Type of Content
Approved Story
1
Format
Region
Person
News Item Format
Standard
Allow me to take you back. The year is 1957 and “Leave it to Beaver” debuts in black and white on CBS.
The earnest and playful family comedy offers up solvable moral dilemmas and a heaping spoonful of unvarnished optimism in the American Dream for six years and remains for many people one of the greatest television shows of all time.
But one of the reasons the show was so popular was that it was, for many at the time, an escape from the anxiety-inducing social, cultural and economic changes affecting the country at a rapid pace. The Cleavers’ idealized version of 1950s American suburbia — safe, white, upwardly mobile and meritocratic — masked a reality that simply didn’t match the white picket fences of Mapleton Drive. Much to the contrary, at the time America was starting to feel the most significant economic downturn post-WWII in the Eisenhower Recession.