2018 Sitcom Revival Craze Isn't New But Criticism of Whitewashing Is

On February 22, 2018, Marketplace featured a show segment entitled "Explaining the craze in TV reboots".  Reboot is perhaps an inappropriate term; rather "revival" is likely a more accurate term.  You may listen to that segment HERE, or below.

Also be sure to read the Hollywood Reporter article written by Michael O'Connell who was interviewed in the Marketplace clip.  That story can be viewed at https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/new-economics-tvs-reboot-craze-1086797.

The Marketplace story discusses a recent (as of early 2018) wave of TV revivals either already on the air, or scheduled to be headed to the airwaves very soon.  For example, think of successful reboots already on the air, including "Fuller House" and "Will & Grace."  Indeed, "Will & Grace" currently ranks as NBC's No. 1 comedy of the season, and it trails only CBS' "Big Bang Theory" and "Young Sheldon" on the list of top comedies across TV.  Others, including "Roseanne" and "Murphy Brown," with the original casts still in place, are scheduled to air soon.

"Fuller House" was a revival of ABC's "Full House" with the original child cast now adults rather than children.  That show picks up with most of the original cast, only it was Netflix that took the risk of producing it rather than network television.  Now entering its fourth season, the numbers were solid enough for the streaming giant to continue.  The original trailer was available at the following link, but has since been removed from YouTube https://youtu.be/CXuGLswn2l0.

"Will & Grace" Cast Reunion as PSA for 2016 Election

"Will & Grace's" TV revival actually began as kind of a public service announcement (PSA) on YouTube encouraging viewers to vote in the 2016 election.  A mini-episode, if you will, featuring the original cast.  That video was originally on YouTube at https://youtu.be/dQZkt7SKtKk but has since been disabled. However, Hollywood Reporter has its own copy found at https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/will-grace-reunion-debra-messing-932915 if you wish to watch it.

That 10-minute PSA clip generated more than 7 million viewers in the first few weeks after it went on YouTube (and subsequently went viral on Facebook and other social platforms), suggesting the U.S.audience was still very much interested in seeing the original characters 11 years after the series finale in 2006.  The cast also seemed ready for a revival, and luckily the original set was still in storage (which was used for the 2016 YouTube #VoteHoney PSA), plus the creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan were also ready to revive the original series.

Eleven years after the finale of the original series required a little bit of creative license to revive the show in a believable manner.  The original series finale ended with Will and Grace partnered — Will with Vince, Grace with Leo — all raising children.  Grace had a daughter named Laila with husband Leo (Harry Connick Jr.) while Will was raising a son, Ben, with spouse Vincent (Bobby Cannavale).  But the revival began by acknowledging both Will's and Grace's separations, and Karen (who is known on the show for having substance abuse issues anyway) having and explaining what was a drug-induced hallucination.  The exact dialogue went as follows:


"I had the craziest dream," Karen says, describing the finale scenes. "Will was living with a swarthy man in uniform and Grace was married to a Jew doctor."

"Well, we were, but we're single now," Will replies.

"What happened to the children that you had that grew up and got married to each other?" Karen then asks, to which Will replies that it "never happened".

"Oh, what a relief," she replied, speaking for fans everywhere. "Nobody wants to see you two raise kids."


The revised "Will & Grace" sitcom was originally ordered by NBC for a limited, 16-episode run, but was subsequently renewed for another, 13-episode season.  NBC was evidently pleased enough with the ratings to renew it for another season.

Roseanne Revival Coming to ABC

The 1990's ABC sitcom Roseanne is another revival that will appear on ABC television starting on March 27, 2018.  Like the others, it will feature virtually all of the original cast.  A trailer is available by visiting https://youtu.be/X32lP33kyOs.

[Author P.S., May 29, 2018: ABC abruptly cancelled the Roseanne revival after the show's namesake star went on a racist Twitter rant.  While the show's performance was acceptable, ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said in a statement: "Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show".  Disney CEO Bob Iger added on Twitter that "there was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing."  Barr's talent agency also dropped her.]

Meanwhile, rival network CBS is going full steam ahead (at least for the 13 episodes which have been ordered and produced) with its revival of Murphy Brown, which is planned to run on Thursday evenings at 9:30 PM.  The trailer for that show was found at https://youtu.be/pGn-OXaBV68 but has also since been removed.

