New Regency and Fox are planning a film version of Father Knows Best, bringing a 60 year-old radio and TV series to the big screen as a generation-gap comedy.
The series was created as a radio show in 1949 and then transformed into a TV series between 1954 and 1960, profiling a typical '50s nuclear family: patriarchal father Jim, mother Margaret, two teenagers and a younger daughter. The film version, however, will be set in the present day, and will focus as much on a grandfather who disapproves of his son's modern child-rearing techniques. So it's not so much father knows best, as a question of which father knows best.
This is not the first attempt to turn the show into a film: it was also mooted back in 1994 with Brokeback Mountain writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana set to write it, and again set up as a comedy with Tim Allen in 2003. This time, however, the estate of original series creator Robert Young is onboard and all concerned are hopeful that it will finally get made. Chad and Dara Creasy, a husband-and-wife screenwriting team, are set to put together the script.