Like many of Lear’s productions, Maude was a character-centered sitcom. Maude Findlay was opinionated like Archie Bunker, but her politics and class position were completely different. Strong willed, intelligent, and articulate, the liberal progressive Maude spoke out on issues raised less openly on Lear’s highly successful All in the Family. While questions of race, class, and gender politics reverberated throughout both series, certain specific issues, such as menopause, birth control, and abortion, were more openly confronted on Maude. In a two-part episode that ran early in the series, the 47-year-old Maude finds out that she is pregnant and decides, with her husband Walter, that she would have an abortion, which had just been made legal in New York State. Part 2 of the double episode also deals with men and birth control, as Walter considers getting a vasectomy. Thousands of viewers wrote letters in protest of the episode because of the abortion issue. In other episodes, Maude gets a facelift; Walter’s business goes bankrupt, and he deals with the resulting bout with depression; in yet another program, Walter confronts his own alcoholism. The realism of Maude, though conforming to the constraints of the genre, made it one of the first sitcoms to create a televisual space where highly charged, topical issues and sometimes tragic contemporary situations could be discussed.

Maude represented a change in television sitcoms during the early 1970s. Many 1960s sitcoms reflected the context and values of white middle America, where gender and family roles were fixed and problems encountered in the program rarely reached beyond the confines of nuclear family relationships. Despite variations on that theme in terms of alternative families (Family Affair and My Three Sons) and an added supernatural element (Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie), the context was middle to upper middle class, mostly suburban, and white. However, cultural upheaval in the 1960s, the political climate of the early 1970s, shifting viewer demographics, and the maturation of television itself were responsible for a departure from the usual fare. By the early 1970s, a growing portion of the viewing audience, baby boomers, were open to new kinds of television, having come of age during the era of the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests, and various forms of consciousness raising. However, the changing tastes of the audience and the social climate of the early 1970s cannot by themselves account for the rise of socially conscious television during this period. The sitcom had also matured, and producers such as Norman Lear, familiar generally with American humor and specifically with the rules of television sitcom, decided to make television comedy that was more socially aware. Like All in the Family, Maude set out to explode the dominant values of the white middle-class domestic sitcom, with its traditional gender roles and nonwhite stereotypes, by openly engaging in debates where various political points of view were embodied in the sitcom characters.

Such debates were the staple of Maude throughout its six-year run. In an early episode, Maude hires Florida Evans, a black woman, to be housekeeper. Maude goes out of her way to prove her progressive attitude to Florida by insisting the housekeeper act as if she is one of the family. Florida, along with Walter and Carol, points out to Maude the foolishness of her extreme behavior. In the end, Maude recognizes her underlying condescension toward Florida, who, as witty and outspoken as Maude, retains her dignity and decides to remain as the Findlay housekeeper on her own terms. The interaction between Maude and Florida in this episode was a comment on the issues and attitudes about race that stemmed from the civil rights efforts of the 1960s. Maude’s attitudes and behavior were indicative of white liberal politics during a time when race relations in the United States were being reconfigured.

Another reconfiguration was taking place within the arena of women’s rights. In one of the final episodes of the show, Maude is given the opportunity to run for the New York state senate, but Walter refuses to consider the possibility. He offers Maude an ultimatum, and after mulling over her decision, she decides to let Walter leave. This episode, like many others, reflected a feminist sensibility emerging within the country and can be viewed as a platform for discussions about the changing roles of women and the difficulties they encountered as they were faced with new challenges and more choices. Maude’s character agonized over the conflict between tradition and her own career aspirations.

The show’s ratings began to fall after its fourth season, and by 1978, Bea Arthur announced that she would leave the show. The end of Maude marked another shift in the domestic sitcom, away from open political debate and toward a renewal of the safer, more traditional family-centered sitcoms of an earlier period in television history.