2018 Casts of Several Sitcom Revivals

Mixed Track Record of Success and Failure on Previous Reboots/Revivals

Reboots/revivals of one form or another have enjoyed periods of popularity with networks and producers.  There were numerous reboots/revivals of "The Brady Bunch" for example, including 1981's sitcom "The Brady Brides" which focused on Marsha's and Jan's newly-wed lives.  That was followed by several made-for-TV movies including 1988's "A Very Brady Christmas," 1995's "The Brady Bunch Movie" and 1996's "A Very Brady Sequel".  The latter two were movies shown in theaters, and although the characters were identical (played by new actors/actresses and caught in a time-warp), they succeeded because they were intended to be parodies of the original.  Not all revivals are parodies.

In 1980, "The Nude Bomb" (also known as The Return of Maxwell Smart) was a reboot of the late-sixties sitcom created by Mel Brooks "Get Smart" that starred Don Adams, though it was released in theaters initially, and didn't air on TV until 1982.  But another made-for-television revival in 1999 starring Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, and Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 entitled "Get Smart, Again!" was popular enough to prompt a new (but short-lived) TV series, which starred the two original cast members as well as actor Andy Dick.  A 2008 reboot film version starring actor Steve Carrell as Maxwell Smart and Anne Hathaway as Agent 99 hit the theaters, and received mixed reviews from film critics, but did reasonably well at the box office.  But the inescapable fact is that many of the popular gadgets featured in the original series no longer seem so revolutionary today.  For example, the shoe-telephone is now an antique relative to smartphones today, and the "cone of silence" seems like its from another era -- which it was.

Similarly, "I Dream of Jeannie... Fifteen Years Later" aired as a made-for-TV movie in 1985 and another named "I Still Dream of Jeannie" ran in 1991.  Actress Barbara Eden starred in both, but Tony Nelson initially played by actor Larry Hagman (who was under contract to star in the prime-time soap "Dallas") was played by different actors.  As a result, neither the "Get Smart" of "I Dream of Jeannie" revivals were huge ratings successes.

Finally, how many revivals of Gilligan's Island can realistically be remembered?  Most of the original cast (excluding actress Tina Louise who played the character/actress Ginger Grant on the original series, but was notably absent from virtually all of the reunions) were in each of the made-for-TV movies including "Rescue from Gilligan's Island", "The Castaways on Gilligan's Island" and even "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island" not to mention a couple of animated cartoon versions of the sitcom which was more popular in syndication than it ever was in its initial broadcast run.  Each ended pretty much as they began: rescued only to be lost again on an uncharted island - again.

For television, revivals/reboots usually rely on bringing much of the original audiences, although not always with the same casts.  Some featured original actor/actress cameos (for example, Ann B. Davis, who played housekeeper Alice Nelson in the original sitcom made cameo appearances, as did actress Florence Henderson who played Carol Brady in the originals (both actresses have since passed away), while others only briefly reunite the original casts (or many of them; some had to be replaced since the original talent are deceased).  For example, 2012's first-episode reboot of "Dallas" featured many of the original cast members, even featuring actor Larry Hagman who played J.R. Ewing, although he passed away shortly after the first episode of the reboot aired.

Other prior revivals/reboots have been re-imagined with completely new casts and story lines.  One famous reboot flop was 2007's unsuccessful reboot of "The Bionic Woman" which (briefly) ran on NBC.  That featured actress Michelle Ryan as the main character Jamie Somers.  But instead of Jamie being a schoolteacher and former professional tennis player, the new Jamie was a bartender raising her younger sister on her own, and her bionic powers were not implemented by secretive Government researchers, but her boyfriend.  Only 8 episodes of the reboot aired on TV, as a strike by the Writers Guild of America interrupted production.  The series suffered from poor ratings after an initially-promising premier episode, likely attributed to audience curiosity who ended up very disappointed at how dark the new series was compared to the original.

Actress Lindsay Wagner, the original actress who starred as Jamie Somers in 'The Bionic Woman' back in the 1970's, also played no part in the new, rebooted series.  Ms. Wagner said, "On a technical level, it was very good, but I don't think they understood the show. It was steeped in that old-school thinking. It was like a lot of things today, angry and dark."

