mr. Lear became a prominent spokesman for Hollywood’s progressive wing. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, in a letter to supporters, was moved to label him “the greatest enemy of the American family in our generation.”

Mr. Lear, for his part, called the religious right “a well-financed, highly coordinated, computerized campaign not just to preach their faith and their politics — which they have every right to do — but … to impose their political and moral beliefs on the rest of us.”

In 2000, Mr. Lear bought one of the few extant original copies of the Declaration of Independence for $8 million and sent it on a cross-country exhibition. He also started campaigns to encourage young voters and promote citizen action, and he became a regular blogger for the Huffington Post.

Mr. Lear’s personal life made headlines in 1987 after he divorced his second wife, Frances Loeb Lear, an outspoken lecturer and scholar who was widely believed to be the model for Maude Findlay. (Mr. Lear’s first marriage, to Charlotte Rosen, had also ended in divorce.)

The resulting settlement, estimated at about $112 million, was enough to knock Mr. Lear off Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans, but it gave Frances Lear the seed capital to found Lear’s, a magazine aimed at women 35 and older. The magazine folded after six years. She died of breast cancer in 1996.

With his third wife, psychologist Lyn Davis Lear, Mr. Lear owned multimillion-dollar properties and added to his already vast collection of contemporary paintings and sculpture. To those who argued that his lavish lifestyle was at odds with his left-wing politics, his response was simple: “I never claimed to be Mother Teresa, only Norman Lear.”

In addition to his wife, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Ellen; two daughters from his second marriage, Kate and Maggie; three children from his third marriage Ben, Madeline and Brianna; and four grandchildren.

In his later years, Mr. Lear did his best to plug into the zeitgeist. He attended Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts. He rescued Concord Records, a foundering jazz label. He brainstormed with the writing staff of “South Park” (whose pint-size bigot, Eric Cartman, could be Archie Bunker’s great-grandson).

Mr. Lear, a recipient of the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors, was once asked whether shows like “All in the Family” could be a force for social change. “If a couple thousand years of Judeo-Christian ethic have not solved the problems of bigotry and narrow-mindedness,” he replied, “I’d be a fool to think a little half-hour situation comedy is gonna do the trick.”

But he remained proud of his television legacy. “It seems to me that the bulk of what we’ve done is a celebration of family. They’re all families that hang together, they all love one another, they go through the ordeal of life, but they come out on the other side of that ordeal connected. Together.”

Bayard is a novelist and contributing writer to Book World

correction

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the name of the BBC comedy series that helped inspire Lear's CBS sitcom “All in the Family.” It is “Till Death Us Do Part,” not “Till Death Do Us Part.” The obituary has been corrected.

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