Wealth & Money Quote by Norman Lear

Lear’s move here is to puncture a lazy moral math: rich equals cynical, therefore success cancels sincerity. He grants the obvious up front - yes, the people who make TV get paid - then pivots to the real claim: money doesn’t automatically explain motivation. The line “they might be choosing” is doing quiet but pointed work. It frames entertainment as a deliberate vocation, not an accidental racket, and it implies an ethical choice inside the marketplace: if they wanted only the biggest paycheck with the least scrutiny, there are easier industries and safer products.

The subtext is a defense of craft communities Lear spent his life organizing around: writers’ rooms, production crews, the messy collective labor behind “just a sitcom.” It’s also a subtle rebuttal to the recurring suspicion that Hollywood is either frivolous or predatory by nature. Lear isn’t pretending capitalism disappears on set; he’s insisting that creative people often trade certainty for meaning - deadlines, public backlash, censorship fights, and the emotional hazard of making culture for strangers.

Context matters: Lear’s legacy is entertainment that picked fights with the culture war before it had that name. From All in the Family onward, he treated prime-time as a civic space where class, race, and politics could be argued in public. This quote reads like a producer’s shrug sharpened into principle: yes, the money is real; so is the choice to use mass media to say something, and to absorb the heat that comes with it.