More recent revivals (distinct from reboots) are using all or much of the original casts that made the initial shows successful.  Although a complicated rights and remuneration can bedevil many revivals or reboots (such as the soaps noted in a previous post, see http://hgm.sstrumello.com/2013/04/can-soaps-left-for-dead-see-new-life.html for that), when original producers are involved, those issues may be slightly less complicated if the producers are onboard with the idea of reviving the show and they own content rights for the original programs.

The TV revival/reboot craze currently going on is not without criticism, although not because the revivals or the shows aren't any good, but because they claim it is whitewashing.  Though they may make us feel nostalgic, they also come at a cost, because diversity is often nixed in favor of the all-white casts of the past.  From the 1980's to 2017, the number of characters of color with speaking roles has nearly quadrupled, up from about 8% in the 1980's to about 30% today.  According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, non-whites are still under-represented on television, although they are better represented in 2018 than at any point in the past.

Are Current Reboots/Revivals Whitewashing?

On February 12, 2018, the New York City NPR station WNYC and Public Radio International (PRI)'s program "The Takeaway" addressed this not-too-minor issue in an episode entitled "TV Reboots and Revivals Bring Nostalgia — And Whitewashing" and it discussed the implications of that.  That was worth listening to below, or by visiting https://www.wnyc.org/story/tv-reboots-and-revivals-bring-nostalgia-and-whitewashing/.


Of course, all-white casts have long dominated U.S. popular culture in spite of growing diversity, and recent gains made by non-white players recently won't necessarily erase generations of U.S. pop culture.  As noted by Michael O'Connell in the Marketplace interview above, the current reboot wave has much more to do with the fact that not much else seems to be working right now from an entertainment business perspective, rather than any sort of systematic effort to erase the gains of non-white programming.  Indeed, although white supremacy has gained visibility since the electoral college victory by Donald J. Trump, as trackers of hate groups note, those groups still remain relatively small in spite of their recent increased visibility (see the Anti-Defamation League's write-up HERE and Southern Poverty Law Center's write-up HERE for more background) lately.  The entertainment industry has no motivation other than profit.

Whether the current popularity of reboots and revivals enables all to succeed remains to be seen; so far, the revivals' success features an unconventional family involving three white men as heads of household and another featuring gay white men with female companions.  Soon, another will star a female investigative journalist and news anchor for a fictional TV news magazine and recovered alcoholic who speaks her mind freely, and finally a blue-collar, working class white family living in rural America.  Only the latter series is even remotely consistent with the Alt-Right.

However, if trips down memory lane work out financially, TV history certainly has a lot to mine, although not necessarily with the same casts and producers.  In the end, Hollywood will be watching how financially successful the latest reboots turn out to be.  If history provides any clues, there will likely be a mixture of success and failure, just as did prior periods of sitcom reboots/revivals.

Pop Culture Reunion: Who's the Boss?

On October 5, 2016, the main cast of the 1980's sitcom "Who's the Boss" reunited 25 years after the show ended in 1992.  The reunion video appears on Time's (relatively) new streaming video service (which launched in September 2016) called the People/Entertainment Weekly Network.  A link to the news can be seen at http://ew.com/article/2016/09/30/whos-boss-ew-reunion/ and the video (and link to it) can be seen below.  The re-united cast dished on one of their show's most iconic episodes, "Samantha's Growing Up". The basic synopsis of that episode was Samantha was growing up fast, only Tony was reluctant to admit it. Reality set in when he had to buy her first bra.  When Samantha was upset over his purchase, Tony asked Angela for her help with shopping for Samantha's first bra.

In the reunion, Tony Danza (Tony Micelli), Judith Light (Angela Robinson Bower), and Alyssa Milano (Samantha "Sam" Micelli) shared how they could only say the word "bra" on broadcast television once at that time because the network censors were still very actively controlling what could (and could not) be said on the show.  Although all of the cast is present, the conversation was dominated by Tony Danza, Judith Light and Alyssa Milano, whereas Danny Pintauro (Jonathan Bower) and Katherine Helmond (Mona Robinson) are a bit quieter, although we don't really know how much was edited out of the final reunion video.  The video clip can be found below, or by visiting https://youtu.be/dTcTYKJy2Zc .



About Who's the Boss?

