Rant #2,887: Is It Any Wonder?

Good morning!
 
Time to get up!
 
Time for me to stop using exclamation points to frame what I am saying!
 
There, I did it again!
 
But I have to say, the reverberations from my weekend are still coming to me strong!
 
It was such a fun weekend, and it was a party that I will never forget!
 
But it got me to thinking …
 
As I mentioned to you yesterday, I actually screwed up my speech, because I fouled up “The Adventures of Superman” mantra that I wanted to use as part of my speech … “Superman … who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.”
 
I don’t know, it just didn’t come to me, so I bypassed it …
 
But it also got me to thinking … what is my favorite TV show of all-time?
 
What is the one TV show that has made a mark on me virtually for my entire life, and will continue to reverberate with me until the day I die?
 
It is certainly a photo finish between the aforementioned “The Adventures of Superman” and “Leave It To Beaver,” and it is a real horse race to decide which one is truly my favorite.
 
Being a child of television, a real Baby Boomer, it is almost too close a horse race to call.
 
I have to go back to Rant #1,804, dated December 20, 2016, to put things in proper perspective.

 
Here is what I had to say about “The Adventures of Superman” back then:
 
“If ever there was a real, true Baby Boomer show, this was it. Coming to television in the early 1950s when TV was black and white and that was it, the show was very dark in its first season, almost "TV noir" to suit the lack of color, but then the producers figured that color TV was going to be all the rage someday, and they switched to color, which was a brilliant move. In color or black and white, the show was perfectly cast--led by George Reeves as the penultimate Man of Steel--the stories were often childish but fun, the violence was of the fluff variety, and the show really defined what Baby Boomers watched on TV. If there was a perfect TV show for that age or any age, this was it.”

 
And then, in the same Rant, this is what I had to say about “Leave It To Beaver”:
 
“I could really say exactly the same thing about this show that I did about the preceding one. less the color aspect, which never came to this show. The show was actually a boy's eye view of the world, seen through the eyes of one Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver, a suburban kid who had the same problems we all had as we grew from adolescence to teenagedom. The show is beautifully written, well cast, and yes, at times corny as heck, but Jerry Mathers and the rest of the cast made the show less dated then you think it would be. A real treasure, it is supposedly the only situation comedy that has never been off the air since it first aired in the late 1950s.”
 
Yes, both shows reverberated with me, resonated with me, and will be with me forever.
 
There are other TV shows that I really adored, such as “My Three Sons,” “The Monkees,” and “Sanford and Son,” but “The Adventures of Superman” and “Leave It To Beaver” just stand out from the rest.
 
So which one is my personal favorite?
 
Back when I wrote that Rant, I gave the slight edge to “The Adventures of Superman.” I can never remember ever not watching that show, and certainly as a kid, its sense of wonder was really the tipping point for me … its recurrent theme that “anything was possible” really was the general theme of the Baby Boomer generation, wasn’t it?
 
But as I have gotten older, I think I now have to give a slight edge to “Leave It To Beaver.”
 
Both shows are very well cast, both shows really typify what Baby Boomers were all about back then, but “Leave It To Beaver,” as I get older, is the go-to show for me, maybe because in this imperfect world that we live in, it is the perfect show.
 
No, the “Leave It To Beaver” world that it created for itself was not perfect, certainly not when Eddie Haskell was around.
 
But the nuclear family is there, the same human foibles that we really struggled with back then and today is there, and the stories resonate even nearly 60 years after these shows first aired.
 
I can live through the character of Superman, but I actually lived through many of the circumstances experienced by the Cleavers, and there is a great difference.
 
No, I could not save the world—or at least Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen—through one danger after another, but I could worry about my next haircut, I could worry about doing my homework, and I could worry about talking to girls.
 
And now, as an adult, I can put myself in the shoes of Ward and June Cleaver, who had the task of rearing two children in suburbia, or at least the suburbia of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
 
I guess I can really see myself as both a child and as an adult in “Leave It To Beaver,” and that is why I now choose “Beaver” as my all-time favorite show over “Superman,” maybe by a hair.
 
But whatever the case, I will always be a child of television, and I hope I never lose that part of my personality …
 
Because even thought TV shows like these are not “real,” that personality trait that I have, and many Baby Boomers have, is as real as can be …
 
And I hope that sense of wonder and that belief that “anything is possible” never fades.