Ward and June are sweetly sensitive and understanding, but not really idealized. They successfully hide the disaster, but then Wally feels horribly guilty after Ward praises him for having been so responsible. In another show Wally baby-sits Beaver who accidentally lets the bathtub overflow, which in turn seriously damages the plaster ceiling in the kitchen below. One entire episode revolves around Beaver's stubborn determination not to dress-up for an awards banquet, another around Beaver's regret and embarrassment after he makes a funny face for a class picture. The problems and challenges Beaver and Wally face might seem trivial or inane to adults, but Connelly and Mosher obviously remembered how monumentally important they could be to children and teenagers. Indeed, the audience never even sees their bedroom during the entire run of the show. Instead of a family sitcom told from a neutral, third-person perspective or which functioned mainly as a vehicle for its adult star, Leave It to Beaver told its stories entirely from Beaver and/or Wally's perspective - there are no shows pivoting around Ward and/or June's concerns. All told this set includes nearly 100 hours worth of material.Īs hardly needs explaining, Leave It to Beaver is a half-hour situation comedy focusing on the boyhood (and, later, the tumultuous teenage) trials and tribulations of Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver (Jerry Mathers) and his older brother Wally (Tony Dow), who live in a pleasant, middle class suburban home with their parents, Ward (Hugh Beaumont) and June (top-billed Barbara Billingsley).Ĭreated by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, who before this were writers on The Amos 'n Andy Show and who later wrote and produced The Munsters, Leave It to Beaver was ingeniously simple.
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Shout! Factory sublicensed the series from Universal but unlike earlier, disappointing transfers of Shout!/Universal titles (e.g., McHale's Navy), these remastered shows look spectacular. Shout! Factory's Leave It to Beaver - The Complete Series, is a terrific package that includes all 234 episodes of the 1957-1963 show, with six 6-disc season sets neatly packed into brick-sized cardboard packaging, along with a bonus disc supplementing the mostly radio interview extras interspersed throughout the six seasons. Their scripts slightly expanded into comic terms real-life incidents, authentic little slices of life that, in Beaver's case, captured the essence of youth. While The Dick Van Dyke Show, about the home and work life of a comedy-variety television show writer, and Beaver, about two brothers and their relationship with their suburban middle-class parents, their friends and community, have entirely different agendas, they took the same basic approach. Waldron quotes Dick Van Dyke Show creator Carl Reiner, who expresses an unreserved admiration for the series, and who talks about how it influenced his own famous sitcom, a series now regarded as one of the three or four best television comedies of all-time. But then something in Vince Waldron's excellent The Dick Van Dyke Show Book got me thinking about the series in a new way. Like most audiences, until recently I took Leave It to Beaver for granted.
As writer-producer Brian Levant remarks in one of the featurettes, Leave It to Beaver was almost unique among American sitcoms - it was wise. No, Leave It to Beaver is remembered because was an extremely well-made, memorable show. But the shared affection toward Leave It to Beaver differs from other familiar, forever-syndicated programs like The Brady Bunch, a series remembered more because it was drummed into the collective consciousnesses of the '70s generation through endless UHF repeats rather than because it was any good. Beaver somehow never lost its audience and it remained popular.
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It became emblematic of '50s blandness and conservative family values, and accused of unrealistically presenting an idealized nuclear family, one whose matriarchal figure, for instance, did the vacuuming wearing a pearl necklace and high heels.Īnd yet as criticized as it was, it's always somewhere on the airwaves, even after television stations stopped showing old black & white TV shows and movies to make way for all those mind-numbing infomercials.
For the past 50 years, it's been regarded with a strange, simultaneous mixture of fondness and derision. Though perennially popular, Leave It to Beaver is one of television's most misunderstood, most under-appreciated comedies.