The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
June 27, 2010
TELEVISION was still relatively young when, on Oct. 4, 1957, CBS broadcast the perfect sitcom scene:A second grader known as the Beaver and his older brother, Wally, ordered by their mother to take baths before going to bed, are kneeling beside a tub they have just filled. Already in their pajamas, they are fiddling in the water with their hands to make it sound as if bathing were taking place, dampening washcloths and towels to create a trail of supporting evidence. As this goes on, the Beaver, who earlier that day was given a note by his teacher to take home to his parents but has been too afraid to deliver it, asks Wally for advice: Should he open the note, to see whether he’s in trouble?
“ ’Course not; that’d be dishonest,” says Wally, who then grabs a handful of dirt and tosses it into the draining bathtub. Why the dirt? “It’ll leave a ring,” he explains to the Beaver as the boys go off to bed, unwashed.
There have perhaps been funnier sitcom scenes since, and certainly much louder, more frenetic ones. But has the craftsmanship — wonderfully believable brotherly chat as a foundation; sly incongruity laid on top — ever been bested? Doubtful.
Wally and the Beaver, of course, were the focus of “Leave It to Beaver,” and that bathtub scene was in Episode 1 of Season 1: “Beaver Gets ‘Spelled.’ ” There would be 233 more episodes during the show’s six-season run, from 1957 to 1963, and they are full of small, knowing moments. A boxed set out this week from the Shout! Factory collects the entire series, with assorted extras and annotated booklets for each season. The discs are a technical upgrade over previous releases, but the real prize is being able to immerse yourself in the entire body of work, a time capsule from that brief moment between the end of the Korean War and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when American life — at least as it is often now mythologized — stood blissfully still.
“Jokes get in the way,” Tony Dow, who played Wally, said in a telephone interview, talking about the “Beaver” writers’ reliance on more placid, observational humor. “They get in the way of your concentration when you’re trying to get at a story. We would throw jokes out at the table reading.”
That is what hits you first when you sit down with a box of “Beaver”: television comedy was a much slower animal back then. You have to detox mentally to watch these shows, to lay aside your caffeine and BlackBerry addictions and be prepared to wait for your rewards. That bathtub scene takes almost three and a half minutes to unspool. In that time Hannah Montana could have traded six insults with her father, tripped over a couch, lost her wig, dumped two boyfriends and had a crisis involving shoes.
Not that “Leave It to Beaver” was above using sight gags. Four of the show’s stars, all now in their 60s, had no trouble selecting a “most humiliating thing ever done to my character.”
Frank Bank, who played Wally’s friend Lumpy Rutherford, recalled taking a quart of melted ice cream (which, he confessed in an interview, was actually yogurt) over the head in “Wally’s Weekend Job” (Season 5, Episode 6). Ken Osmond — the slick, weaselly Eddie Haskell, one of the most memorable characters television has ever seen — spoke of receiving a faceful of differential fluid in “Wally’s Practical Joke” (Season 6, Episode 35). Jerry Mathers, the Beaver, still cringes at “Beaver, the Bunny” (Season 5, Episode 16), in which he ended up in a ridiculous rabbit suit for a school pageant. (The episode gave Lumpy the opportunity to utter the memorable line: “Beaver in a bunny suit. The only thing that would be funnier would be a bunny in a beaver suit.”) And Mr. Dow cited “Wally, the Lifeguard” (Season 4, Episode 4), in which Wally thinks he has been hired as a lifeguard but finds himself hawking hot dogs instead. “They put a goofy-looking hat on me,” Mr. Dow recalled. Yes, Wally is still saying “goofy.”It seems like a perfect instance of brotherly rivalry that, when asked to choose his favorite episode, Mr. Mathers picked the show that Mr. Dow named as his most humiliating. But that’s an illusion; Mr. Mathers said his selection was based on the memory of the down time between scenes, when he outfished Mr. Dow in what is now called Jaws Lake on Universal’s back lot.
