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The Innovator Award: One Day At A Time (1975-1984)
The running cliché of the night was that every cast was like a family. But the talents of One Day At A Time really seemed to mean it. Even the endlessly self-dramatizing Mackenzie Phillips affectingly described Bonnie Franklin, who played her struggling single mother on the sitcom, as "a mom who actually held me to a higher standard than my own mother did."
Everyone acknowledged the contributions of the member of the family who wasn't there: socially conscious television emperor Norman Lear. As actor Richard Masur (Franklin's lawyer boyfriend) put it, "What Norman did was open up people's minds by first getting them to laugh."
(AP)
