Those of you who are either codgers or fans of "TV Land" are familiar with Leave it to Beaver. Depending on your viewpoint, Leave it to Beaver, first appearing in 1957, was either a wonderful heartwarming window into a unparalleled era of peace and prosperity in America or instead simplistic soporific suburban white-bread pap which totally ignored important social issues and reality.
In any event, it would be grossly unfair to say that the program was not cutting-edge in addressing in at least one of society's sacred cows. Specifically, the first regular episode filmed ("Captain Jack") was initially banned by the censors and was only grudgingly later released by them. It seems that it featured a brief shot of the young brothers Wally and Beaver hiding a baby alligator in a toilet tank at a time when potties were considered far too risque to be displayed on television.
Actually, not only were toilets totally taboo at the time, it was forbidden even to show a bathroom. Although the censors in this instance eventually bent this previously rigid policy, they did insist that only a toilet tank could be displayed--not the bowl itself.
Once this cultural barrier was breached, it did not take TV long to sink into its current miasma of bad taste where anything and everything prurient goes and where NBC almost broadcast a Fear Factor episode showing contestants drinking mugfuls of two different types of bodily fluids from a donkey (including one fluid which was golden in color and another which could be obtained only from a male version of the animal). The release of the donkey event in the U.S. market was cancelled at the last minute by Comcast, NBC's parent company, after a description of the upcoming broadcast leaked out and controversy ensued as a result.
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