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Father Knows Best

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Father Knows Best
“Father Knows Best” and “The Cosby Show” Annotation
Some of the main concepts portrayed in the article “Father Knows Best” and “The Cosby Show”: Nostalgia and the Sitcom Tradition” by June and Timothy Frazer, are in which some of our traditional ideals and concepts towards women in America haven’t changed much over time. This article goes to identify two racially different sitcoms relating in the sense where the mother or females in the household of the show are undermined in their authority and/or are made by a joke of initiating one’s authority in the show. The article shows evidence of the two middle class family shows in episodes where it tries to address the sexist matters, while instead of educating and providing light to issues of sexism, the shows tend to stray away of that agenda during the shows and are seen to typically make a joke from it. The article also goes to observe how through two completely different eras where which one sitcom is postwar and the other is mid-80s, how much of our general perception of the female in the American household hasn’t altered over time, but instead added stereotypes and gender roles have been given to the women of these middle class family shows. (June M. Frazer and Timothy C. Frazer, Western Illinois University) One of the concepts of which I found interesting in this particular article is where they aligned two majorly different shows, different in which I mean culture and ethnicity and the overall time period difference between them. Even with those distinct differences there is a common characteristic between the sitcoms, in which the role of the women in the show seem to hold the course over time. One example is in which June and Timothy Frazer depict how in one episode of FKB, the son sneaks out the house without permission and lack to do chores, whilst getting caught, the father Jim and the minister in the show override the instruction of the mother to let Bud play in the baseball game. Which correlates to

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