Shark Bytes

Love those stereotypes! Contrary to strangely popular belief, 1950s housewives generally did not dress up in nice dresses, high heels and matching pearl necklaces and earrings to stay home and do houswork or cook. No wonder the baby boomers turned out the way they did. Real Mom was inferior to TV Mom. But, just like in today's TV commercials, TV Dad was usually umemployed and a dufus. Money grew on trees then and it was a wonderful dreamlike world.
(I had a big crush on Ricky and thought his singing was the best ever. Then, years later, I heard this music again. No comment.)

The show definately jumped around the time the boys got married in the early 60's but I have to admit the main reason I watched till the end was just to hear Ricky do his latest song at the end of the show . He had the best band in James Burton Ritchie Frost and James Kirkland. Even the sappy songs were fun to watch.

This is one that you either go with and believe in, or just enjoy for the cheese factor. Either way, it is worth a re-look.
It is a show that relies on "types" for its humor...Ozzie is a goof, Harriet is grounded, Rick is a goof, David is grounded...Kris is cranky, June is a ditz.
True, nothing much ever happens, but the way it doesn't happen, is often quite clever. The main problem? It ran too long.

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is an important program. I know the show is the darling of the family values/entertainment set, but it deserves much more credit.

The show has great storytelling. Ozzie and his writers were skilled, and crafted some clever situations, which in some episodes do show depth beyond the funny situations mentioned in this forum.

I was so intrigued by the show I read Ozzie's autobiography and learned that he worked tirelessly, and in the process took television to a new level by excercising creative control, and using that control to produce for the time a superior product. I know this is hard to believe considering most of the episodes out there are in the public domain, grainy, some even bordering on unwatchable (this, of course, excludes the 25 episodes released by the Nelson family, which are lovely).

Kind of a bad first impression for someone just discovering the show, I think. Perhaps it's time to restore the rest of the episodes, as clean copies would do wonders for its legacy. "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" is an important part of any conversation on the history of television comedy, and I'd love to see it acknowledged as such.

This show was boring, BORING, BORING!

I tried a couple of times to watch when I was a kid, but it was NEVER interesing at all.

Seinfeld described his show as one where "nothing ever happened"... I guess he never saw this. Watching O and H can be fun if you tell yourself it is really an episode of TWILIGHT ZONE...A Dad without a job, who looks exactly the same in year 14 as he did year one...but a mom who looks older in each successive episode and whose voice gets more cigarette-raspy, though she is never shown smoking....And all of Dave and Rick's frat buddies seem to be in their early 30's...No, Wally, nobody thinks you are funny, just come out of the closet.... As the boys grew up they were both eye candy, which helped. I just rewatched some episodes with David's first ditzy wife June, trying to stuff a roast into a tiny little pan..."gee honey, it doesn't fit"...yikes...flashbacks to the honeymoon!

I think it's funny that, had it been entirely up to Ozzie, this show would've probably lasted into the 1970s! The show had a 1948 mentality, and should have been canned after 1 season!

I love this show. It's not a "big laugh" kind of thing (though it certainly can do that, and does, often); it's more of a constant chuckle for 30 minutes each episode.

If you wanna say it jumps at all, it'd probably be the last couple of seasons, especially the color one. Though, like the earlier poster noted, Ozzie getting himself a handful of Mary Jane Croft's butt, is pretty good.

Still, by the end everyone was getting old; compare the last seasons with the early ones, or, especially with the radio episodes. There you have O&H as a young couple with a couple of young kids; it's fresh and witty and full of life.

All this being stated, the lamest Ozzie and Harriet beats the crap outta the dreck that passes for TV these days. I'd rather watch the public domain episodes of O&H for about the thousandth time, than this garbage that infects network TV today.This modern crud should be eaten by the shark. O&H rules!

Never jumped because they allowed David and Ricky to grow up on the show (if it had been an 80's/90's sitcom, Ricky still would've been saying "I don't mess around, boy" at age 21, and would've worked "David, you dope!" into the lyrics of his songs). The stereotype people have of this show is nothing like the show itself. I've collected tapes of the show for the last 15 years, and they're hilarious. It wasn't half an hour of setups and punch lines, the family actually talks to each other. The laughs come out of the situations they find themselves in.

Ozzie and Harriet stayed on much longer than it should have. I can't say the exact year it started to show it's old age, somewhere in the early Sixties, I suppose. But it's not the only show to wear its welcome out, that's for sure. The early episodes were the best. Ozzie was charming as hell, and Harriet was the prototypical 50's suburban housewife. I know David became a lawyer, and for some unknown reason rock star Ricky went to work in his office, I believe. Regardless, in order to appreciate this show, you have to look upon it from a historical perspective. It's the 1950s; television was young, and controversial topics had yet to emerge on the tube. Married couples still slept in separate bed, and men were always the breadwinners of the family. So by the Sixties, innocence gave way to more modern lifestyles, and the Nelsons gave way to old age.

When they recycled the following plot line for the umpteenth time--Wally falls for out-of-town girl whom he has never met, so he sends Rick's picture to her. Rick has to pretend to be Wally with the usual lame results. Brain dead crapola!!!

The moment Ozzie gets confused and concerned when the boys aren't interested in how an old toy mechanical submarine works. "Honey, I just don't understand why the boys aren't interested in mechanical things!" Is this really a crisis? I think Ozzie needed Prozac.

This show never jumped the shark. Some of the people reviewing this show are clearly confused. Anyone who thinks Ozzie Nelson represented the typical 1950s dad who was never wrong has never seen the show. Ozzie was usually wrong! He'd constantly jump to the wrong conclusions about what his kids were doing, what was going on around him, what to do with Harriet's benefit, etc. What's more, Rick and Kristin did not sleep in bunk beds! They did in the movie they were in together, but they slept in the same bed together. For that matter, so, too, did Ozzie and Harriet as did David and his wife June. That alone represents a stunning difference between this show and others of the 1950s. But since this show lasted so long, how did it keep from jumping the shark? By constantly evolving. We watched Dave and Rick grow up and have their own families, and their own careers on the show. Surprisingly, this show seems to hold up a lot better than other family sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s, probably because the characters did grow.

This is one of many long-running shows that simply went on too long & this was most apparent in the last season, which also is when the ratings really cratered, against tough competition from the camp classic, "Lost in Space". By that time, the wonderful stock company of neighbors, golf buddies of Ozzie, neighbors, frat brothers of the boys, etc. had thinned and both David & Rick were really too old for the show. Rick's singing career also was in decline by then as Motown, the British Invasion and the surf sound had eclipsed him and other "teen idols".

Now think about it....The ADVENTURES of Ozzie and Harriet. Adventures? Ozzie deciding what sweater to wear? Harriet choosing between peas and carrots or succotash for dinner? Ricky curling his eyelashes? David, er, doing whatever the heck it was that David did on the show? What kind of people are we that we can allow something like that to be called entertainment for decades?