Citing Leave It To Beaver's strengths, Tony Dow has said that it was the first program of its kind to include episodes dealing with death and divorce. Though I don't doubt Tony Dow's claims about the show that continues to make him recognized, I have never considered Leave It To Beaver a daring sit-com that presents unpleasant and unsettling truths. I don't see it as the forerunner to the openly controversial comedies, such as Maude, The Jefferson's, and All In The Family.
Leave It To Beaver has more in common with The Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best, and Make Room For Daddy, shows of the same era that also featured families, and made light of differences of opinion and miss-communication between husbands and wives and of the typical struggles between parents and their children, young people and their friends. Leave It To Beaver, however, does a better job than its rivals of presenting, in an entertaining way, middle-class living as many of that era had known it.
Like the other popular television families of that era, the Cleavers resolve their problems promptly, Ward Cleaver disciplines reasonably -- the two boys express dread when they expect their father to holler when he comes to their bedroom to give consequences, but he never really loses control of his anger -- June Cleaver offers her opinion tactfully, and nobody behaves antisocially. The Cleavers have a functional family. They don't, however, come across as a model one.
The other popular sitcoms of the 50's and early 60's either featured characters a little too refined or proper to make viewers easily forget that they are observing actors, or entertained by including buffoonery (Don Knotts, Lucille Ball, and Dick Van Dyke each engaged in the unlikely.). Leave It To Beaver, though, maintained a solid following by presenting predicaments and featuring characters that more closely resembled reality.
The way the makers of Leave It To Beaver portray the most extreme of its cast may serve as the best criteria for rating the show above the others of that time. As the quintessential sycophant, Eddie Haskel keeps me laughing, but he also occasionally reveals fragility behind the phony, cocky exterior. Similarly, Lumpy usually amuses viewers by playing a common type: the insecure teen who teases and bullies his buddy's younger sibling. He puts on innocence, though, in the presence of his overbearing father. Because the audience sees other sides to Eddie and Lumpy -- Leave It To Beaver writers had the astuteness to include them - - they and the show come across as less fictional.
Leave It To Beaver has more in common with The Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best, and Make Room For Daddy, shows of the same era that also featured families, and made light of differences of opinion and miss-communication between husbands and wives and of the typical struggles between parents and their children, young people and their friends. Leave It To Beaver, however, does a better job than its rivals of presenting, in an entertaining way, middle-class living as many of that era had known it.
Like the other popular television families of that era, the Cleavers resolve their problems promptly, Ward Cleaver disciplines reasonably -- the two boys express dread when they expect their father to holler when he comes to their bedroom to give consequences, but he never really loses control of his anger -- June Cleaver offers her opinion tactfully, and nobody behaves antisocially. The Cleavers have a functional family. They don't, however, come across as a model one.
The other popular sitcoms of the 50's and early 60's either featured characters a little too refined or proper to make viewers easily forget that they are observing actors, or entertained by including buffoonery (Don Knotts, Lucille Ball, and Dick Van Dyke each engaged in the unlikely.). Leave It To Beaver, though, maintained a solid following by presenting predicaments and featuring characters that more closely resembled reality.
The way the makers of Leave It To Beaver portray the most extreme of its cast may serve as the best criteria for rating the show above the others of that time. As the quintessential sycophant, Eddie Haskel keeps me laughing, but he also occasionally reveals fragility behind the phony, cocky exterior. Similarly, Lumpy usually amuses viewers by playing a common type: the insecure teen who teases and bullies his buddy's younger sibling. He puts on innocence, though, in the presence of his overbearing father. Because the audience sees other sides to Eddie and Lumpy -- Leave It To Beaver writers had the astuteness to include them - - they and the show come across as less fictional.