In the early days of television, there were much stricter rules about what you could and couldn’t show onscreen. That’s why Leave It to Beaver ran into a problem in 1957 when one script included the show’s main characters keeping their pet alligator in a toilet tank. The issue was that they weren’t allowed to show a toilet on TV, according to the Standards and Practices department. Ultimately, they reached a compromise: The show could feature the toilet tank as long as the bowl remained out of the shot.
