Maude was the first spinoff of All In The Family in 1972 and immediately shot into the top ten. It was an inverse of All In The Family where the main character was a bigoted right winger. Maude, by contrast, was a bit of a left wing looney.
Maude made her first two appearances on All In The Family during season 2 as Edith Bunker’s cousin, the second appearance was a back door pilot that laid out the premise of the show Maude.
In an interview at Emerson College, Bea Arthur discusses how Maude came about, she’d had a long association with producer Norman Lear reaching back into the 1950s. Lear first cast Arthur in a show on its last legs, a retooling of The George Gobel Show.
Bea Arthur: “It was 1959. I came out here and [Norman Lear] was doing, he was like writing or producing the dying George Gobel Show. George was really on his last leg, and we didn't last long. I think we did three shows and that was it. But then when he did All in the Family, that's when he called me and said, 'come on out,' he'd write a part for me. He wrote a part for me where I was Edith Bunker's liberal cousin from the back east.”
“After her first appearance on All In the Family, “A few days later Norman called me and said that he had gotten a call from the president of CBS. He said, you know, let's give the girl her own series. And that's how I know it started. I'm telling you, my whole life has been a Cinderella story."
That didn't mean that the actress was automatically sold on the idea of a series at first. In a 1995 interview on a local TV chat show Arthur said, "I had achieved a certain amount of success at that point and had decided that, unless something really interested me, I wouldn't do it. I was afraid that the part being written for me might not be as good as I would like it to be. I'm a real perfectionist. I'm almost a nut when it comes to that. For instance, I knew when I saw the first script of Golden Girls that this is important. This is good. This has merit because there's so much junk [on TV], you know?"
As for similarities between her and the character? "I was never really politically involved, which was Maude's whole thing. I always, you know, took the time to figure out who to vote for, but I would never get into [politics] that seriously."
The role of Maude was played to perfection by Beatrice Arthur for six seasons, the series ending in 1978. If there had been a seventh season the premise would have been tweaked to allow Maude to move to Washington and become a congresswoman, the supporting cast would have been replaced, which they probably should have done a couple of years earlier when the writers began running out of steam.
When it comes to opportunities, Beatrice Arthur’s advice is, “Go with it. Enjoy it. Make it juicy, right?”
Maude was the first spinoff of All In The Family in 1972 and immediately shot into the top ten. It was an inverse of All In The Family where the main character was a bigoted right winger. Maude, by contrast, was a bit of a left wing looney.