The title of the show refers to the clear role reversal of the two lead actors, where a woman was the breadwinner and a man (although he was not her husband) stayed at home and took care of the house.  It challenged then-contemporary stereotypes of Italian-American young men as macho and boorish, but wholly ignorant of life outside of urban working-class neighborhoods like Brooklyn where the character Tony was from, whereas Tony was depicted as sensitive, intelligent and domestic with an interest in intellectual pursuits.

The premise of the show was that former major-league baseball player (he was reportedly a second baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals) Tony Micelli, who was forced to retire due to a shoulder injury, along with his young daughter Samantha, takes a job as live-in housekeeper at the suburban Fairfield, Connecticut household of advertising exec Angela Bower.  Angela was uptight and obsessed with her work.  But Tony was eager to move his daughter out of crowded Brooklyn, New York, so the gig in Connecticut seemed like a perfect place to raise his daughter.  Tony and Sam had to adjust to their new lives with the Bowers -- Angela, her son Jonathan, and her mother, Mona.  Mona Robinson was Angela's feisty, sexually progressive mother, and Mona dated all kinds of men, from college age to silver-haired CEOs. That portrayal of an "older woman" with an active social and sex life was also unusual for TV at the time.

In terms of sitcoms, Who's the Boss premiered at a time when broadcast TV was still king (1984), which was just before cable (and later, streaming) commanded a growing share of public attention and ratings (and therefore ad dollars), or industry creativity and awards.  As a result, it was somewhat unique because it shares something with true television classics like I Love Lucy which came from an era where TV was only broadcast over the airwaves and was still a relatively new technology.  While Who's the Boss? got mixed reviews from critics, it was a ratings success for ABC, and continued for an impressive eight seasons.

Cast of Who's the Boss?

The cast was also an interesting ensemble.

Tony Danza was a TV sitcom veteran (in addition to being a former professional boxer in real-life), having previously starred in the ABC sitcom Taxi roughly a decade earlier.  Judith Light was a veteran of the stage and of TV soap operas, having been a popular and longstanding cast member (playing character Karen Wolek) on ABC's One Life to Live for a number of years before stepping into primetime TV.  Katherine Helmond was another sitcom vet, having starred on the sitcom Soap among others.

Both of the children in the cast pretty much got their start on "Who's the Boss".  While Alyssa Milano (age 44 as of 2017) continued to work periodically in entertainment, as did Judith Light (age 68 and as of 2017, she regularly appears on Amazon's series Transparent), and Katherine Helmond played recurring characters on both the sitcom Coach and Everybody Loves Raymond, Helmond has since largely retired (she's now age 87), and Tony Danza (age 65) has also unofficially retired, while Danny Pintauro has basically left show business.

Life After Who's The Boss?

A year earlier, former child actor Danny Pintauro announced that he was HIV positive and had been living that way for over 15 years (see http://usat.ly/1KFryBK for more), making him one of a few celebrities along with Charlie Sheen and Magic Johnson to do so.  He broke the news when he told told talk show host Oprah Winfrey that at the advice of his former Who's the Boss? co-star Judith Light, he shared the story with the celebrity tabloid the National Enquirer, which threatened to out him, but instead, he said he felt that the Enquirer's coverage of his news was fair and balanced rather than salacious, and that was mainly because he was forthcoming with his story.   Catch his interview with Oprah for the OWN cable network on YouTube at https://youtu.be/GUCJgQndgGQ for more.


Because Pintauro's diagnosis took place a number of years after medications were developed to effectively treat the HIV virus, his story was quite different from earlier celebrities diagnosed in the late 1970's or early 1980's (think of people like Rock Hudson as the most notable example), and he's now a happily-married gay man, rather than a tragedy.  But he's also avoided staying in show business, preferring to live his adult life outside of the Hollywood spotlight, making him an anomaly among former child stars, which has a sordid history of leaving child-stars-turned-adults devastated with drug/alcohol addiction and ruin, or religious cult membership to give a few examples.

