How ‘Leave It to Beaver’ (Sorta) Became the First Series to Show a Toilet

The early days of television were hilariously prudish. 

That’s easy to say in the modern era of such obscenities as foul-mouthed cartoons, reality dating show contestants grinding on each other and Young Sheldon, but even by contemporary standards, the list of things you couldn’t do on TV sounded like it was written by Dolores Umbridge. Any suggestion of sex, of course, was a nonstarter, extending absurdly to the acknowledgement that married couples usually share a bed and pregnant women, uh, exist. You couldn’t even film a scene in a bathroom. Not even involving any kind of bathroom behavior; people couldn’t just be standing around, having a conversation in a room that exists in every home and public building, because it might remind viewers of what butts do. It was enough to give ‘50s audiences a mass coronary.

It didn’t take long for networks to start relaxing their own restrictions, though. In fact, it began with the very first episode of Leave It to Beaver in 1957, although the episode was rescheduled for later in the season precisely because of a dispute over a lavatorial plot point. In the episode, titled “Captain Jack,” the Beaver in question and his brother, Wally, buy a baby alligator and hide it from the rest of the household in the toilet. There wasn’t a lot of room for modification, as people don’t generally keep enclosed containers of water in other parts of the house. It was either shelve the episode or get literally pissy.

As a compromise, CBS allowed the episode to show only the toilet tank, where the alligator was hidden. For those keeping track, a group of grown adults in business suits made an actual executive decision to permit the American public to think about the concept of a toilet, but they drew the line at displaying the parts where poop goes. You’d think they’d have gotten over it pretty quickly, as Psycho soon became the first movie to go whole bowl, but even the sound of a flushing toilet wasn’t heard on TV until 1971 on All in the Family. 

It’s unclear which TV series finally got the honor of displaying the porcelain throne in its full glory, but we’ve progressed in all too short a time from there to one of the most popular entertainment franchises detailing the trials of toilets with human heads, so maybe censorship wasn’t so bad after all.