![]() ![]() Others of Beaver’s friends talked of their fathers’ “hittin’ moods.” Eddie Haskell, too, behaved the way he did in part because of domestic discord. Mondello’s advanced age carried the suggestion that Larry was a “surprise” child and unwanted. Larry Mondello’s father was perpetually away on business trips his mother was a nervous wreck, struggling to raise single-handedly her wayward son. Those who call Beaver “sanitized” overlook that many of the children on the show came from broken or dysfunctional homes. His schemes were invariably shown to be morally bankrupt, and the episodes ended in the reinforcement of the correct moral norms. ![]() A smarmy sycophant to the adults and rascally schemer to his peers, Eddie was a menace to the social universe of Mayfield. His name suggested an “eddy”: a current at variance with the main current in a stream and indeed, Eddie represented the antithesis of the Cleaver values. ![]() The ultimate foil to the Cleavers was Eddie Haskell, the best friend of Beaver’s older brother Wally. The scripts excelled at pinpointing the decisive moment of moral choice and the chain of causation leading to evil. Two of the most famous episodes of the series involved Beaver, at the instigation of his friends, attempting to smoke his father’s meerschaum pipe and climbing into a giant “soup bowl” on a roadside billboard. Most memorable was Larry Mondello, whose function as tempter was emphasized by his ever-present apple later in the series, this tempter role was filled by the aptly named Gilbert Bates (“baits”). Beaver’s friends were a Dickensian bunch of delinquents, constantly luring him into trouble. The Cleaver home was portrayed as a sanctuary, a garden of moral values in which love, mutual respect, and dignity reigned supreme.īut the evil lurking outside the sanctuary was given its due. ![]() The name of Beaver’s elementary school teacher-Miss “Landers”-suggested a person who steers children to land amid the stormy seas of childhood. It was set in the fictional town of Mayfield-that is, a “field” in which the young (those in the springtime of life) are formed morally. To criticize Beaver for being “idealized” misses the point, for its purpose was not documentary but didactic.īeaver had many trappings of a morality play. Media and popular culture during the Cold War reinforced the domestic ideal, particularly in light of Communism’s disdain for the “bourgeois family.” While divorce and broken homes were becoming more common-in 1949 one writer could already claim that “family life is becoming a thing to be remembered rather than to be lived”-TV domestic sitcoms attempted to shore up the old values, stressing the importance of family in forming character and virtue. After the tumult of World War II, Americans longed for tranquility and order. Leave It to Beaver was an artistic expression of a particular time in history. Mathers’ idea offers the perfect template for viewing this popular classic. As we celebrate Leave It to Beaver‘s sixtieth anniversary, Mr. The show is often misrepresented as a “sanitized,” “unrealistic,” or “cookie cutter” portrayal of a “perfect nuclear family”-phrases which reveal scorn for the very concepts of family and domesticity.īy contrast, Jerry Mathers, who played the title character and was a college philosophy major, has likened the series to a “medieval morality play” in which Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver repeatedly succumbed to temptation, suffered the consequences, and was guided back on the path of virtue. To many, Leave It to Beaver is merely a phrase conjuring up a host of media-propagated clichés about society in the 1950s-bland, “white-bread,” conformist, and so on. The main reason-apart from its top-notch production values-is that it avoided the topical and ephemeral and drew instead from the wellspring of the moral imagination, creating characters and situations which have become archetypes. Viewed today, Leave It to Beaver remains ever fresh, even as other pop-culture products have faded and dated. Since its premiere sixty years ago, the beloved sitcom Leave It to Beaver (1957-63) has been such an “enduring source of inspiration” for many, unfolding the story of a young boy who learned “first principles” and was guided in “virtue and wisdom” in the midst of his family. Russell Kirk defined the moral imagination as “an enduring source of inspiration that elevates us to first principles as it guides us upwards towards virtue and wisdom and redemption.” It is a quality which informs the great works of art, not excluding the more popular art forms of film and television. “Leave It to Beaver” was very much a medieval morality play, in which the character of the Beaver repeatedly succumbed to temptation, suffered the consequences, and was guided back on the path of virtue. ![]()
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