Rant #2,630: Kid

 

I cannot get into today’s current slate of television programming.
 
I find it boring, “been there, done that,” and let’s be honest about it, the shows on today are not made for my generation, but for younger people who really don’t know what they missed when television was a new medium and there was actually some creativity involved in programming.
 
Sure, I watch a few shows that harken back to that time, like “Young Sheldon,” and when it is on, “Survivor,” and yes, I do watch “Blue Bloods,” but generally, I find TV today boring, and not entertainment at all because everything on seems to have a political lean.
 
So as a Baby Boomer, I have a definite fondness for shows that I watched growing up when TV was still a relatively new medium, when shows were not rife with political stances and were only meant to entertain us … and yes, get us to think on occasion too, but not pounding us over the head with their messages.
 
One of those shows that I loved as a young kid—and still do as a grizzled adult—is “Dennis the Menace,” which brought the newspaper comic strip to life.
 
The show was a hit when it was on, and a lot of that had to do with the picture-perfect casting, which so resembled what we saw in the funny papers that it was almost unreal.

 
The original cast featured Herbert Anderson as Henry Mitchell, the tall, thin matriarch of the Mitchell clan, Gloria Henry as Alice Mitchell, the comely matriarch of the Mitchell family, Joseph Kearns as the gruff and often grumpy George Wilson, Sylvia Field as wife Martha Wilson, and of course, Jay North as the precocious Dennis Mitchell.
 
Even the supporting characters—Billy Booth as Tommy and Jeannie Russell as Margaret, among others—were perfectly cast.

If ever a group of actors seemed to be born to play these roles, this cast was it.
 
The entire show—and the comic strip—revolved around Dennis’ love of his much older next door neighbor, George Wilson, and the culture clash between the young and the old, which always led to a lot of chaos, but also always ended up somehow righting itself by the end of the episode.
 
The show had strong writers who truly understood the characters, and you could see that there was a strong fondness between North and Kearns, the young and the old, in real life, which led the show to become so believable.
 
When Kearns suddenly died, Gale Gordon and Sara Seeger were brought in as the new Mr., and Mrs., Wilson, but the show was never the same, and with North growing out of his overalls and cowlick, the show somehow survived four seasons, but has been in rerun syndication for nearly sixty years since it last went off the air.
 
One of the integral characters in the show was Alice Mitchell, Dennis’ mom, and Gloria Henry, who played this role for four seasons, just passed away the other day, at age 98.

 
Henry was a beautiful woman in her day, but like Audrey Meadows on “The Honeymooners,” she had to dress down to make the part her own, and she did just that.
 
Henry had a long career in TV and movies, and she first cemented herself in the minds of Baby Boomers in her one-shot role on “The Abbott and Costello Show,” where she played a glamorous gun moll. If you want to see just how pretty—and talented—this actress was, see that episode.
 
But on “Dennis the Menace,” she played to type, the typical late 1950s-early 1960s mom who only wondered how she would clean her house while wearing blousy dresses and pearls.
 
During one of the show’s seasons, she was out of several episodes because she became pregnant in real life. Since pregnancy was handled very delicately back then—and since in the comic strip, Dennis was an only child—Henry had to be written out of a few episodes while she had her child.
 
She has said that she never realized the Jay North was such a troubled child, being used and abused by family members while he starred on the show. But she did see that he was segmented off from the other children who appeared on the show, and she did wonder about that, but only years later found out that North was under untold abuse from family members during the show’s entire run.
 
Henry acted into the 2000s, making appearances here and there, the last being in 2005.
 
The two main women on the show—Henry and Field—both lived long lives, with Field passing away at age 97 in 1998.
 
That being said, Henry will always be remembered as Dennis’ mom, or will be remembered as long as reruns of the show are available—and you can watch the show on Antenna TV, Hulu, and on the new Peacock Network.
 
And “The Abbott and Costello Show” is also available on many outlets, too.
 
Always one of my favorite TV sitcoms, “Dennis the Menace” is a show for the ages, funny just to be funny, but it did have a message: no matter what our age, we can always learn from those younger, and older, than we are.
 
And that is a message that Gloria Henry helped to carry out on that sitcom, and she, and the rest of the cast, did it to perfection.