Beaver's House Guest

an unusual episode for a '50's sitcom...the subject was divorce..Beaver's friend Chopper comes from a VERY split family viz; a mother and 2 stepmothers...Beaver is right on at one point in the episode when he comments that he has never had a friend with divorced parents before! This was not a common feature in 50's sitcoms...about as unusual as his having friends from another race or culture...watching the episode, you feel his shock and confusion, as if he were experiencing a certain loss of innocence..but, by then he was all of 12 years old and maybe the writers of the show felt it was time to put away more the more childish situations he had been getting involved in...time for him to face the real outside world, although the full impact of a broken marriage seemed lost to him, thinking only of the material gains of having presents to replace the affection and love that would be lost to him.. Wally, being slightly older seemed more attuned, almost blasé to such a situation... Definitely a sober beginning to a new season with an older Beav, and a foretelling of slightly more serious situations to come.

Beaver sees the ugly side of life. A total about face for a series that shys away from many real life problems. A very gutsy episode.

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I really liked this episode. How it showed by contrast with Choppers family, how wonderful the Cleaver's family was being happily married with happy children. I love "Leave It To Beaver".

But it was neat to see Barry Gordon (Chopper). Five years later he was in a movie with Jason Robards. Gordon is really a fine actor. You can really tell in "A Thousand Clowns". His imitation of Peter Lorre was iconic. It's ironic- here he plays a child from a broken home. On "A Thousand Clowns" he wasn't only from a broken home, but a dysfunctional one. Being raised by an uncle. They ''communicated with his mother entirely by rumor!"

(*Wally quote*) - "Sure, dad, he's more interested in his stomach than he is in his brain."

(IMO) - This episode of TV's "Leave It To Beaver" was actually quite a surprising one as the touchy subject of divorce (shock! shock!) was brought up in its storyline.

Anyway - (As the story goes) - "Chopper" Cooper is a buddy of Beaver's from the Konig Summer Camp. Today he has come to visit Beaver for the weekend.

Even though Chopper boasts about the benefits of having 2 families, the reality is that he's unhappy due to all of the disharmony that goes on.

This was the first episode in TV to deal with divorce and they do it in such a genuine way, Beaver thinks it's cool that his friend Chopper gets sets of presents from his parents and step presents but as the episode progresses we see that Choppers home life is abusive with his parents both using him to hurt each other, it was a shocking episode at the time that has aged beautifully.

In 1960 divorce was a taboo subject Beaver at age 11 had never had of it and Wally who is 15 has only heard of it in movies, while this may seem unrealistic to us nowadays it was actually quite common back then.

No show would touch on the subject but like all taboo subjects that no show would touch on a sitcom had to do it first, the episode gets a lot more serious toward the end and Beaver realises that it's better to have two parents that don't have much money but love each other than two that hate each other but give you lots of presents and think that their kid is a burden, this was by my count the only episode so far to have a scene that didn't use the laugh track.