Mr. Dow named as his favorite “Happy Weekend” (Season 2, Episode 13), a wise, wistful tale in which the boys’ father, Ward (Hugh Beaumont), drags them against their will to the cabin where he used to vacation as a child. Like so many of the series’s best installments, that one was written by the show’s creators, Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, men apparently obsessed with bathing. The subject comes up seemingly in every episode, including “Happy Weekend.” “Hot dog, Beaver!” Wally says as the boys are looking over the cabin. “There’s no bathtub!”
Maybe the cleanliness fixation was a manifestation of the way Mr. Connelly and Mr. Mosher ran their operation: protectively, Mr. Dow said, with an eye out for the negative influences that have derailed so many child stars since. “There were drugs and alcohol when we grew up, but we had this tremendous core of support, first from our families, but also from the writers and others who worked on the show,” Mr. Dow said. “I remember there was this crewman who said ‘dammit’ or something once. Never saw him again.”
Mr. Dow went on to have success as a television director (“Coach,” “Babylon 5”). Mr. Mathers — despite having been killed in Vietnam, according to a false rumor that floated around for years — graduated from Berkeley and for a time went into banking, though he continued to act (including in “Hairspray” on Broadway, a job he’s particularly proud of). Mr. Bank became a financial consultant, and Mr. Osmond was for years a Los Angeles police officer. (In one of the discs’ bonus features, he gives a matter-of-fact account of the time he was shot in the line of duty.)
In the 1980s the four, along with Barbara Billingsley, who played June Cleaver, Wally and the Beav’s mom, reunited for more than 100 episodes of “The New Leave It to Beaver.” And thus the “Beaver” franchise was, as Mr. Bank put it, “probably one of the most evolutionary shows of our time”: at first, it was the world as seen through the Beaver’s eyes; increasingly in later seasons it was taken over by Wally and his friends; then, years later, it revisited the characters in adulthood.
That’s the main pleasure waiting in a box of “Beaver”: the first six years of that evolution. Think of it as a 234-episode history lesson, of a family, a country, a medium. Each installment has a few pearls worthy of that necklace June is always wearing (even while doing housework). Consider, for instance, what “Ward’s Baseball,” Season 3, Episode 28, can teach us:EVERYTHING WAS NEW ONCE June has just been grocery shopping, and Ward, wandering by the kitchen, helps her unload the bags. “What’s this?” he asks, indicating one particular purchase. And June says: “Frozen waffles. You just heat them and serve them.” That’s right: she has to explain to him what frozen waffles are.
OUR RELAXING SKILLS HAVE IMPROVED CONSIDERABLY It’s the weekend, and Ward is chilling in a chair when the doorbell rings. “It’s probably Fred Rutherford,” Lumpy’s father, he tells June, showing mild annoyance at having his laid-back Saturday interrupted. “I don’t know anyone else who would drop in on Saturday without phoning first.” Thing is, Ward has been doing his Saturday relaxing while wearing a coat and tie. When he opens the door, Fred too is wearing a coat and tie.
THESE SHOWS CONTAIN THE ROOTS OF ALL FAMILY AND TEENAGE COMEDY “Ward’s Baseball” involves a valuable autographed baseball that the Beaver accidentally wrecks. See “Hannah Montana,” Season 2, Episode 21: “Bye Bye Ball” (Miley Cyrus’s character wrecks her brother’s valuable autographed baseball).
These “Beavers” are constantly doing that: reminding you of a scene or plotline in some subsequent show or movie. When Eddie got that faceful of fluid in “Wally’s Practical Joke,” it’s because he was under Lumpy’s car, repairing the damage from a practical joke gone awry: he and Wally had chained the car to a tree, and when Lumpy drove forward, the back axle was yanked off. “American Graffiti,” anyone?
Cheating on homework, being mortified by clothes or haircuts, running away from home, discovering the cruelties of the working world, feeling the stirrings of interest in the opposite sex: “Beaver” covered those and dozens of other topics that later turned up in “Family Affair,” “The Wonder Years,” “The Bernie Mac Show,” “Hannah Montana” and everywhere else, and will turn up again in whatever family series comes next. You might have thought kids, with their electronic devices and their early maturation, had changed too much for half-century-old stories to still resonate.
“Nah,” Mr. Osmond said. “Kids are still the same as they were in 1810.”
Related
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