Podcasts, we all know, are for the youngsters. It’s not a medium courted by octogenarians, much less nonagenarians. Don’t tell that to Norman Lear, whose show All of the Above with Norman Lear recently premiered on the PodcastOne network.
Lear, who turns 95 later this month, is the creative visionary behind All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and more than a dozen other TV shows. Not content with creating television programs, in 1980 he founded a progressive advocacy nonprofit, People for the American Way, in an effort to take on Jerry Falwell’s conservative Moral Majority. It’s possible that eagle-eyed cineastes caught the American Masters documentary Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You at the Wisconsin Film Festival last year and don’t need this refresher course.
With All of the Above, Lear adds himself to the list of longform interview podcasts like Marc Maron’s WTF, Pete Holmes’ You Made It Weird and Alec Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing. Lear’s guests so far have included Amy Poehler, Jerrod Carmichael, Julia Louis Dreyfus and Kevin Bacon. It’s an interesting bunch, but almost as interesting is who the list excludes. Lear has hosted comics and actors he admires, but as of yet we haven’t heard Lear dig into his deep Rolodex and call in favors from Rob Reiner or Dick Van Dyke. The tone of the show, though, leads me to to believe that Lear and his co-host Paul Hipp are opting to craft a show that targets a younger demographic of comedy nerd and leave the gossipy old-time Hollywood stuff to Gilbert Gottfried and his (also great, for different reasons) Amazing Colossal Podcast!
But, like Gottfried, Lear has managed to wrangle his guest into a sing-along in every episode thus far, with co-host Hipp (who also wrote the theme song) on guitar duty, and the trend shows no sign of stopping. Occasionally it makes for a disorienting shift — the episode with Carmichael, whose NBC sitcom The Carmichael Show owes a lot to Lear, includes liberal use of the word nigger as a playful topic of conversation, then segues soon enough into some good-time campfire-style fun. But you know what? So far, it’s all worked, thanks to the earned status and no-shits-given approach Lear takes.
The overall effect is one that is surprisingly calming. It’s impossible to be stressed out while the legitimate heir to the title of “World’s Greatest Grandpa” is being piped into your earbuds. Lear is sincerely happy simply for the opportunity to talk with these folks, the torchbearers for his envelope-pushing legacy. He talks network shop with each in turn, but more often than not, those diversions maintain a comfortable balance between being concrete enough to be interesting but abstract enough to avoid getting lost in the weeds.
When I first heard that Lear was going to host a podcast, I really expected him to get those older guests from his decades-long career and talk about the glory days. And I was excited. But now, several episodes in, my expectations have shifted and I can’t wait for him to pull something fascinating out of Shonda Rhimes or Mindy Kaling. It may not required listening (yet), but so far, All of the Above with Norman Lear has been a wonderful little bright spot in my otherwise-heavily-political podcast rotation.
