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'The Jeffersons' at 50: Looking back at a classic sitcom that changed TV
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The cast of "The Jeffersons": Front row, from left: Roxie Roker, Isabel Sanford, Mike Evans. Back row, from left: Franklin Cover, Paul Benedict, Sherman Hemsley, Marla Gibbs, Ned Wertimer, Berlinda Tolbert. Credit: CBS/ Everett Collection
Marla Gibbs, one of the last surviving cast members of "The Jeffersons," is 93 years old, but breezily insists during a recent phone interview that she'd actually prefer to be a little bit younger. "God said we are physical beings as well as spiritual beings," she explains, "but as spiritual beings, we don't have an age, so I choose to be 30."
What, then, does this spry 30-year-old spiritual being who's still a working actor ("Grey's Anatomy," "One Life to Live") remember most about the sitcom that just turned 50 and made her into a household name during the 1970s and '80s?
"We were like a family," she recalls. "We were very happy. We were a very happy set."
Sherman Hemsley was 'morbidly shy'
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George (Sherman Hemsley) and Louise (Isabel Sanford) in their deluxe apartment in the sky. Credit: Everett Collection
Gibbs says that Sherman Hemsley — George Jefferson, of course — was almost morbidly shy, so that whenever the cast had to venture out in public, the other cast members would shield him from autograph hounds or other assertive well-wishers. Isabel Sanford — Louise — was the rock of the show who was always prepared and always on-time. Gibbs' best friend on the set was Roxie Roker, who was Mrs. Willis, the Jeffersons upstairs neighbor, married to Tom — Franklin Cover. (Roker, who died in 1995, is the mother of Lenny Kravitz.)
Gibbs herself played the Jeffersons' maid, Florence Johnston. At the time a TV novice and mother of three, Gibbs had been working as a reservation agent for United Airlines and figured she'd have a walk-on then be gone. Instead, her TV prospects were about to brighten.
At the outset of the Jan. 18, 1975, pilot, Ja'Net DuBois' indelible theme song told viewers that the Jeffersons from "All in the Family" had moved on up from Queens to a "deluxe apartment in the sky" (12th floor at 185 E. 85th St., to be exact). George's dry cleaning business had turned into a lucrative mini-empire, and he was about to flaunt his wealth. In this first episode, Florence was astounded to learn that her new employer was actually Black and by the end landed the line that would become just about as memorable as that theme:
"How come we overcame and nobody told me?"
Gibbs: 'The Jeffersons' was a 'whole new thing'
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Florence (Marla Gibbs) meets Wally "Famous" Amos in the 1980 episode "The Jeffersons Go to Hawaii." Credit: CBS/Everett Collection
Gibbs remained on as a key cast member and indispensable foil to George whose bombast demanded a zetz from time to time which Florence cheerfully provided. She has since appeared in dozens of shows, landed her own spinoff, produced and starred in her own hit ("227"), and got five straight Emmy nominations for that long-ago role of a lifetime. (Only Sanford won an Emmy — a first for a Black leading actress in a comedy — in 1981.) The show changed her life and American culture, too. Ask her what all that means now, and just like Florence, Gibbs has the obvious answer.
"As a child growing up in Chicago, I loved the movies and mostly the musicals, but I didn't see any Black people in them, and then came 'The Jeffersons' and it was a whole new thing! On the show we accepted it like we had always been there. I guess we had always wanted to be there anyway." She adds, "It was a phenomenal moment for me."
A sensation and shock to viewers
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Sammy Davis Jr. guest-starred in a 1984 episode, "What Makes Sammy Run?" Credit: CBS/Everett Collection
You can still catch isolated seasons and episodes of "The Jeffersons," scattered across free streaming services (Tubi, Pluto, YouTube) or a few broadcast channels like Antenna TV. There remain devoted fans who go to signings (Gibbs still attends them, too). Otherwise, it's become a relic of '70s pop culture, seemingly as dated as disco, or as bygone as bell-bottoms. But in the moment, it was a sensation and a shock to a TV nation only just then getting accustomed to Black faces, voices and lives in prime-time. "The Jeffersons" was hardly a pioneer — two other Norman Lear creations, "Good Times" (1974-79) and "Sanford and Son" (1972-77) came before — but it was a groundbreaker and rabble rouser. Like George, there was no holding back.
Consider the insolence (or propriety) of a leadoff joke about the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" not all that long after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "The Jeffersons" featured TV's first solidly middle-class, upwardly mobile Black family; the first interracial married couple; the first transgender storyline on network TV. This was a situation comedy where the situations drilled down to current events and societal pathologies like guns, suicide, divorce, alcoholism, racial injustice — and yes, the assassination of King, too.
Like "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons" was a Trojan horse — funny, foremost, but a way to get people to take a hard look at themselves under the pretext that if you get them to laugh, then maybe you'll get them to think about what they're laughing at. "If you look at that show and at those episodes, there was real drama, and there was always something going on underneath," says Oz Scott, a veteran TV and movie director who worked on the series its last few seasons. "With 'Good Times,' it was dealing with poverty, making fun of the underbelly, and then 'The Jeffersons' came along to say 'I got money, I'm as good if not better than anyone else.' That was very helpful in a lot of ways where Black people saw successful Black people, and having the Jeffersons as positive role models. Some people have accused George of being a buffoon, but he was not — he was someone who'd earned the right to say what he wanted to say."
