There are many challengers for the "Most Wholesome Sitcom Family of the 1950s" award, since wholesomeness was a prized commodity in those days. The Cleavers of Leave It To Beaver spring to mind of course. Serious consideration must also go to the Anderson's of Father Knows Best and the Nelsons of Ozzie and Harriet, but a dark horse candidate is the Stones of The Donna Reed Show. What gives the Stones an edge is that there really is not one member of the Stone family who has any sort of peculiar personality trait to set them apart from average suburbanites. All of the Stones are, well, wholesome.

Considering that The Donna Reed Show is named after the actress playing the mother, it is not too surprising that the father in the Stone household is somewhat of a cipher. Dr. Alex Stone, a small-town pediatrician, is a nice enough chap, who shows the wry bemusement with his family's antics that is required of sitcom dads of the 1950s. Having Dr. Stone be a pediatrician is a convenient plot device to get him out of the home at all hours of the day and night (for wholesome reasons), leaving the star, Donna Reed, as the primary focus. Dr. Stone is no wimp like Ozzie Nelson; rather, he is much more in the Ward Cleaver mold. Like Ward, Alex means well but has little time to do much more than provide a few sage words of advice and make bumbling attempts to be pals with his offspring.

The Donna Reed Show is one of a handful of 1950s family sitcoms featuring the wife as the lead. The others of this ilk (I Love Lucy, The Goldbergs) were popular enough, but they featured more comical, offbeat female leads. Reed plays Donna Stone straight down the middle. She displays her share of typical housewife fluster when trying to deal with problems on her own, but this is normal for the times. Reed earned the star billing based on her successful film career, where she portrayed everything from a prostitute (From Here To Eternity)to the more traditional faithful wife character (It's A Wonderful Life.) Reed's real-life husband, Tony Owen, served as producer of The Donna Reed Show and obviously took care to be certain his wife came across in a favorable light.

If the parents in The Donna Reed Show are such straight arrows, what about the kids? Well, they are pretty wholesome too. Mary, the Stones' oldest, is cute, but not gorgeous. She spends most of the series in the high school dating years, where puppy love complications abound. The Stones' son Jeff is rambunctious and interested in cars and is making his own first fumbling efforts to woo the fairer sex. Once again, though, this is all pretty standard for the times, and there is nothing about Mary or Jeff to make them memorable.

So we've written off the entire Stone family as nice but bland. The final area to look for some color in a wholesome family sitcom is the neighbours, and here The Donna Reed Show finally shows a glimmer of distinctiveness. For two seasons in the middle years of the series, Bob Crane livens up the program as the madcap Dr. Dave Kelsey, yet another pediatrician, who displays a great deal more zaniness than Dr. Stone. This must be chalked up to the fact that Dr. Kelsey and his wife Midge do not seem to have any children. Therefore, they can be allowed the occasional flight of fancy. Crane's success in his role as Dr. Kelsey led directly to the starring role in his own sitcom (Hogan's Heroes.)

The omnipresent wholesomeness of The Donna Reed Show is both its strength and its weakness. Wholesomeness does not necessarily mean boredom, and this show must be recognized as a well-crafted series that has many enjoyable, humorous episodes. The humor is realistic and the characters are friendly. The unremitting wholesomeness does become a drag after a while, though. One longs for a slimy character like Eddie Haskell of Beaver fame, or some screwball like Lucy Ricardo, to inject some unusual flavor. Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best proved that quality humor can come out of a normal family setting, but both those shows added enough flair to make at least some of the characters memorable. None of the major characters in The Donna Reed Show are any more interesting than anybody you might meet in the average suburban development. The Donna Reed Show tries very hard to be sober, reasonable family entertainment. The problem is that it succeeds too well.

Shelley Fabares and Paul Petersen both followed Ricky Nelson's lead and used their starring roles in a family sitcom to launch singing careers. Both Fabares ("Johnny Angel") and Petersen ("She Can't Find Her Keys" and "My Dad") scored with hits (that were performed in various episodes of the series), but their singing fame faded as soon as they lost their prime-time showcase. Soon after her character was sent off to college, Fabares left the series to pursue a career in the movies (she appeared in several Elvis Presley flicks, such as Girl Happy, Clambake, and Spinout). Shortly after Fabares left, Petersen's real-life younger sister, Patty, joined the cast as a wayward orphan taken in by the kindly Stone family. Could we expect anything but such generosity from such a wholesome family?