Norman Lear, who died this week at 101, left behind a legacy of groundbreaking television. But there was perhaps no hour of TV on his lengthy résumé more controversial than a two-part episode of the CBS sitcom “Maude,” from the show’s first season.

Titled “Maude’s Dilemma,” it aired on consecutive weeks in November 1972 and follows the 47-year-old Maude, a grandmother played by Bea Arthur, as she learns she is pregnant and decides ultimately to get an abortion. In the aftermath, advertisers dropped the show and network affiliates refused to air reruns.

“Maude’s Dilemma” originally aired two months before the Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal nationwide — it was then already legal in New York, where the series was set. More than five decades later, the episode still seems radical, particularly in an era after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, in 2022.

“It’s completely relevant to everything we’re going through now,” said Tracey Scott Wilson, a TV writer and professor in the radio, television and film department of Northwestern University. “What is actually most surprising about it is that there was actually an ability to have a conversation about it. And I think that’s what makes Norman Lear and his shows so relevant today.”