The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet: America's (Once) Favorite Family

http://tvwheniwasborn.blogspot.com ^ | November 7, 2013 | Dixon Hayes

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The Nelsons really were a family, not assembled by a casting director, and Ricky and David literally grew up right in front of our eyes. When David and Rick (as he was known in later shows) got married, their actual wives even became series regulars. Ozzie and Harriet has become, a buzz term for a way of life that sums up all of the black and white family shows of the 1950s and '60s, yet it's unlike any of them.

Ozzie supposedly based the show's "Adventures" on things that happened around his own house or to people he knew. That's perhaps why the show seemed to be "a show about nothing" before Seinfeld even coined that phrase. One 1957 episode even had Ozzie craving tutti-frutti ice cream late at night when the stores were closed, and driving around town to find some. That was actually the main plot of that episode, and it worked. Leave it up to other family shows to warm your heart, tell Aesop fables and teach you lessons, the Nelsons were happy just to be your friends and make you chuckle. Don't get me wrong, the show had plenty of laughs; one 1955 episode, "The Pajama Game" (in which Ozzie and his neighbor Thorny get locked out of their houses in the middle of the night, fall asleep in a station wagon, and end up stranded in town in their pajamas) was outright hilarious, still is even now. (So's the 1953 episode about the store that keeps mis-delivering the chairs.) But it was the exception, not the rule. For the most part, if you just chuckled and shook your head, they were fine with that.

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Here's a Pepsi ad from the early 60's