| In this week’s New Yorker, the staff writer Rachel Syme profiles Bela Bajaria—a former beauty-pageant winner who, as the global head of television at Netflix, is leading the company’s ongoing transformation of TV production and consumption. In 1975, the magazine’s TV critic, Michael J. Arlen, directed his gaze at another revolutionary of the form: the sitcom superproducer Norman Lear, who was responsible for no fewer than six shows then airing in prime time. Each of them—including “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “The Jeffersons,” and “Sanford and Son”—challenged traditional attitudes about race, gender, and class, and five were among the dozen most-watched shows. Compared with comedies such as “I Love Lucy” and “Gilligan’s Island,” Arlen wrote, the Lear œuvre was doing something new, notably in its ability to draw laughter from the “curious, modern, undifferentiated anger” of Lear’s protagonists. Arlen wasn’t exactly a fan, but at least one of his subject’s gifts was undeniable. “What tens of thousands of business geniuses and consumer theoreticians spend half the energies of the Republic vainly striving after,” Arlen argued, Lear knew how to deliver: “namely, a ‘feel’ for what the public wants before it knows it wants it.” Lear celebrated his hundredth birthday last year. Among his more recent projects has been a remake, in 2017, of “One Day at a Time,” another of his classic sitcoms. He revived the show—you guessed it—for Netflix. | 
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