One need look no further than the cast of the 1970's sitcom Diff'rent Strokes as an example, where Dana Plato went from TV star to robbing convenience stores before her untimely death in 1999 at the age of 34.  She wasn't alone.  Her co-star Todd Bridges battled a crack cocaine addiction in his twenties, and the other child co-star Gary Coleman, struggled financially later in life.  In 1989, he successfully sued his parents and business adviser over misappropriation of his assets, only to declare bankruptcy a decade later.  Unfortunately, Gary Coleman died in 2010 at age 42.  But Coleman was also parodied in the Broadway show Avenue Q, which won the 2004 Tony Award for Best Musical, and a character presented as Gary Coleman in the show works as the superintendent of the apartment complex where the musical takes place.  In the song "It Sucks to Be Me", he laments his fate.  Initially, the producers intended for Coleman to play himself, but he never showed up to the meeting with them, and subsequently threatened to sue them, although the lawsuit never materialized.  Given the track record of child-stars-gone-bad personified by the cast of Diff'rent Strokes, the fact that Danny Pintauro left show business should be viewed positively.

As for the others in the cast, former child castmate and on-screen pseudo-sister Alyssa Milano is, perhaps due to her age, been one of the more active cast members still working on-screen (aside from Judith Light), but her work has also been more limited by comparison, consisting of  a number of made-for-television movies, guest-star appearances, occasional TV celebrity game-show and daytime talk-show appearances, as well as a few television commercials.

As already noted, Judith Light has likely had the most active acting career after her work on Who’s the Boss?  Having really begun her acting career on Broadway, Judith Light has continued to return to working on the stage, having received several Tony nominations and winning two Tony's (one in 2012 and another in 2013).  She's also played in a variety of different television roles since starring on Who's the Boss, including recurring roles on both the NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and on ABC's Ugly Betty (for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in 2007), and on the short-lived TNT reboot series Dallas.  Most recently, she's been starring as Shelly Pfefferman on Amazon's successful series Transparent, for which she received noms for the Golden Globe, Primetime Emmy, and Critics' Choice Television Award.

Although Tony Danza continued to work on television immediately following the conclusion of Who's the Boss?, mostly in made-for-television movies, and he briefly had his own syndicated daytime talk show known as The Tony Danza Show which ran from 1997-1998, as well as various standalone appearances, his work has been considerably less frequent in the past decade, and the consensus is that he is now semi-officially retired now (he may still work in entertainment occasionally, most likely when his agent brings something of interest to his attention).

As for the sitcom Who's the Boss, I think the reunion episode was cute (there had been previous reunions, but the timing seemed right this time around) and the length was right for an environment where short clips seem all the American attention-span can accommodate.  Whether the People/Entertainment Weekly Network releases any others remains to be seen.

Odd Way Race Was Depicted in the 1970's

For most of TV's history, the images on screen were anything but diverse.  Instead, TV reflected a depiction of the U.S. as an almost exclusively Caucasian-American, heterosexual, Christian population (in spite of the fact that most of the industry's most important executives were Jewish).  But following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it became clear that either they started depicting people outside of that narrow population (usually, that meant including African-Americans) or it might be imposed upon them by lawmakers or the courts.  This meant that people who grew up in the 1970's were the first generation of people to grow up in this "new" world.

The cover of a Ginn basic reader circa 1973

It wasn't just Hollywood, even publishers of grade-school textbooks faced the reality that the U.S. was never truly as white as they'd portrayed it to be, so the readers used in grade-schools across the country suddenly faced revisions to accommodate reality as it actually was, rather than as some racists wanted it to be.  Most notably, that meant the inclusion of African-Americans in the dialogue and illustrations, although far less of smaller demographic minority populations at the time, including Hispanics, Asians, Hawaiians, Native Americans and certainly no sexual minorities.  Of course, those groups did not include a legacy of slavery as was the case with Southern blacks.  Ironically, in many parts of the country, "integration" as it came to be known at the time was largely something that was talked about, but didn't really exist except in conversation because many Americans had self-segregated themselves by living near people who looked like them, worshiped as they did, and thought like they did.  But integration had to start someplace.  The problem was that publishers and TV execs did not exactly "embrace" integration in the beginning, rather they stumbled into it.  That meant that kids growing up during that era were seeing failed integration experiments in person.

