At home in TVland

The recent deaths of Barbara Billingsley (June Cleaver of Leave it to Beaver) and Tom Bosley (Howard Cunningham of Happy Days) reminded me of a piece I did in 2005 for V-Life about the houses they and we lived in when we all lived in TVland. I've updated it slightly for this remembrance in August 2015.There was so much we weren't expected to notice about the houses in TVland ... that a lot of them were supposed to be in mid-America, but the trees that hung over their picket fences would never have flourished if the houses had really been in Ohio or Illinois. Or that TVland houses rarely changed; they were the same week after week.

Your mom, in a spasm of good housekeeping, might one day switch décor from Early American to Danish Modern; TV moms never did. Or that all the stories told under the roofs of TVland houses were essentially the same: the mild adventures of families that were white, middle-class, and mostly happy.

Click through the "classic TV" cable channels today and you'll recognize the houses that all of us entered every evening after dinner and homework. You can still settle into their rooms as though you've just left them.

These houses were much nicer than mine or my neighbors. We weren't middle class.

Donna Reed's tasteful house doesn't conjure up just memories of a lost place, but recollection of how our hunger for storytelling was satisfied then. That hunger began in dislocation.

One of the greatest migrations in human history got underway in the late 1940s. Almost every kind of American - rural, urban, well-to-do, and working-class - moved into the uncertain territory of the suburbs carrying a TV set and the desires it beamed into their lives.

But in packing up to go, the threads of American stories unraveled, and in their new homes, these stories were either not told or deliberately forgotten.

TV stepped in with its comedies and melodramas to supply narrative continuity to everyday life for the kids gaping at the blue glow of the screen.

In their fifty-year run from I Love Lucy to Everybody Loves Raymond, the stories in situation comedies consoled far more than they amused. In fact, apart from a few resurrected vaudeville routines, situation comedies were never very funny. They were - from the titles, through the commercial breaks, to the end credits - supportive.

Millions of Americans, trying to do what was expected of them, learned the proper manners for middle-class suburban life watching TVland families. Leave it to Beaver has more in common with Pride and Prejudice than you might think.

Some of the lessons have a weird circularity. The façades of some real houses in LA suburbs were recreated as studio sets in the 1950s and 60s. In the late 1990s, some of those sets were envisioned as models for new subdivisions.

KB Home, once one of the largest builders of houses, proposed that the producers of Desperate Housewives brand the show's Wisteria Lane as a KBH development. "The homes are attractive, well-landscaped and well-maintained," a company spokesman told the Los Angeles Times. (Even if the fictional lives inside were falling apart.)

The housewives have their "problems, personalities and idiosyncrasies," the spokesman added, but the houses are pretty much what you would hope to find in one of KB Home's aspirant housing tracts.

It was just the same at the beginning of the suburban exodus. In 1948, when RKO released Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House - a wicked satire of suburban life gone wrong - thousands of eager fans wrote the studio asking for the Blandings' "dream house" building plans. They didn't get the irony.

Real neighborhoods that look like a movie set - that actually become a movie set, as the suburb of Seaside, Florida did in The Truman Show - have front porches, narrow streets, and other evocative design details. You can live in TVland if you can afford to. TVland is a place that's never been but that's never lost its curb appeal.

Wisteria Lane of Desperate Housewives is on a stretch of the storied Colonial Street on the Universal Studios backlot. It's played the role of a quietly prosperous (or ominously quiet) neighborhood in scores of movies and TV series. June and Ward Cleaver lived there, so did Bonzo the chimp and the haunted Sydney Hansen of Providence.

The Munsters' house is there, too, regularly recycled before getting its own small part in Desperate Housewives. Nearby is a two-story rambler that's mistakenly pointed out as the Leave It to Beaver house to tourists riding the Universal Studios tram (who have to imagine it in black-and-white).

The house the tourists see is a slightly different version recreated for the Leave it to Beaver Movie in 1996 because the original set had been carved into Marcus Welby's medical office and later morphed back into a home for a different Beaver sequel.

The mangled remnants of that house were relocated to a part of the backlot where battered sets are clustered in the studio's equivalent of a teardown neighborhood. It's not on the tour.

A more of suburban promised land can be found a few blocks away on the Warner Bros. Ranch in Burbank. The Partridge Family house, mostly blown up in Lethal Weapon, has come back with a matched pair of bay windows and what looks like aluminum siding. Next-door is the I Dream of Jeannie ranch house (originally the home of the Father Knows BestAnderson family), showing some wear after fifty years. Dennis the Menace's house looks remarkably pious, its long porch roof held up by sober Doric columns.

The gabled and dormered Bewitched house is at the end of the street, restored after an episode of Home Improvement set fire to it.

No one on either side of the small screen wondered, when I was a boy, why things were they way they always were at Wally and the Beav's house or Rob and Laura's or Jim and Margaret's. "Over and over again" is what TVland stories are about, not authenticity. Our own stories with more-or-less happy endings - the stories we passed around the dinner table (when we used to sit at a dinner table) - are just as consistent. TVland and my street were alike in their longing for something stable to call home while sidestepping some of the harder issues in the narrative.

The houses of TVland have been remade and recombined, preserving and demolishing and disappointing, just like L.A.'s real neighborhoods. I used to get calls from location scouts at my office at city hall. They'd heard of Lakewood - L.A.'s bookend to Long Island's Levittown. They were looking for a neighborhood that's quintessentially Father Knows Best Americana; what they want is to go back to TVland and all its implied stories.

I have to tell them that the shade trees have grown too tall, that the houses have gained layers of idiosyncrasy from sixty years of living, and that their memories of classic TV are faulty anyway. Nothing is as it was on Colonial Street or my street.

You can't go home again, the novelist Thomas Wolfe famously said, and when we glibly repeat that line, it's to explain the waywardness of our lives. But of course, it's not entirely true.

We've never left the homes of TVland. If anything, watching today we can spend less time with the flimsy sitcom plots and dwell more on the way the Cleavers, Andersons, Bradys, Partridges, and all the other TVland families fitted their lives into their houses. Tuning in, I can't feel where irony leaves off and something like regard begins.

TVland houses were supposed to be the houses that embodied the American Dream, but it might have been the wrong kind of dream. "If I were asked to name the chief benefit of houses," said Gaston Bachelard, the lyrical French philosopher of domestic space, "I should say that a house shelters daydreams."

The houses of TVland did. In reruns, they always will.

The image on this page was taken by flickr user Eric Goldberg. It is used under a Creative Commons License.