Jen Vestuto is a TV Features Writer for Collider. A born and raised New Yorker, she started her career on set as a production assistant for shows like Law & Order: SVU and Person of Interest. In LA, she worked in the writers' rooms for The Vampire Diaries and Nancy Drew.
When The Good Place premiered in 2016, it was hailed as a comedy that was not only funny but incredibly smart. Created by Michael Schur, already beloved for Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the series blended philosophy, afterlife mythology, and social satire into a sitcom format that felt genuinely new.
Its twist-filled storytelling and thoughtful approach to morality signaled a shift that audiences wanted more from comedies that challenged norms and broke the rules. But The Good Place wasn’t the first comedy to bend the rules or reimagine its world in bold, unconventional ways. Decades earlier, Norman Lear tried a similarly bold experiment with All That Glitters, a 1977 gender-reversed satire so ahead of its time that audiences and critics didn’t know how to process it. One reviewer even calling it"unquestionably the weirdest Lear has ever produced." The show quickly became one of Lear’s rare misfires, forgotten almost as soon as it aired. But revisiting it now, especially in a TV landscape shaped by shows like The Good Place, reveals a sitcom far more relevant and modern than anyone realized. What 'All That Glitters' Was Actually About After the syndicated phenomenon Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Norman Lear decided to push television satire even further. Known for grounded, socially conscious hits like All in the Family and Maude, Lear pivoted toward something far stranger: All That Glitters was a soap-opera spoof with a twist that aired five nights a week in 1977. Set in a parallel world where women held all the power and men filled the secretarial and domestic roles commonly assigned to women in the real 1970s, the show used its inverted universe as a mirror to expose the absurdity of gender inequality. Even its theme song announced its intentions, declaring that God is a woman who made Eve first and only created Adam so she wouldn’t be lonely. Lear’s premise was deliberately provocative. After visiting the Institute of Policy Studies, he wanted to explore one simple question: What would happen if the male-female equation were reversed? The series leaned into melodrama and heightened performances to drive its satire, with characters like executive Christina Stockwood , powerful CEO L.W. Carruthers , ambitious agent Joan Hamlyn , and Linda Gray — long before Dallas — as one of TV’s earliest transgender characters. Yes, some jokes feel dated now, which is inevitable for a 1970s satire, but the heightened, over-the-top approach was never meant to be realistic. All That Glitters was deliberately exaggerated, using melodrama and the absence of a laugh track to push its ideas even further. Despite its 65-episode run, the show sharply divided viewers and critics. Even those familiar with Lear’s boundary-pushing work didn’t quite know what to make of it. According to executive producer Stephanie Sills, the fiercest backlash came from male executives who bristled at the show’s depiction of men, while some feminists worried that audiences would miss the satire entirely and assume it was a sincere blueprint for a female-dominated society. In hindsight, its polarizing reception had far less to do with the show’s quality and far more to do with how unprepared 1977 audiences were for satire that confronted gender norms so directly. Misunderstood in its moment, All That Glitters now looks like a bold early attempt at the kind of genre-blending, socially aware comedy modern viewers embrace, making it perfectly positioned for reevaluation, and even a reboot. Related 9 Years Ago, NBC's Fantasy Comedy Show Delivered Some of the Best Plot Twists Ever on TV It's more than good. Posts By Lloyd Farley 'All That Glitters' Plays Completely Different Today Thanks to Shows Like 'The Good Place' Viewed today, especially through the lens of The Good Place, All That Glitters feels strikingly contemporary. Lear’s series was once dismissed as “blasphemous” for suggesting God was a woman who created Eve first, just as The Good Place likely would’ve been condemned had it aired in the 1970s for its irreverent, whimsical portrayal of the afterlife. Modern audiences embraced The Good Place because they were open to existential comedy that mixed philosophical questions with cosmic rule-breaking, something viewers in 1977 were nowhere near prepared to accept. A character like Maya Rudolph’s Judge Gen, an all-powerful and hilariously relatable overseer of the universe, embodies the kind of boundary-pushing character All That Glitters attempted decades earlier. All That Glitters and The Good Place both encourage viewers to question the rules of the worlds they enter. Lear’s satire flipped gender roles entirely, showing women as corporate titans, men as house-husbands, as the defaults to highlight how absurd sexism looks when reversed. The Good Place portrayed the afterlife with things like point systems and committees to choose where people go after they die. And, perhaps, if All That Glitters premiered more recently, it would have had a much more successful run. CL Report Dive into the world of entertainment with Collider, delivering the latest news, reviews, and exclusive updates from movies, TV, and pop culture Subscribe CL Report Dive into the world of entertainment with Collider, delivering the latest news, reviews, and exclusive updates from movies, TV, and pop culture Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept Valnet’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime. Back in 2015, amid the rise of shows like Transparent and Orange Is the New Black, Sony reportedly considered rebooting All That Glitters. The very idea of reviving it almost forty years later underscored how ahead of its time the original was, especially given the inclusion of Linda Gray’s Linda Murkland, a trans woman model and one of TV’s earliest regular transgender characters, whom Gray portrayed with guidance from a transgender consultant. A modern remake would almost certainly approach the material differently. Conversations about gender and representation are far more sophisticated today, and women’s roles in the workplace have evolved dramatically since 1977. Instead of relying solely on a simple role-reversal premise, a reboot could expand the satire, making the show sharper and more contemporary while honoring Lear’s original intent. In recent years, the series has even begun to receive a more appreciative critical reassessment, with some writers praising its striking, imaginative satire of American society. Throughout his career, Norman Lear pushed sitcoms into conversations that the culture simply wasn’t ready to have. With the benefit of hindsight, and with shows like The Good Place proving that modern audiences will embrace ambitious, rule-breaking storytelling, All That Glitters finally reads like what it always was, as a bold, ahead-of-its-time experiment that deserves a second look. Genres Comedy, Drama Creator Norman Lear Powered by Expand Collapse
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