David Nelson has passed away

[DRW50]

Ricky got all the attention, and it wasn't difficult to see why, but I thought David was very underrated, very quietly handsome, with a nice calm presence, with some comic chops of his own. It's a shame that the family became so known for dysfunction and the show is seen as passe - it is, but is also much more watchable than a lot of sitcoms, then and now. Check out some of the many dirt cheap copies you can find in stores.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-david-nelson-20110112,0,1039470.story

Please register in order to view this content

[All My Shadows]

Rest in peace, indeed. David was totally underrated...I like Ricky, but sometimes he could be a little obnoxious (especially in episodes in the middle of the run when he was really eating up the teen idol label). David was always a solid, calm figure on the show, and I always thought he was better-looking than Rick.

I wish they aired somewhere nationally. Even when TV Land and Nick at Nite were still devoted to older shows, O&H never managed to get on either one or enjoy a second life that shows like Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, and to a lesser extent Donna Reed and Father Knows Best had.

[DRW50]

Ricky annoyed me a lot in the early years, especially when they had to do the smart aleck talk and the "hip" talk...I think he used to say "man" a lot. As the show went on he got quieter, probably since Rick did, and his looks did the talking, along with a certain quiet confidence.

In a lot of ways I also thought David was more handsome, perhaps because he was less obvious, sturdier. Something else that I remember a little from those later episodes after David and Ricky each got married was that the show didn't exactly try to ignore that David and his wife were both attractive and young people who probably enjoyed sex. They were never going to say this directly, but it was still a departure from a lot of sitcoms of that era - at that point the only other sitcom which hinted at this was Darren and Samantha on Bewitched, a few years later. David and his wife also had a good chemistry on the show and she had good comic timing - I thought Ricky's wife was a bit of a drag.

There's a video on Youtube of Ricky and David as a Union and Confederate soldier for some John Wayne patriotic special from 1970. That must have been the last TV thing they did together.

I think Ozzie and Harriet is public domain, or some of it is, which means very scattered releases. The same is true for Life With Elizabeth and some of Burns of Allen, I believe. I'm glad I got to see those shows so cheap, you could go to the dollar store and find them for very little, but that means an official release seems almost impossible.

[All My Shadows]

Yeah, there are tons of sites you can go to and watch countless episodes of those shows and others. I haven't watched Ozzie and Harriet in a while, and I hate that this might be the thing to prompt me to pay more attention to it.

I've never really seen a lot of the later episodes. There is a color episode in public domain that I watched and liked, and it centered on David and Kristen. They sorta reminded me of Robbie and Katie on My Three Sons. They were young, they were obviously in love each other, but they were very quiet and reserved about their relationship. With David and Kristen, since they were really a couple, I guess a lot of that had to do with wanting to retain at least a little bit of privacy. It had to be awkward whenever they'd be romantic for the cameras.

A lot of those so-called "wholesome" family shows from that era are shortchanged some credit for being a little progressive. I've been watching Hazel a lot, and I totally forgot the wife/mom on there owned her own business. Donna Stone was seen working in various medical settings, too. I always thought that they were sorta making a statement on O&H by not showing Ozzie's job. Obviously the Nelsons were welfare queens.

[DRW50]

The main thing that bothered me about the women on My Three Sons is I felt they lacked personality and drive. I haven't seen the show in a long time, especially those later years, but there was a strange energy drain. I blame Dody.

I have never seen any color episodes of Ozzie and Harriet, just the black and white. I remember one where Kristen worked as his secretary, or something like that. It was just a very casual, no-nonsense expression of affection between a young husband and wife, as you mention, slightly restrained, but in some ways also very rare for that time.

Those shows are shortchanged all the time. I remember how Gilmore Girls trashed the Donna Reed Show, yet in the end most of the people I knew who watched Gilmore Girls watched for which man Lorelei or Rory was going to be with, whereas Donna Reed, while not exactly a liberated show, had Donna as her own character, not just a wife or mother. With Ozzie and Harriet, Harriet does what she wants, and if she doesn't then she's just placating Ozzie, who deep down knows she is the one who is in charge. I think Ozzie was a salesman or something, but generally he was a layabout, and he couldn't have gone on without Harriet.

I think "modern" shows like Everybody Loves Raymond, the later years of Roseanne, etc. are much more harsh and much more harshly dated in their view of women and of relationships. The wife as an emasculating shrew.

[All My Shadows]

Forgive me for veering the thread off the topic of David.

Dody was worse than Cousin Oliver The early seasons of Sons were so loud and chaotic, but I love that, and it definitely makes it stand out from the other family sitcoms of that era. Once the boys grew up and started having romances, the show slowed down, got softer, calmed down a little bit, and got quieter, and I like that too. I thought it was pretty appropriate. The wives were so dull, though, I can't deny that. Katie was okay. I never saw anything with oldest son Mike's wife, but I liked Katie. Polly was a bore, but she was tolerable. I think they were in a tough time for how to write young women in comedic television.

I hate it when people down Donna Reed in particular. She and the show openly embraced a sense of women's lib and feminist before the rest of primetime did. When the show began, the opening featured Donna seeing the kids off to school and her husband off to work before closing the door and contentedly smiling at her home. In the later years, she (with an enormous bouffant) saw the kids and Alex off before grabbing her purse and going out herself. But that spirit was a part of the show from the very beginning.

Only Leave It to Beaver (of the popular, long-running sitcoms) was ultra-backwards like that. In one episode, Ward (King of the Douchebags) actually says something along the lines of, "A woman's place is in the home. And if she's at home, she might as well be in the kitchen." Like WTF? Obviously it wasn't said in a sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek way.

[DRW50]

I had read that David Nelson had a tough time with work in the industry because a lot of people hated his father but couldn't take it out on Ricky, at least for a while.