Has Father Knows Best rightfully been condemned by history

[TMC]

This is what TV Tropes has to say about the subject:

Father Knows Best was hugely popular in The '50s, running for six seasons and reran for years afterwards. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women's Liberation movement came to re-define the American landscape. Father Knows Best and its idealized middle-class nuclear family, came off as antiquated. Today, it has become infamous due to that. Similar shows from its era, such as Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis have similar "rose-tinted" reputations. They do not attract the same level of disdain, even if the latter has fallen into relative obscurity.

[icecream]

Show boards here are for fans, not haters bashing the show with a bunch of negative links they are paid to promote. You are constantly trashing shows on their board which shouldn't be.

[GentlemanJim]

I suspect there is a degree of escapism involved, especially among us who were children back at the time, wishing we could go back there and live in what we perceive as a carefree era.

And it's the very notion that we feel this way that angers the cause-activists who would like nothing better than to run a good healthy dose of Norman Lear up our utopian behinds...(lol)

So, I think that it's mostly the cause-activists having an agenda that have "condemned" these old shows, not "history" as the thread title suggests.

[Tankeryanker]

I think it's the people who are jealous of that time era that put them down. They see what a mess has been made and what they lost.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by icecream

Show boards here are for fans, not haters bashing the show with a bunch of negative links they are paid to promote. You are constantly trashing shows on their board which shouldn't be.

I'm not personally bashing Father Knows Best, I'm asking a serious and legitimate question about how well does this particular show hold up in a modern context. Where do you get the notion that show boards are strictly for fans and not also for critics or observers who want to analyze and dissect it? You're basically taking the perspective of you don't like the message so you go and personally attack the messenger.

Even Billy Gray himself, has in the past, been critical of the show and whether or not its depiction of American life and the nuclear family was genuine or realistic.

[stevea]

I think you can find things to marvel at from the era, and things to shake your head at. In a way we're looking at history--how society was, the good and the bad.

Also you can hear how some words have gone by the wayside--Jim one time asking if someone felt "logy" today, for example. And some pronunciations -- Jim saying "pawtio" for patio for example-never heard that anywhere else.