Like many fictional municipalities, Leave It to Beaver’s Mayfield was never explicitly located, precisely because the show’s creators wanted viewers to feel like it could be their town. Some of them felt that a little too strongly, however, resulting in countless hours spent poring over dialogue and examining each frame for clues to where in the U.S. the idyllic town exists.
Their efforts have produced two primary contenders: Illinois and Wisconsin. Many Ohioans try to claim the town, citing possession of an actual Mayfield as well as Ward Cleaver’s origins in Shaker Heights and anecdotal references to landmarks around Cleveland, but comments from one character noting that another’s parents “wish they live closer, like Ohio,” pretty much shoots down the possibility that they’re in Ohio. It also doesn’t help that Ohio is close to everything. Kind of the nature of Ohio.
There’s a stronger case for Wisconsin. In one episode, the high school band is said to be traveling to Madison to play for the governor, and in another, characters strongly allude to attending a Green Bay Packers game. However, a Mayfield in Wisconsin — and Ohio, for that matter — presents a huge problem: proximity to a beach. Ward Cleaver once claims the ocean is 20 miles away, and both states are smack in the middle of either coast.
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Illinois isn’t anywhere near an ocean, either, but it is on Lake Michigan. You ever seen that thing? If you didn’t know where you were, you’d swear it was the Atlantic. Most pertinently, one establishing shot in a 1959 episode is unmistakably downtown Skokie, a suburb of Chicago. It doesn’t get a lot more concrete than, you know, concrete.
Of course, the real answer is Los Angeles. Leave It to Beaver was filmed primarily at CBS and Universal Studios — in fact, the Cleavers technically live on the same street as the Munsters — with some location shots clearly identifiable as Hollywood and Santa Monica. If the Cleavers lived in Los Angeles, though, they would probably be multigenerational factory workers rather than the perfect nuclear family that never really existed.
In this case, like so many series and movies, Los Angeles is just a metaphor.
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