Father Knows Best

That girl with black hair and chopped bangs was irritating

Do you mean Kitten? Yeah, she wasn't cute. Especially as she got older and continued to wear those unflattering Mamie Eisenhower bangs.

A while ago I watched a few episodes. In my mind, it was contemporary with The Donna Reed Show. FKB seemed so dark. I don’t just mean the Life Lessons. It was the living room, the decor. So friggin’ dark. Donna Reed’s house was so light and bright. Laugh all you want but in which house would you rather live? And this has NOTHING to do with Carl Betz. Take him out of the equation.

That girl ‘s name is Kitten? Should have been Ogre.

Betty was a cunt.

Eleanor Donahue is a sweetheart though.

[quote]Do you mean Kitten? Yeah, she wasn't cute. Especially as she got older and continued to wear those unflattering Mamie Eisenhower bangs.

And then she became a crack whore.

[quote]Eleanor Donahue is a sweetheart though.

ELINOR

It was a melancholy more than comedy, like so many others I could name. Later half-hour shows were critisized for special episodes ot being to serious for the term SIT-COM but they had nothing of the likes of FATHER KNOWS BEST, MY THREE SONS, FAMILY AFFAIR, etc. Was Don Fedderson involved in each one?

ELINOR turned up in Mayberry at some point.

Princess was tops in taps!

Big fan in the 80s--WGN in Chicago used to broadcast it; Billy Gray was the best thing about it. Very, very talented child actor. Loved him in The Man Who Fell to Earth with Michael Rennie.

Bud gets manhandled...

Odd though it may seem, you have to know that when Father Knows Best premiered, it was bucking a tide against early 1950s sit-coms in which the hapless schnook of a father/husband was often the butt of the jokes and got into trouble and Mother always knew best. The Stu Erwin Show, The Honeymooners, Life with Riley and others I'm forgetting were typical.

Robert Young represented something fresh. A dad who was a sage patriarch and could solve all problems. Of course, many new sit-coms, like The Donna Reed Show and Bachelor Father followed suit, in which the father figure was the wise unflappable straight man.

It’s such an interesting time capsule, capturing life in the suburbs the soldiers and their wives settled in when coming back from the war.

A whole new society cropped up in those suburbs. It changed American life forever.

The opening theme music and the same theme music used during the episodes was haunting and dreary at the same time.

That moment on FKB at r12 has been burned in my memory (and other parts of my body) for 65 years, at least. Somebody find the clip on youtube and link it here. Please!

It was a very strange incident where Bud needs to find Betty's professor to convince him of something in her defense and goes to a gym where he expects to find the professor getting a massage but winds up on the table himself.

Why must we take Carl Betz out of the equation, r3??

Perhaps he deserves his own thread.

Suburbia

r16...

You're welcome.

THANK YOU, r20!

R13, when "Father Knows Best" debuted on radio in 1949, the family dynamic was entirely different from the later television version. Father Jim was frequently snarky and exasperated with his children, complaining to his wife what stupid children they had, and lamenting the current generation, contrasting them with his idyllic childhood. He would also admonish his wife for the way she was raising their children and for her housekeeping. Wife Margaret, of course, was a paragon of reason and patience and took it all in stride. This whole setup was played for laughs and zingers.

When the show was brought to CBS television, star Robert Young demanded an entirely new cast and a warmer family dynamic. So Jim became a caring, loving father full of wisdom and sage advice.

[quote]OP: Did you watch it?

Not if I could help it. At one point or another during the 1970s, I may have been in the room with an episode or two, but without interest. But when it came on, for me it was always channel-flipping time.

Carl Betz he was the man.

Interesting, r22, I had no idea FKB started out on radio. Robert Young was really the star of it? Can't imagine him playing anything other than dignified and rather humorless.

R23 it was a show from the 50s

Father Knows Shit

R3, FKB was shot on a closed set with one-camera, on 35mm film. The producers wanted four-wall rooms rather than three so that they could shoot from many different angles. All of this might explain why the show looked more like a Warner Bros noir film than a family sitcom. Contrast this with multi-camera, live-before-a-studio-audience I Love Lucy, which had cheery brightness.

I don't know how The Donna Reed Show was shot, but it, like FKB, was a Screen Gems production.

When Elinor Donahue was brought onto The Odd Couple in 72 to play Felix's girlfriend the character was named Miriam Welby as a nod to her former TV father, who was then playing Dr, Marcus Welby.

Maybe it was mentioned already but I believe Elinor had a long happy marriage to a TV producer, who was somewhat older than her.

R29- He was quite good as Marcus Welby- a much more well rounded character and show than Father Knows Best. I paid for the first two seasons on Amazon.

