Time For A New Car (Aired June 8, 1950)
Father Knows Best, a family comedy of the 1950s, is perhaps more important for what it has come to represent than for what it actually was. In essence, the series was one of a slew of middle-class family sitcoms in which moms were moms, kids were kids, and fathers knew best. Today, many critics view it, at best, as high camp fun, and, at worst, as part of what critic David Marc once labeled the "Aryan melodramas" of the 1950s and 1960s. The brainchild of series star Robert Young, who played insurance salesman Jim Anderson, and producer Eugene B. Rodney, Father Knows Best first debuted as a radio sitcom in 1949. In the audio version the title of the show ended with a question mark, suggesting that father's role as family leader and arbiter was dubious. The partner's production company, Rodney-Young Enterprises, transplanted the series to television in 1954--without the questioning marker--where it ran until 1963, appearing at various times on each of the three networks. Young and Rodney, friends since 1935, based the series on experiences each had with wives and children; thus, to them, the show represented "reality." Indeed, careful viewing of each of the series' 203 episodes reveals that the title was actually more figurative than literal. Despite the lack of an actual question mark, father didn't always know best. Jim Anderson could not only lose his temper, but occasionally be wrong. Although wife Margaret Anderson, played by Jane Wyatt, was stuck in the drudgery of domestic servitude, she was nobody's fool, often besting her husband and son, Bud (played by Billy Gray). Daughter Betty Anderson (Elinor Donahue)--known affectionately to her father as Princess--could also take the male Andersons to task, as could the precocious Kathy (Lauren Chapin), the baby of the family.
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