Gold Age of Television
Rick Marschall, 1987
Leave It To Beaver was another W.A.S.P. suburban family gentle sitcom wherein the father always wore cardigan sweaters and the mother tidied up an already neat and affluent home. It was indeed a genre and many carbon copies where to come before the golden age ended. Nevertheless, Leave It To Beaver was a cut above the average. It's closest counterpart was Father Knows Best which was arguably, something of a female-oriented show. Betty, for instance, was brainy and independent and had to deal with those traits which were somewhat untypical of the 1950's woman.
Leave It To Beaver, on the other hand, can be seen as a sustained treatment of male relationships -- father and son, brother to brother and the challenge of accommodating to rather than merely surviving 1950's stereotypes. It was a very preachy show, with Ward Cleaver, the father, dispensing lectures to this sons. Usually they were hard to argue against - if you were a kid yourself watching the program and dealt with the consequences of one's actions.
The situations then in Beaver sitcoms were themes universal to childhood rather than contrived outrageous predicaments. In the warm cast were Jerry Mathers as Theodore Beaver Cleaver, Tony Dow as his older brother Wally and Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley as the parents. Also appearing were Ken Osmond as the all-time stereotyped snotty teenager Eddie Haskell, Frank Bank as Wally's friend Lumpy and Richard Deacon as his father, Fred Rutherford and Burt Mustin as Gus, the local fire chief.
Mathers and Dow left the acting profession after Beaver but were lured back for stage performances and in the mid 1980's as stars of the reunion, Still the Beaver, a TV movie and later, on Disney and Turner Cable Systems, a full fledged series again. Hugh Beaumont had died, Wally had become a lawyer and Beaver's wife had left him. The new version was indeed a 1980's update of the somewhat blander 50's but the new Beaver movie featured original series as appropriate and irrefutable as always.
