Love & Passion Quote by Norman Lear

Lear’s line lands like a rebuke to an industry that loves to blame “audiences” while cashing the checks. The clunky phrasing ("is comes") almost helps: it reads less like a polished aphorism and more like an irritated, behind-the-scenes truth finally said out loud. His target isn’t sex or violence as moral panic categories; it’s the supply chain. “Trafficking” is a loaded verb, deliberately borrowing from criminal commerce to frame network programming as an amoral marketplace. Content isn’t “edgy” or “bold” in this telling. It’s inventory.

The intent is to flip the usual narrative. TV executives often defend sensationalism as realism, artistic freedom, or simply giving people what they want. Lear’s subtext is that the medium’s real religion is ratings, and everything else is post-hoc justification. Sex and violence become the easiest currency because they travel fast: they’re instantly legible, instantly promotable, instantly polarizing, which means instantly measurable. The quote doesn’t ask whether these themes can be handled thoughtfully; it questions how often they’re deployed because they reliably spike attention.

Context matters: Lear built his legacy proving television could be provocative without being cheap. His shows poked at race, war, class, and gender to drag mainstream America into uncomfortable conversations. So when he warns about “trafficking,” it’s not a prudish complaint. It’s a veteran producer drawing a bright line between confrontation with purpose and provocation as a business model, where the audience’s gaze is the commodity and outrage is just another programming strategy.