Last fall I found it. Not on regular TV or any cable network but on DVD at my local library. I'd never seen it on TV...ever. "Hazel",marks the very first time for me seeing a series,exclusively,on DVD. I completed watching in January (2014) just 2 weeks after Season 5 came out.I will say,I was only a bit disappointed that the shows weren't "cleaned up" like newer shows are,to broadcast day perfection.That said,it did not distract me from what a very good series is. The Oscar winning Shirley Booth (Come Back Little Sheba)came to TV and made this her signature role and career apex. Her role is a woman with the mind to say exactly what she means, even if someone doesn't like it. She's honest without being insulting or (too) obnoxious about it. She always has the best in mind. If she feels something is wrong,she goes out of her way to correct it. Shirley demonstrated a unique balance between comedy and (mild for) TV drama. The comedy at first comes from she and "Missy" sort of pulling the wool over George's eyes to make something happen when he is reluctant (always for a good reason or cause,not to make him look foolish.) Usually,when it comes to George's business dealings with Mr. Harvey Griffin.On the serious,I point to the very first show with George's sister Deidre (Cathy Lewis). In "George's Niece" Hazel brings together Barb's daughter and her Nephew. Deidre,who grew up around the ideal that "the classes should not mix" & who has a bad habit of alienating her daughter,is very angry with Hazel. The scene near the end between Booth & Lewis has a great tension and the very real problem of a mother who doesn't understand her teenage daughter's ways. Unusual for a show that's supposed to be a sitcom in 1961. In her own way,Hazel tells her that she needs to try to listen to o and understand her daughter.Another shocker,in one episode,George gets fed up with her meddling and says (best recall) "Hazel Burke,you are an interfering,meddlesome busy body and I'm sick of it!" Which instantly hurts her feelings and makes everyone mad at him. They make up later of course. A "novelty" episode is the only one shot in color that first year. In "What'll We Watch Tonight?" Both Hazel and later the Baxters,get the first color TV's on their block. The novelty is that it's shot in color. (There were color TV's but networks wouldn't broadcast in color,full time,until the fall of '66. Seasons 2 through 5 were all filmed in color.The chemistry between the main players is just right. Missy and George are "lovey-dovey" (but not to the level of say Rob & Laura Petrie) and you have to love Hazel & little Harold's relationship. (Bobby Buntrock doesn;t seem to age much in 5 years.) For 4 years,the show followed it's charted course in it's story lines,it kept the comedy on a smooth course and every now and then tugged at people's hearts. Then in the final season,things got shook up. The show was cancelled by NBC but picked up by CBS. Don DaFoe & Whitney Blake were gone. Their characters,off on business for a year in the middle east. Leaving, Harold in the care of George's real-estate selling brother Steve & his wife Barbara )who have a cute little daughter. Hazel gets mixed up in their affairs as well but the shows don't seem as strong as the first 4 years. Still,overall,I will rate this 10 stars because it really is a series worth watching. For a look at the kind of shows that could not possibly survive today and maybe just to watch a program that doesn't rely on lower standards of comedy or trumped up dramatics. Perfect picture or not,Hazel is a classic! (END)

