LEAVE IT TO BEAVER: The Complete Series Box Set

Leave It to Beaver is a 1950s and 1960s family-oriented American television situation comedy about an inquisitive but often naive boy named Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver and his adventures at home, in school, and around his suburban neighborhood. The show has attained an iconic status in the United States, with the Cleavers exemplifying the idealized suburban family of the mid-twentieth century.

One of the first primetime sitcom series filmed from a child's point-of-view, the show was created by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, two radio and early television writers, who found inspiration for the show's characters, plots, and dialogue in the lives, experiences, and conversations of their own children. Like several television dramas and sitcoms of the late fifties and early sixties (Lassie and My Three Sons, for example), Leave It to Beaver is a glimpse at middle-class, American boyhood. A typical episode features Beaver getting into some sort of trouble and facing his parents for reprimand and correction.

Comprising six thirty-nine-week seasons and 234 episodes, the show debuted on CBS on October 4, 1957, moved to ABC the following year, and completed its first run on June 20, 1963. Though the show spanned the period in television history when filming was transitioning from black-and-white to color, the series was a single-camera, full-screen production filmed entirely in black-and-white on 35mm film. The show's production companies included comedian George Gobel's Gomalco Productions (1957-1961) and Kayro Productions (1961-1963) with filming at Revue Studios/Republic Studios and Universal Studios in Los Angeles, California. The show was distributed by MCA Television.

Contemporary commentators were favorable to Leave It to Beaver, with Variety comparing Beaver to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. A moderate amount of juvenile merchandise was published during the show's first-run including board games, novels, and comic books. The show has enjoyed a renaissance in popularity since the 1970s through off-network syndication, a reunion telemovie, Still the Beaver (1983), and a sequel series The New Leave It to Beaver (1985-89). In 1997, a movie version based on the original series was released to moderate acclaim, and, in October 2007, TV Land celebrated the show's 50th anniversary with a marathon. Although the show never broke into the Nielsen Ratings top-30 nor won any awards, it placed on TIME magazine's unranked 2007 list of "The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME.