His production banner, ACT III, has a first look deal with Sony Pictures Television.  He served as executive producer to the critically acclaimed reimagining of One Day At A Time, which ran for four seasons and was the first Netflix series to be renewed for network television (PopTV and CBS.)  Lear executive produced and co-hosted three installments of LIVE In Front of a Studio Audience…, alongside Jimmy Kimmel. The series set record ratings for ABC and won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special for two consecutive years. In addition to the award winning documentary Rita Moreno: Just A Girl Who Decided To Go For It, Lear is an EP on the critically acclaimed feature film I Carry You With Me, and the producer responsible for the making of the classics The Princess Bride and Stand By Me. 

Last year, complete seasons for some of Lear’s groundbreaking series were released on streaming platforms Amazon Prime Video and IMDb TV for the first time. The streaming partnership included All in the Family, Good Times, Maude, and One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Diff’rent Strokes, The Jeffersons, and Sanford & Son.

This year, Lear is executive producing an animated, reimagined Good Times, and an original drama based on the memoir of its same name, The Pink Marine – both for Netflix, as well as an original half hour for IMDbTV with Laverne Cox and George Wallace called Clean Slate.

Born in 1922 in New Haven, Connecticut, Lear attended Emerson College before flying 52 combat missions over Europe during World War II.  Upon his return, Norman began a successful career writing and producing programs like The Colgate Comedy Hour, and The Martha Raye Show -- ultimately leading to Lear captivating 120 million viewers per week with his iconic shows of the 1970s and ‘80s — All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

As Lear began witnessing the rise of the radical religious right, he put his television career on hold in 1980 to found People For The American Way.  Today, the organization is over one million members and activists strong and continues to fight right-wing extremism while defending constitutional values like free expression, religious liberty, equal justice under the law, and the right to meaningfully participate in our democracy.

In 2000, the Norman Lear Center was dedicated at the USC Annenberg School for Communication for the study of entertainment, media and society.

One of the few surviving original copies of the Declaration of Independence was purchased by Lyn and Norman Lear in 2001, and during the decade that followed, they shared it with the American people by touring it to all 50 states through their Declaration of Independence Road Trip.  Lear launched Declare Yourself, a nonpartisan youth voter initiative that registered over four million new, young voters in the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections.

Lear is a 2017 Kennedy Center Honoree; a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 1999, the Peabody Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016; and a proud member of the inaugural group of inductees to the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1984. He has won six Primetime Emmys and a Golden Globe.  In 2021 the Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded him the Carol Burnett Award for Achievement in Television. When President Clinton bestowed the National Medal of Arts on Lear in 1999, he noted that “Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it.”

Norman Lear is married to Lyn Davis Lear, and is the father to six and the grandfather to four.