Leave It To Beaver, a series both praised for its family-bolstering innocence and panned for its homogenized sappiness, served as a bridge between the waning radio comedy and the blossoming of the television "sitcom." The show was created by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher; two writers who first worked together at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York. Leaving the agency in 1942 to devote their talents to radio comedy writing, the duo worked on shows starring Edgar Bergen, Frank Morgan, and Phil Harris before securing jobs on the wildly popular Amos 'n' Andy program. Over a period of twelve years, they earned writers' credits on over 1,500 radio and television scripts for that series; continuing to create material for the show's radio version right up to Beaver's third year. Although Amos 'n' Andy now is viewed as a distorted repository of racial stereotyping and segregated casting, Connelly's and Mosher's experience on that program helped them refine a flair for extracting humor from uncomplicated, yet likable characters immersed in unremarkable situations with which the audience could easily identify.
Connelly's and Mosher's first solo television effort was a short-lived anthology series for actor Ray Milland. This uncharacteristic failure, they revealed in a New York Times interview with Oscar Golbout, taught them to restrict themselves to writing "things we know about." They followed up on this resolution by taking a situation Connelly had observed while driving his son to parochial school and crafting it into The Private War of Major Benson, a theatrical feature starring Charlton Heston that won the pair an Academy Award nomination in 1956. It was from such real-life simplicity that Leave It To Beaver was born. In 1957, Connelly and Mosher developed a concept for an adult-appealing show about children. Unlike such predecessors (and competitors) as The Life of Riley, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, and Father Knows Best, it would not be the parents who served as Beaver's focal point but rather, their offspring. The stories would be told from the kids' point-of-view as Connelly and Mosher recalled it and observed it in their own children. Mosher was the father of two children and Connelly the parent of six. While all of these offspring served as sources for the show's dialogue and plot lines, Connelly's eight-year-old son Ricky was the inspiration for Beaver; his fourteen-year-old son Jay the model for Beaver's older brother Wally.
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