'The Jeffersons' at 50: How Norman Lear changed the way Black people were represented on TV

At 11 seasons, “The Jeffersons” ran longer than any of producer Norman Lear’s classic 1970s comedies, including its parent show “All in the Family.” But the more important history it made came as soon as its first episode, 50 years ago this week: CBS' “The Jeffersons” marked the first Black-family comedy for which Black didn’t signal economic struggle.

George and Louise Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford) were plain rich. Credit the Black Panthers. At least, in part.

As racial barriers fell and onscreen representation increased in the early 1970s, the biggest gains were in half-hour comedies. Some of these “Black shows” ‒ a series adaptation of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park,” military comedy “Roll Out” (from the creators of “M*A*S*H”), and barbershop sitcom “That’s My Mama” ‒ came and went. Two became giant hits: NBC’s “Sanford and Son” and CBS’ “Good Times.” But their tales of impoverished lives unfolding in famously Black neighborhoods ‒ the Sanfords were junk dealers in Los Angeles’ blighted Watts community, while “Good Times” was set in a Chicago housing project ‒ offered singular, even stereotypical, portraits: Two steps forward, one step back.

'The Jeffersons' were moving on up

“The Jeffersons” moved on up to primetime to change all that. It saw the longtime neighbors of Archie and Edith Bunker celebrating the success of their expanding dry cleaning business by trading their working-class Queens rowhouse for a deluxe apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Any struggles here were more fish-out-of-water cultural than economic, as the newly wealthy went about fitting in among the always-have-been.

The spinoff was assured as soon as Hemsley’s first appearance in “All in the Family” Season 4. Sanford as Louise Jefferson, along with Mike Evans as their son Lionel, had been semi-regulars since 1971, but Hemsley, whom Lear wanted as the family patriarch, wasn’t available until 1973.

However, in his 2014 memoir “Even This I Get To Experience,” Lear told how a non-show-business encounter sped it along.

How Black Panthers inspired a TV family that wasn't 'dirt poor'

“One day, three members of the Black Panthers … stormed into my office at CBS saying they’d come to see the garbage man – me,” he wrote. “’Good Times’ was garbage, they said. ‘Show’s nothing but a white man’s version of a Black family… every time you have a Black man on the tube, he’s dirt poor.’”

“The Jeffersons” became his response. A week after a “Family” goodbye that served as an unofficial first episode, “The Jeffersons” made its midseason debut on Jan. 18, 1975. Well positioned on CBS’ Saturday schedule, behind its highly rated progenitor, the new comedy was a ratings hit. As George and Louise settled in, so did viewers. It ended the 1974-75 season as the fourth most-watched show.

“The Jeffersons” benefitted from a larger cast than seen in Lear’s other hits, too, allowing for more storylines to explore. Costars included Marla Gibbs as the Jeffersons’ housekeeper, Zara Cully as George’s live-in mother, Paul Benedict as their British neighbor, and Berlinda Tolbert as Lionel’s girlfriend (and later, wife), whose parents, played by Roxie Roker and Franklin Cover, made history as primetime’s first regularly featured interracial couple.

Yet 'The Jeffersons' largely shied away from politics

While early episodes addressed the social politics stirred by their move to Manhattan ‒ stories about identity, invoking terms like Uncle Toms and passing ‒ “The Jeffersons” didn’t court headlines the way “All in the Family” or Lear’s controversial “Maude” did. In time, race was less of a driver, and the show became a more conventional, often broad sitcom. Even the stridency of George Jefferson’s prejudice on display in “Family” ‒ the character, “imagined as a reflection of what (Archie) Bunker’s bigotry would look like in ‘blackface’” ‒ was toned down, wrote Mark Anthony Neal for Ebony in 2012. His boisterous persona was more comical than confrontational, a hot-air balloon of strutting pomposity punctured by his family.

Even the occasional “special episodes” ‒ Louise’s reflections on her less-affluent past, Lionel’s dip into alcohol abuse, George’s reunion with an old Navy pal, now a woman ‒ orbited more around the human condition than a racial one.

One notable exception: 1980’s “The First Store,” a flashback episode about Jefferson Cleaners opening on the same day in 1968 as Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. After Lear’s 2023 death, The Hollywood Reporter included it as one of the “Six Norman Lear TV Episodes That Changed the World.”

The show was never nominated for Emmy Awards in writing or directing categories, and won just two in total, for videotape editing and for Sanford (the first black woman to win Best Comedy Actress). “The Jeffersons” was sometimes criticized in the Black community for perceived lapses into stereotypes, or for portraying George as a buffoon. (The Baltimore Sun’s Gregory Kane called it “demeaning to Black people” in a 1999 essay about race and television.) But the show facilitated a prime-time transition from “Black shows” to series that simply offered Black casts, cemented by the arrival of NBC’s “The Cosby Show” in 1984.

“Its characters opened doors for future black actors,” wrote Danielle Cadet in The Huffington Post after Hemsley’s 2012 death. “And its success proved that African American sitcoms did, in fact, resonate with general audiences.”

The resonance of “The Jeffersons,” which ended in 1985 after 253 episodes and 15 timeslot changes, stands as its legacy: the first Black sitcom since “Sanford and Son” (1972-77) to rank among TV’s top five shows, the first to rank as TV’s top comedy for a season (1981-82), CBS’ third-longest-running sitcom at the time of its cancellation and, still, the longest-running Black comedy in network-TV history. Lear restaged one episode in a live 2019 ABC special that featured Jamie Foxx and Wanda Sykes in the lead roles.

It took a whole lot of trying, but “The Jeffersons” got up that hill.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'The Jeffersons' at 50: Norman Lear's groundbreaking sitcom