I accuse Lear of being a closet scholar. Like most creators with the broad touch necessary for quality-cum-success, he seems sure enough of his own originality not to hesitate to steal from past masters. His earlier shows, still running, reflect this. The Jeffersons's black bourgeois dry cleaner … is "movin' on up" so nearly in the footsteps of Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, that it is hard to believe that Lear has not been rereading the Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Further-more, both Jefferson and his white counterpart, Archie Bunker, of Lear's All in the Family, are typically Molièresque central figures: authoritarian male family heads, narrow-minded and covertly decentish in their willful ignorance. (p. 157)

[Each] of these shows is classical in that the laughter results from discrepant human engagements with an implicit moral norm, which norm is (usually too blandly) re-established by the end of each episode after a...