Shirley Booth played an opinionated, talkative, even bossy maid for five seasons on "Hazel" -- but there was never a more lovable, or more loved, maid on television.As portrayed in the popular "Saturday Evening Post" cartoon by Ted Key, Hazel was almost a little too brash. But Miss Booth took some of the harshness out of the cartoon character and replaced it with the warmth and love she brought to her award-winning movie, Broadway and radio roles ("Come Back, Little Sheba," "Duffy's Tavern"). In its debut season of 1961-62, "Hazel" was #2 among all TV programs in the Nielsen ratings.Hazel never met a person she didn't like--much to the chagrin of her employer, corporate attorney George Baxter (Don DeFore). Even a simple meeting with Frank Gifford (then of the New York Giants), in the 1963 episode "Hazel and the Halfback", goes delightfully awry as Hazel tries to inject her thoughts about football, bowling, and the risks of investing in a bowling alley for which George is negotiating a deal with Gifford.When George married his wife Dorothy, Hazel came along. As the maid for Dorothy's family, Hazel had raised "Missy" virtually from childhood. While she was supposedly a free-lance interior decorator, Whitney Blake's Dorothy was cast as a typical 1960's TV sitcom housewife--a role at which she chafed until DeFore and she left the series at the end of the 1964-65 season. In one 1964 episode, however, Dorothy joins forces with Hazel to have George break down and remodel their kitchen with side-splitting results.Hazel was pal and confidante to their son Harold (Bobby Buntrock), and many episodes focused on her helping and motivating "Sport" to be the best he could be, often with unexpected results. In fact, when DeFore and Blake left the series, CBS felt transplanting Hazel and Harold to live with George's real-estate brother Steve (Ray Fulmer), his wife Barbara (Lynn Borden) and their daughter Susie (Julia Benjamin) could keep the continuity going. (Ironically, "Mr. Steve" never appeared in any NBC episode; George's sister Deirdre Thompson, played by Cathy Lewis, was virtually a semi-regular.) While changing characters, settings and networks often weakened existing series, "Hazel"'s ratings were fairly strong during its CBS run despite being up against the new Monday night episodes of "Peyton Place" on ABC. Miss Booth, herself, was not. As far back as 1964, DeFore was concerned about jeopardizing her health and worked to reduce her load in fourth-season episodes. Indeed, other than a few guest appearances and the short-lived series "For the Love of Grace" in the 1970s, Shirley Booth's TV career ended when "Hazel" left the air in 1966.Other shows tried to copy "Hazel's" magic, from "Our Man Higgins" with Sterling Holloway in 1962-63 to Fran Drescher as "The Nanny" in the 1990s. No one has come close, and probably no one ever well. To quote Shirley Booth's favorite catchphrase, "Hazel" continues to be "a doozy" half a century later!

When I was growing up in New Jersey in the 60s, I remember watching the reruns of Hazel on Channel 5. It was a very good sitcom, thanks to the outstanding performance of Shirley Booth as the title character. It was her breakout TV role that won her a couple of Emmys.Also adding to the show's success was Don DeFore as George (Mr. B) Baxter, Whitney Blake, who later went on to co-create the hit CBS sitcom One Day at a Time as his wife Dorothy aka "Missy" and Bobby Buntrock as their young son Harold. Sadly, Buntrock was killed in a car accident at the age of 21.Not only was Hazel an outstanding maid, she was also a really good bowler. I remember the episode where she competed in a bowling tournament.Unfortunately, I don't remember any of the fifth season episodes, where DeFore and Blake were replaced by Ray Fulmer as Steve and Lynn Borden as Barbara. Those two have rarely been heard from in years.Coming from Screen Gems, who had a hit with another sitcom based on the comic strip Dennis the Menace, Hazel ran for five years and ended its run, not because of declining ratings but because Booth was tiring of the role. The show was in reruns for years and later disappeared. But fear not, thanks to the new digital broadcast network Antenna TV, viewers can finally see this lost gem of the 60s.As the theme song stated early in the run "Who's the gal that's everybody's pal? It's Hazel."

What I remember most about this show (and I have seen the show in reruns on Antenna TV recently) is that Hazel's world was one where everybody knew their place and knew that they could never rise above their stations. On the one hand, you had the masters who had the money and called the shots. Beneath them were the domestics - maids, butchers, plumbers, the mailman, who existed only to serve their betters. They ate in the kitchen, called the employers Mister and Mrs. and never questioned what their superiors did.Hazel was smarter than any of them but she spent her life raising the Baxter's son, living in the maid's quarters and never having enough money to even have an apartment of her own. Mrs. Baxter was young enough to be her daughter but she always had to take an inferior role.Things have changed since then to some extent, but that is the message that I got (and still get) from Hazel.