After All In The Family's unexpected success, it would've been easy for producer Norman Lear to keep repeating the same formula—and with the spin-off series Maude, he arguably did. By substituting Bea Arthur's brassy Westchester liberal for Carroll O'Connor's cranky Queens bigot, Lear and longtime collaborator Bud Yorkin explored hot-button issues in a more sophisticated milieu, mocking the hypocrisy of the hyper-opinionated. The breakthroughs of All In The Family and Maude were largely aesthetic, bringing a New York theater sensibility to television via sitcoms that were staged like one-act plays, complete with a live audience, a view-from-the-second-row visual style, and the kind of frank exploration of sex, race and politics that had been the province of the stage for much of the previous century. In the 22 episodes on the Maude: The Complete First Season DVD set, Arthur's frazzled upper-middle-class housewife has an abortion, plays host to a black radical, debates whether it's healthy for young kids to "play doctor," and stages a protest against local marijuana laws. But with Arthur's impeccable comic timing, she's only as shrill and hectoring as she needs to be to get a laugh. Maude distilled the kinds of conversations regular people have about everything from infidelity to menstruation, while welcoming in people who'd always wanted to have those conversations. It pulled the audience up, rather than talking down.