I’m the one in the white hat,” Norman Lear announces as he and his producing partner, Brent Miller, several decades his junior, appear in Zoom boxes in late August.
At 100, the “newly minted centurion,” as he proudly describes himself, still appreciates a laugh. After all, the white hat has been the signature of Lear’s aesthetic for the vast majority of his career — which, at one point, included having seven series on the air and a weekly audience of more than 120 million. A sitcom savant, as Lear has been dubbed over the years, he’s responsible for such barrier-breaking, cultural behemoths as All in the Family, Good Times, Maude and The Jeffersons.
Many of his shows, part of a catalog now largely owned by Sony Pictures Television, have been…