TV's first interracial couple
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"The Jeffersons" cast members: Clockwise, from bottom, Sherman Hemsley, Isabel Sanford, Franklin Cover, Roxie Roker Credit: CBS/Everett Collection
Jay Moriarty, "The Jeffersons" showrunner along with his writing partner Mike Milligan, said in a phone interview that "this was really the first interracial sitcom on television [and] in fact you'd never really seen a mixed marriage couple — Black and white — even kiss before. Consider that just a few years before, in 1968, Petula Clark touches Harry Belafonte's arm at the end of a song and there's a huge scandal [the first time on network TV a white woman had touched a Black man, prompting a rebuke from Chrysler, which had sponsored the NBC program]. Now, less than 10 years later, you've got a Black and white married couple" — Roker and Cover's Helen and Tom Willis.
Lear, who died in 2023 at the age of 101, wrote in his memoir that the idea of an upwardly mobile Black family hadn't even occurred to him. Instead, "the plan to see [the Jeffersons] movin' on up to the East Side with a 'deluxe apartment in the sky' came about in the most interesting way."
He'd originally approached Hemsley about the role of George in 1971 when he was starring on Broadway in "Purlie," a musical adaptation of an Ossie Davis play about a charismatic preacher. Hemsley didn't want to leave the production, so Lear got another actor (Mel Stewart) to play George's brother Henry instead. "But Henry came off as a Black Archie, not his nemesis [or as] someone who could get his goat," Lear wrote. "Sherman was another story ... a natural irritant — prouder, feistier, more pugnacious and smaller than Archie, the Black bantam cock version of him who could all but literally get under his skin."
How 'The Jeffersons' moved on up
Hemsley was a breakout after he joined "All in the Family" in 1973, so the plan was to spinoff the Jeffersons but into what was unclear until the day "three members of the Black Panthers stormed into my offices at CBS saying they'd 'come to see the garbage man' — me," Lear wrote.
They told him that "Good Times" — on the air at the time — was "nothing but a white man's version of a Black family" and that "'every time you see a Black man on the tube he is dirt poor, wears [bad] clothes, can't afford nothing ... We got Black men in America doing better than most whites.'"
Lear wrote that hours later he'd recalled the visit to an associate whose "eyes lit up. The Jeffersons were now 'movin' on up.' "
Lear tapped three "All in the Family" veteran writers as showrunners, Don Nicholl, Michael Ross and Bernard West, and along with some other "Family" vets, Moriarty and Milligan, they came up with a dramatic backstory for George and Weezy (Louise), which would be revealed in an episode that aired late in "The Jeffersons" run.
Both had started dating as teens, then as a married couple lived at 126 Lenox Ave. in Harlem, near to the cleaning store where he worked the press machine, tagged clothes and waited on customers. George later wanted to open his own store, but as he was showing Louise the space he intended to rent, a brick came through the window. King had just been shot, and George was ready to join the mob outside.
But Weezy pulled him back, and the episode closed with King's own words from a speech he gave the day before his death: "We've got some difficult days ahead but it really doesn't matter to me now, because I've been to the mountaintop ... I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."
'George's bigotry is a reaction to prejudice'
In his own memoir, Moriarty wrote a mini-character study of George: "Throughout his life George had found himself in a continuous battle with prejudice in a society which ironically claims the belief that all men are created equal. Louise understands that and she's accepted her role in helping the man she loves navigate the pitfalls of his race." He added that "Archie [Bunker's] bigotry is pure prejudice. George's bigotry is a reaction to prejudice. George doesn't hate white people just because of the color of their skin. He hates that they kidnapped, raped, enslaved and lynched his ancestors."
In his memoir, Moriarity also addressed the elephant in this show's particular writer's room — "How can a white writer write for a Black show?" (The other showrunners were white as well.) He dismissed that with another question — "How can a man write for a woman or how can a gay man write for a straight man, or vice versa?" — but conceded that there were so few Black writers working in Hollywood at the time that the Writers Guild would create programs and workshops to promote diversity after shows like "The Jeffersons" became hits.
The end came suddenly
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Jenny (Berlinda Tolbert) and Lionel (Mike Evans) in the 1981 episode "The Separation." Credit: CBS/Everett Collection
Meanwhile, the end of this groundbreaking series came abruptly and without warning. Just before the July 4 holiday in the summer of 1985, after 253 episodes, and 11 seasons — comprising some of the most successful in TV history to that point — CBS pulled the plug. The end was so sudden that the show never even got a chance to wrap the Jeffersons' story. (The final episode was about a George scheme to win Dry Cleaner of the Year.)
Moriarty now remembers that "the cast was really hurt. They wanted to be together forever. Sherman had just said, 'May it last forever because love has joined us together.' He was very shy, the total opposite of George, a wonderful guy who identified with the lowest person on the totem pole in the production — the first time we had dinner over break he'd take food down to the security guard. Isabel was a real trouper, too, who kept everyone grounded. No ego."
Both Sanford and Hemsley reprised their roles a couple decades later for a touring stage show, "The Real Live Jeffersons." After a 30-year stage career and nearly as long a one on screen, Sanford died in 2004 at the age of 86. Hemsley died in 2012. He was just 74.
"My partner and I worked for 30-plus years in television, and we never saw a cast with the closeness and love the Jefferson's cast had," says Moriarty. "Just amazing."
Where to watch 'The Jeffersons'
Antenna TV (Optimum 114) Weekdays 8-9 p.m.; 3-4 a.m.; Saturday, 10-11 p.m.
TV One (Optimum 178; FiOs 271) Saturday 6 a.m.-Noon; Sunday 2-3 a.m.
The Grio TV (Optimum 164; FiOs 777) Weekdays 10 a.m.-Noon; Monday-Thursday, 2-4 p.m.
Streaming:
Tubi, PlutoTV
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