Leave It To Beaver

I've never watched "Leave It To Beaver" before, and I stumbled upon it today.

I don't think I'll watch it again.

Here are the old-fashioned family values I learned from the 15 minutes that I watched:

1. It's perfectly okay for mom and the kids to lie to dad. What he doesn't know can't hurt him.
2. It's perfectly acceptable to answer the telephone in the middle of dinner.
3. A man is well within his rights to sit comfortably in an easy chair and read his newspaper while his wife frets over a missing child, and then passive-aggressively question the way she is raising their child.
   

Here is a quote I found particularly amusing:

Beaver: “What if you and mom had a fight, what would you do?”

Ward: “Why, Beaver, you know your mother and I don’t fight.”

(My eyebrows are raised at this point.)

Beaver: “But what if you did, what would you do?”

Ward: “Well, I’d probably stay at the Y until she came to her senses.”

Ah, yes. There's that old-fashioned male-chauvinism. A minute later, Ward says, "I'd apologize, even though I was probably in the right." I would assume the writers were trying to be funny, but the laugh track didn't come on and the actor looked serious.

Ah, yes, the world was so much more wholesome back in the 50's, when women knew their places, men were never wrong, and racism was totally acceptable. Those were the days...