Leave It to Beaver producers wanted to focus on the situation, not the comedy, according to Tony Dow, who played big brother Wally on the series. “If any line got too much of a laugh, they’d take it out,” Dow told AARP Magazine, per MeTV. “They didn’t want a big laugh; they wanted chuckles.”
“It’s an honest show,” agreed Barbara Billingsley, who played June Cleaver. She told The Ledger-Star that “the situations are taken from real life, and we are not just trying for laughs. The laughs come naturally from the situations.”
“If you watch sitcoms today, a lot of them are what I call ‘joke shows,’ where people have setup, setup, joke,” Jerry “The Beaver” Mathers told For Women First. “And a lot of them really don’t have a lot of substance.”
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But his sitcom was never a joke show, Mathers told the Television Academy. “Leave It to Beaver took a totally new and unique perspective,” he said. “It was the adult world seen through the eyes of a child, and so there were different characters than people were really used to seeing.”
The Beaver was the innocent, Mathers explained. Wally was the transitional character who tried to explain to the Beaver what the world was really like. “Then the adults come in, even the parents, and say ‘Do what I say, not what I do.’”
Creators Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher were intent on keeping the show grounded in reality. “Mr. Connelly had a little book and he would write down things, from even when he was a child, of things that happened to him, of things that happened to his friends,” Mathers said. Connelly kept writing down real-life stories about his own kids and their misadventures.
“Hugh Beaumont (who played Ward Cleaver) has three children and Barbara Billingsley has two,” Mosher told the Gettysburg Times. “So you see, plot wise we are loaded. Somebody is always telling us what their kids did, and we just kick the idea around and turn it up with a script.”
“So all of the original Leave It to Beavers, all 234 because we shot 39 a year for six years, come from real life,” Mathers said.
And almost all of them muted the laughs in favor of authenticity. “We don’t sugarcoat life,” said Mosher. “We don’t try to give an unreal impression of American life as we think it should be. We work very hard to play it straight, as we know life is.”
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