gather JSON with Python - dict of list of dict conversion

Question

I'm pretty new to Python & JSON, I've been trying to convert a JSON response into a simple one dimension list including a dict for every occurrences of this list

The JSON format is the following :

{"key": [
 {
  "key1": value1,
  "key2": value2,
  "keyN": valueN,
},
{
  "key1": value1,
  "key2": value2,
  "keyN": valueN,
},
{
  "key1": value1,
  "key2": value2,
  "keyN": valueN,
}
        ]
}

I get this JSON from this type of function:

import json
import urllib2    

t = json.load(urllib2.urlopen(path/to/JSON))

My goal is to get rid of the "first level dict" to only keep the list with every dict in it, but when I try the following :

ef = list()
ef = t.values()

I end up with unwanted character such as :

print ef

[[{u'key1': True, u'key2': u'value2', u'key3': 6}, 
  {u'key1': True, u'key2': u'value2', u'key3': 8}
  ...
]]

without mentionning that I didn't do what I wanted (having only one list), but instead, I've a "list of a list". I guess that the "unwanted character" comes from a charset issue (not sure), JSON comes in utf-8