Norman Lear had already changed television once with All in the Family at CBS in 1971. When he developed his next show — an American version of the British sitcom Steptoe and Son — he went back to CBS. He was already renting studio space there to rehearse his new cast. He asked CBS executives to come watch Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson run through the pilot. Nobody came. Nobody found the time. The show went to NBC instead. CBS president Fred Silverman later said it was “one of the stupidest things I did at CBS.”
Sanford and Son premiered January 14, 1972, as a mid-season replacement for a failed Jack Webb legal drama called The D.A. It finished its first short season at No. 6 in America. By season 2 it was No. 2 — second only to All in the Family — the very show CBS had chosen over it. It stayed in the top 10 for 5 straight seasons. Quincy Jones wrote the bass line. 20 million people watched every week.
The man NBC had just made the No. 2 show in America had spent 30 years as someone television wasn’t supposed to want. His real name was John Elroy Sanford. The show was literally his name. His character, Fred Sanford, was named after his own brother. He’d grown up poor in St. Louis, left home at 13, played in a washtub band on street corners in New York, and worked the Chitlin ‘ Circuit of Black nightclubs for decades. He built his stage name from his ruddy complexion — friends called him Red — and his admiration for baseball slugger Jimmie Foxx. He added the second X himself. “So people would remember it.”
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Between 1956 and the early 1960s, he recorded 54 comedy albums of material, so raw they were banned from white record stores and sold under the counter in Black neighborhoods. He sold 20 million of them. Nobody in Hollywood came calling. “No one expected me to be on television,” he said in 1982, “because I had a reputation from the party records as X-rated. But that’s the type of humor I liked.” Then a fellow actor named Cleavon Little — who’d worked with Foxx in the 1970 film Cotton Comes to Harlem — was first approached to star in the new show. He couldn’t do it. He recommended Foxx instead. Lear and his producing partner Bud Yorkin signed him.
“This Is the Big One Elizabeth”
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Before Demond Wilson was cast as Lamont, the producers were considering Richard Pryor for the part. Wilson got it. He brought a grounded sweetness to Lamont that Pryor almost certainly wouldn’t have — and he and Foxx became one of television’s great comedic duos. The long-suffering son perpetually trying to drag his father into a better life. The father perpetually refusing to go. Wilson later wrote a memoir called Second Banana: The Bitter Sweet Memories of the Sanford and Son Years. “Sometimes the bitter outweighs the sweet,” he said.
At the end of season 3, Foxx walked off demanding his fee jump from $19,000 to $25,000 an episode plus a share of profits. He eventually came back. He left permanently in 1977, and the show never recovered without him. He died October 11, 1991, on the set of his new show, The Royal Family. During a rehearsal, he clutched his chest and fell to the floor. His co-stars didn’t move. They’d watched Fred Sanford fake heart attacks for 6 seasons.
Della Reese later described the moment: “Redd said ‘Ah, give me a break’ and reached for the chair and did what we thought was a pratfall ’cause he did that all the time. He’d had a heart attack.” He died at the hospital that evening at 68.
Demond Wilson — who played Lamont and was the last surviving main cast member — died January 30, 2026, at 79 at his Palm Springs home. His son called him “a great man.” The show they made together was one of the most-watched programs in America. CBS had the chance to air it first. Nobody at CBS found the time to walk down the hall.
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