Good, but surprisingly dark

Pythe

Every so often I sit down to watch this show with my mom whenever it comes on TVLand, and the thing that invariably surprises me is the serious edge to the silly humor. Leave It to Beaver has a Charles Schulz sensibility to it: while it's appropriate for all ages, there's a menacing subtext to it that you don't fully appreciate as a child. Parents interact with their children in the most horrendous ways, often talking down to them, yelling at them, selling them short, speaking ill of them, or in general being very condescending (especially Larry's mother, who is downright evil, and Lumpy's father, who is too obsessed with his public image to show any feelings of warmth for his son). Even Saintlike Ward and June are occasionally guilty of unnecessary harshness. Beaver's friends often relate stories that culminate with them being "clobbered" or smacked, leaving the viewer to decide whether they are exaggerating a very just punishment, as children are wont to do, or if their words entail literal physical abuse, which also wouldn't surprise me given the on screen behavior of many of the adults. When the kids aren't being abused, they're often completely ignored; being children, their problems are hardly ever taken seriously by grown-ups who simply don't remember how an apparently trivial matter can be a very real crisis in youth. As Wally often says, Beaver is "just a dumb kid" and is usually treated as such.

This aspect of the show, however, isn't a bad thing. It's just another example of how writers of ages past had to often imply dark issues that censors wouldn't allow an explicit exploration of. In some ways, I prefer this more subtle approach to today's, which essentially involves graphic displays of every conceivable societal or familial dysfunction, overloading the senses with obvious depictions of misfortune.

All that aside, I can only conclude by saying that Leave It to Beaver is still a fine example of strong sitcom writing, even though a lot of it appears silly or naive by today's standards. Some episodes (like the one where Wally gives Beaver a haircut) are simply uproarious. The show began to decline when Beaver hit puberty, mainly because the writers apparently couldn't adapt the zany situations to make them more appropriate for his age. Beaver became a 9-year-old trapped in a fifteen-year-old's body, still mindlessly spewing words like "golly" and "jeepers", still failing to think things through on the most basic level, still creeped out by girls and lost in a world of juvenile fantasy. You can't sell a show based on its cuteness factor when the youngest character is in high school. At least they had enough sense not to desperately introduce a toddler to the cast in the waning years so they could skirt by on cheap jokes and mispronounced words, unlike many other sitcoms that have clearly jumped the shark.

This review is getting much more cynical then I really intended, so I'll just end it here. Make of it what you will.

score 9/10

Pythe 18 August 2007

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1714129/