Word: beaverisms
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...Life of Riley had its own working class hero, Dobie Gillis's father ran a small grocery (his mother worked in the store) and the best of them all--The Honeymooners--featured Ralph Kramden the busdriver and Ed Norton the sewer worker. Although alternatives to My Three Sons and Beaver Cleaver were rare, they existed, and Archie breaks no new ground in this direction...
...particular to All in the Family, but are a symptom of TV's general vacuity. All characters, whether bourgeois or proletarian, are stereotyped, and consequently become a kind of substitute reality in the minds of their audiences. Several years ago, when Jerry Mathers, the actor who played Beaver Cleaver, was rumored killed in Vietnam, people seemed almost more saddened than if their next-door neighbor had been a casualty. The cardboard character had become not more real, but more easily identifiable than the kid down the block. And in this attempt to foster respect for a substitute reality...
Such escapism creates many problems of its own: a phony realism is not one of them. All television shows--comedy and tragedy alike--are ridiculous and are perceived as such by their audiences. A show like Bewitched would be the paramount example, but even Beaver Cleaver is as obviously stereotyped as Jackie Gleason-Ralph Kramden. TV forces its audience to pay obeisance to the unreal, but not to believe...
...smug, self-satisfied feelings of middle and upper-class audiences--who are as statistically as racist as Archie--but do not express their bogotry in such raw terms. Perhaps it is all right to have Archie worry about the 'coons' moving into his neighborhood, but let's also have Beaver Cleaver's father express concern about 'that colored doctor' moving in next door...
...mass telephoning, softening-up cocktail parties and din ners for prospective customers, paid transportation to the site, and even free green stamps just for showing up. Many developments are models of intelligent planning, from Titan Group's Yosemite Lakes Park in California to J.M. Huber Co.'s Beaver Cove on Maine's Moosehead Lake. But fraud and misrepresentation persist, and large swatches of unspoiled wilderness are being turned into tacky subdivisions...