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The Beaver was only in second grade when Leave It to Beaver made its sitcom debut in 1957. By the time the show finished its final season in 1963, Theodore Cleaver had grown into an awkward teenager. With big brother Wally finishing his high school career, the show ending its run made sense. But according to series star Jerry Mathers, the show nearly kept going into the Beav’s young adult years.

Leave It to Beaver aired on two different networks, but it was an ABC property for the majority of its run. After the show’s sixth season, the network looked at current trends among popular shows and decided to implement some changes over at the Cleaver house. For one thing, it wanted to produce the show in color. Makes sense — everyone was making the switch. ABC also proposed a more radical shift: It wanted to make each episode an hour long.

Few TV shows define the early days of the medium like "Leave it to Beaver." Over six decades after it began airing, the idyllic family sitcom isn't just synonymous with 1950s television, but 1950s America as a whole. While its white picket fence dreams have never been reflective of the real world, the show still functions as a gentle comedic escape from reality for many a classic TV fan.

As one of the oldest culturally significant TV shows still in syndication, it's impossible to watch "Leave It To Beaver" without wondering what became of the cheerful bunch of actors populating its sunny suburban world. Unfortunately, the considerable passage of time means that most of the actors involved in the series have died, but there are still three main actors — all of them former child stars — who are carving out paths for themselves in a post-"Leave it to Beaver" world.

Steven Hilliard Stern, a writer, director and producer whose work included the Elliott Gould-Bill Cosby comedy The Devil and Max Devlin, died Wednesday in Encino, his daughter Melanie Stern announced. He was 80.

Stern helmed episodes of shows like Serpico, McCloud, Quincy M.E. and Hawaii Five-O and directed more than three dozen telefilms, including Miracle on Ice, about the 1980 gold-winning U.S. hockey team, and 1983's Still the Beaver, which reunited the cast of the sitcom Leave It to Beaver.

Stern also wrote and directed Running (1979), a drama starring Michael Douglas and Susan Anspach (she co-starred in The Devil and Max Devlin, which he produced, as ...