Some of my favorite examples were the late-1960's to mid-1970's TV sitcoms.  For example, in early in 1970, the sitcom Bewitched starring Elizabeth Montgomery was at the top of the ratings (catch one of my posts about that sitcom at https://goo.gl/olfrdW for more).  The show featured a husband Darrin Stephens and his stay-at-home, witch-turned-wife Samantha and their daughter Tabitha (they added a son Adam towards the end of the show).  The show also featured regulars including Samantha's meddling mother Endora (played by Agnes Moorehead), and occasionally others including her uncle Arthur, portrayed by gay actor Paul Lynde, Darrin's boss Larry Tate (played by David White) as well as nosey neighbor Gladys Kravitz, and Larry Tate's wife Louise, and a few others.  Although the replacement of actor Dick York who played Darrin Stephens with another actor Dick Sargeant (who like Paul Lynde was a gay actor) got the biggest headlines, the show replaced other recurring characters with different talent, including the actress who played Gladys Kravitz, originally played by Alice Pearce, but following her death, the role was played by Sandra Gould, and also the replacement of  character Louise Tate from actress Irene Vernon subsequently with Kasey Rogers.  Note that a 1980's sitcom, The Golden Girls acknowledged the character-switching.  In season 2, episode 24 "To Catch a Neighbor", the character Sophia (played by Estelle Getty),  has a dialogue in which she tells her daugher Dorothy that she's going to their criminal neighbor's house because they need her experience, noting that she's lived through "two world wars, 15 vendettas, 4 operations and 2 Darrin's on Bewitched".

From my perspective, I think its appropriate to acknowledge how race was addressed on television in the years that followed the late 1960's civil rights battles (including such notable U.S. Supreme Court victories as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and Loving v. Virginia).  While those legal issues may have been resolved, public acceptance among many still lagged the Courts, and continue to this day.

The origins of the Bewitched episode "Sisters At Heart" show were actually quite noble.  Actress Elizabeth Montgomery and her then-husband/producer William Asher had visited a Los Angeles area high school Thomas Jefferson High. It was early in 1970 and they were touched by the plight of the students at that school, especially the minority students, some of whom they stayed in touch with through their graduations.  Because of that interaction, they also took an idea that the students themselves came up with, and turned it into an episode of Bewitched.  Elizabeth Montgomery even gave a special message to the audience before the show including acknowledgement of the show's sponsor Oscar Mayer.


The episode originally aired on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1970, and yet these days, you might legitimately wonder how the episode ever made it on the air.  The episode was called "Sisters At Heart" began with Tabitha introducing her friend (who is African-American) and McMahon-Tate wanting to entertain a new client. The client wants to investigate the home life of the people he's working with. The client also happens to be a racist. Tabitha and her friend declare themselves as "sisters" and the African-American child answers the door when the client enters. The client assumes that Darrin Stevens has a black child. Tabitha's friend then tells the client that she has a white sister.  After the meeting, Tabitha tries to rationalize how they could be sisters. First, Tabitha makes both girls white.  Then she makes them both black, but remember, she's a child who hasn't mastered the art of "wishcraft" yet.  She finally tries again and they both end up polka-dotted with the other girl's skin color as dots.

In 1970, rather than generating an outcry for showing blackface on network television, the show was actually awarded a special Emmy. These days, some would likely completely lose it if actors appeared in blackface on national television regardless of the reason.  But "Sisters At Heart" now stands as a rather unique piece of television history.  Indeed, the late Elizabeth Montgomery stated this was one of her favorite episodes of Bewitched.

But the episode stands out for another reason in my mind.  The fact that the African-American characters are never seen again on the show, not even the character Keith Wilson (played by actor Don Marshall), who supposedly worked at McMann-Tate, the advertising firm where Darrin is employed, nor is daughter Lisa Wilson (played by Venetta Rogers) ever seen again.

It wasn't only Bewitched that stumbled on the race issue in the 1970's with odd, one-off depictions of characters who are never mentioned again, many other TV series did things in a very similar way.  Only legendary TV writer and producer Norman Lear, who began with the smash hit All In the Family, really included some of the first African-Americans (others featured black cast members, even if those weren't always regular cast members).  Mr. Lear pushed the proverbial racial envelope even further in subsequent years with several hit sitcoms featuring African-American casts, including Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and Good Times.  The Jeffersons, in particular, was among the most popular, running for an impressive 11 seasons, making it one of the longest-running sitcoms in the history of American television.

Although content rights come and go, for the time-being the "Sisters at Heart" episode can be seen at https://dai.ly/x6gjguc or below: