The Jeffersons

Sherman Hemsley (1938-2012) played the ground-breaking role of George Jefferson.

The Jeffersons was a television show, which ran on CBS from 1975 to 1985. It was a spinoff of All in the Family (the lead character, George Jefferson, was Archie's neighbor in that series).

It was one of the first shows to prominently feature an African-American couple as successful (George Jefferson owned a chain of dry-cleaning stores, and he and his wife Louise lived in an East Side high rise apartment complex with their live-in maid Florence) as well as the first to prominently feature an interracial couple (Tom and Helen Willis, Tom was white and Helen was black). Until 2012 (when it was surpassed by Tyler Perry's House of Payne by one episode), it was the longest-running sitcom with African-Americans as featured lead characters.

In the show, George would be the one showing negative traits (he often called the Willis' daughter and his daughter-in-law, Jenny, a racist epithet due to her mixed race); Louise (and, quite often and with sass, Florence) would be the one to correct him. However, George often had positive traits: he would the only person able to fix the back problems of their neighbor Bentley (a British expat who worked for the United Nations; George could walk on Bentley's back and straighten it out).