Norman Lear, the legendary TV producer who died today at age 101 of natural causes, was working to the very end. Earlier this year, he executive produced a sitcom in Savannah starring veteran Atlanta comic actor George Wallace and Laverne Cox of “Orange is the New Black” fame.
The show for Amazon Freevee, “Clean Slate,” is set to debut in April of 2024, Wallace said in a text to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Only your legendary [expletive] could crash the pearly gates at 101 and still have me thinkin’ ‘Gone too soon.’ Love you forever, Norman,” Wallace wrote on X.
In the series, Henry (Wallace), an old-school and outspoken car wash owner, is thrilled that his estranged child is finally returning home to Alabama after 17 years. However, Henry has a lot of soul searching to do when the child he thought was a son returns as the determined, proud, trans woman Desiree (Cox).
“I don’t think that’s ever been done before, a man gets a new series greenlit on his 100th birthday,” said Lear’s producing partner Brent Miller last year. “And in addition to that, it’s the first [sitcom] that has ever had a trans character as the center point, and the fact that it’s once again Norman doing that just excites me.”
Lear more than 60 years ago broke ground with his 1970s CBS show “All in the Family,” which brought real-life subjects about race, war and class onto TV when such topics were typically verboten on broadcast TV comedies. He followed that up with other classic shows such as “Maude,” “Sanford and Son,” “Good Times” and “The Jeffersons.”
In more recent years, Lear worked with Jimmy Kimmel to do live re-enactments of episodes of “Diff’rent Strokes,” “Good Times,” “All in the Family” and “The Facts of Life” on ABC to big ratings.
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