'Leave It to Beaver,' which ran from 1957 until 1963, was one of the strangest, sweetest, most distinctive domestic sitcoms of television's celebrated Golden Age.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It was just at the end of the golden era of BBC comedy, which was fantastic.
But it was hard to leave because the show's been so important in our lives.
I'm at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show - so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know.
You know as well as I do that the family sitcom was the stalwart of TV for God knows how many decades.
I left 'The Bob Newhart Show,' which was my decision. CBS wanted it to go on. But I could see television changing; I could see the tastes were changing.
Our show was - it remained - you know, kids could watch it and laugh at it. And they wouldn't know - they wouldn't get the jokes. But they would laugh at it. So they tell me now they have grown up and they're watching it. Now they get the jokes. But we didn't say anything blatant.
It's interesting: I went 25 years without watching a single television show. I was one of those people, because I was so inside how a television show was made, if I would turn on somebody else's show, I would sit there and analyze it, like, 'Oh, so they had four hours in this location and had to get out and the number of set-ups, etc.'
My desire for my own sitcom began as a little girl - I spent hours lying on my belly on the shag carpeting getting lost in the world of the '70s sitcom. All I wanted to do was run away to the Brady house, The Partridge Family bus; even the project on 'Good Times' seemed better than Clark, NJ.
There was such a lack of modern, recognizable role models for a young girl in the 1950s. I mean, 'Leave It to Beaver' didn't speak to me. That's why I latched on to music.
I had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.