For the last few years, ABC has been staging live, all-star re-creations of classic sitcom episodes from Norman Lear, the king of socially conscious TV comedies. It’s called Live in Front of a Studio Audience, and they’ve already done All in the Family (twice), as well as The Jeffersons, Good Times, The Facts of Life and Diff’rent Strokes. Now Lear has an idea of which one he’d like to do next, and it’s incredibly timely.
In a wide-ranging interview with Variety ahead of his 100th birthday later this month, Lear was asked about a landmark episode of Maude, his All in the Family spin-off about the upper-middle-class liberal played by Bea Arthur. The show would sometimes criticize its well-meaning but sometimes oblivious hero. Not so in the two-parter “Maude’s Dilemma,” in which she discovers she’s pregnant at 47 and ultimately decides (with help from a friend played by Arthur’s future Golden Girls co-star Rue McClanahan) to terminate it. The episodes aired in November of 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade made abortions legal and safe.
When asked if the episode would work today, now that Roe v. Wade has been eradicated, Lear said it’s “hard to guess,” but said “it could be done.” He then floated an idea: “I think the world is ready for us to do a Live in Front of a Studio Audience with Maude.”
There’s one catch. “There is only one Bea Arthur, there will never be another,” Lear said. “But it’s exciting to imagine what somebody else will make of that character. It’s opening a new door and that’s exciting.”
The Live in Front of a Studio Audience restagings have not only attracted big names. (Woody Harrelson’s Archie Bunker was something else. Ditto Jamie Foxx’s George Jefferson, whose blooper was TV gold.) They’ve also made a point of not altering the original scripts, presenting them as-is, dated pop culture references, mores, and racially charged epithets included. How would an episode from 50 years ago, about a time before abortion was safe and legal, play in 2022? We should probably find out.
(Via Variety)