Family Life Was Never This Simple
• Nostalgie de la boue
The first season of Father Knows Best was just released on DVD. Jim (Robert Young) Anderson is a perfectly middle class insurance salesman, husband and father of one daughter and one son.
There are three reasons to watch something like this:
- Nostalgia
- Interest in the pop culture of the time
- Alienation from contemporary TV
Just barely remembering the show from kidhood my reason was #1.
Like most sitcoms of the 1950s it captures the minor dramas and comedies of family life.
The physical set, quality of acting and scripts are a notch above many of the sitcoms of the time. The dialog and situations seemed less strained and artificial. I think Robert Young had some ownership of the show. Perhaps his years in movies left me more alive to what made entertainment produce successful than the producers who just seemed to throw whatever came to their limited imagination on the screen.
I’d rate it just below The Donna Reed Show as the quintessential family life sitcom of the time. (Ward Cleaver’s insufferable perfection leaves me regarding Leave it to Beaver as an oddity.)
No, family life was never really this simple and easy but the show should be a real pleasure for people who aren’t put off by that.