I liked this show fine in reruns in the early 1970s. But I watched a couple of episodes recently, and to put it kindly, it did not age well. There are family sitcoms from that era that have better written characters and better stories such as Leave It To Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show. I find those two shows much more watchable.

I like Smell My Beaver

r30 Yes, Harry Ackerman.

Thatta girl, baby, turn on the heat...

Also at MGM...

Elinor Donahue had some issues with Andy Griffith when playing his love interest in the early run of his show.

Didn't Frances Bavier also have her issues with Andy Griffith? I get the distinct feeling that the mostly male cast made for a snarky boys' club and didn't take very kindly to women who appeared on the show.

Just my supposition.

I loved it in summer morning reruns as a kid. Every season of it—except for one of the later ones when eldest sibling Betty played by the wonderful Elinor Donahue suddenly decides to start sporting a short poodle haircut. ;)

Frances Bavier looked like she smelled of stale urine.

Watched it a few years back. It's not funny in a laugh out loud sense, and it seems overly melodramatic and somber at times. Not something I would feel compelled to watch repeatedly, whereas I still love Honeymooners and Lucy.

Loved Billy on this and agree he was talented, too, R11; but I’m thinking that you meant to refer to his movie with Michael Rennie as being actually “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (?). Gray was indeed good in that earlier role, too, IMO. 👍

That clip at r35 of Ann Sothern and Robert Young as a composer and lyricist creating the song "Lady Be Good" is just so brilliantly written and acted. You really believe they're composing the song on the spot and it's just that easy.

And all done in one single take!

Also loved Billy Gray in those early Doris Day Warner Bros. musicals On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon as her bratty younger brother who really is the engine that pushes those movies along plot-wise.

I wonder if getting cast in FKB ultimately stifled a promising film career?

And don't forget the episode where Kitten's essay wins and the prize is meeting...Greer Garson. And Kathy is so thrilled to meet her. Oh, Greer, another MGM connection.

R42, yes! You're right--I was thinking of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Thank you for your kind correction! Billy Gray was truly wonderful in it, gave a very natural and intelligent performance, unlike so many child actors who seem like Charlie McCarthy, so stilted and mechanical. He deserved a prosperous adult career; not sure what happened there.

I watched it before school in the early 70s and although not a laugh riot, I always really enjoyed it.

I love the closing theme music.

[quote] Who was that ugly girl? She was kind of smug.

That was Jane Wyatt.

And she wasn't a girl, she was a grown woman.

What's the episode where Betty tells the other girl in her sorority she'd better shut up or she'll slap her silly face right off her head? I love that episode.

Excuse me, e-x-c-u-u-u-s-e me... that's Miss Jane *Lost Horizon* Wyatt...

It’s my new background show now that I got tired of Leave It To Beaver.

I remember an episode, the mother or maybe the oldest daughter wins a new car in a contest and she’s all happy and excited but then the father convinces her to exchange it for two station wagons and donate them to an orphanage. Even as a kid I thought that was bullshit.

How could one car be worth two station wagons?

I remember an episode in which Rita Moreno played a foreign exchange student at Betty's high school. From India!

Rita also played Siamese in The King and I. Yet she's still giving Natalia Wood shit for playing Latina nearly 45 years after her tragic demise.

Fuck Rita Moreno!

Sari!

I remember one surreal Christmas episode, where Kitten says she wishes Christmas Day could be every day. Next morning, she comes downstairs to find that it’s Christmas Day all over again! Then the same thing happens again the next day. And the next. And again. But only Kitten is aware of it, not the rest of the family. Finally, exasperated, she wishes it would all go back to normal, and it does.

It was “Groundhog Day” in a half-hour TV sitcom, decades before that film was made. It intrigued my young imagination at the time, enough that it’s the only specific episode of FKB that I remember.

I forget where, but Billy Gray did an interview a few years ago. Still lives in the same house he bought while he was doing the show. I was pretty surprised when he said was an atheist and when he made clear he does not like Trump.

[quote] After arriving at the Anderson's home, Chanthini (Rita Moreno), an exchange student from India, explains aspects of her culture to the curious Kathy (Lauren Chapin).

If only Kathy had been bi-curious!

Chanthini & Kathy Asti Spumante.

[quote] I was pretty surprised when he said was an atheist and when he made clear he does not like Trump.

Why? Everybody who was alive in the '50s isn't a conservative. In the '60s Gray did drugs and grew his hair long just like everybody else. He also made appearances on Howard Stern in the '90s and made it really clear that he was still basically an old hippie.

Francis Beaver

I watched it but never cared for Robert Young. Later on when he had his own show Marcus Welby MD, I never watched one episode of that series.

[quote]Fuck Rita Moreno!

Yeah, living to be 90 after winning Judy Garland's Oscar has really gone to her head.