Eddie Haskell was the original TV antihero: His brilliant, subversive jerkiness resonates today

The Washington Post

Ken Osmond's memorable Leave It to Beaver character "was a sneaky little rat, a two-faced suck-up and a tinpot bully. A punk who stirred up trouble," says Paul Farhi, adding: "We loved him for it." Osmond, who died Monday at age 76, ingeniously portrayed a character who "was as much a metaphor as a supporting character on a gentle family series," says Farhi, noting that Eddie "differed from virtually any other child or teen characters on TV: He was a bad kid, with little effort made to redeem or rehabilitate him." Osmond's Eddie "embodied the kind of personality that people first encounter on the playground but then again throughout adulthood: the obsequious work colleague, the backstabbing boyfriend, the smarmy politician," says Farhi. "Real life has a lot of Eddie Haskells." Farhi adds that Eddie Haskell "was an antihero, singular because he was subversive — Bart Simpson long before The Simpsons were born. On every episode of Beaver, he could be counted on to instigate a scheme that would invariably land Wally or the Beav in hot water, like the time he persuaded Wally to play a practical joke on Lumpy by hitching a chain wrapped around a tree to the rear axle of Lumpy’s car. The mildly disastrous consequences of Eddie’s deviltry predictably set up the big moment at the end of the show in which Ward or June Cleaver would distill an important Life Lesson from the experience." Farhi concludes: "So few characters have echoed down through the decades as the one he created. The jerk endures." ALSO: Cameron Crowe calls Eddie Haskell "one of the greatest characters ever": "I always dreamed Jeff Spicoli was a distant relative of the Haskells..."