1957: 'Leave It to Beaver' Makes its Debut
October 4, 2020
| By TV WW
On this day in 1957, one of television's most iconic family sitcoms, Leave It to Beaver, made its debut. The series starred Jerry Mathers as Theodore "The Beaver" Cleaver, the youngest son of a suburban family, along with Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont as his parents June and Ward Cleaver and Tony Dow as his older brother, Wally. The cast also included Ken Osmond and Frank Bank as Wally's buddies, Eddie Haskell and "Lumpy" Rutherford, respectively.
The series first ran on CBS, and after its first year moved to ABC. The show ran a total of six seasons. In 1985, a sequel series, Still the Beaver (later The New Leave It to Beaver), ran on the Disney Channel and later TBS, with Mathers, Billingsley, Dow, Osmond and Bank reprising their original roles.