Parents need to know that this is the same show you yourself might have watched in reruns as a kid, with all of the '50s values intact -- good and bad. On the one hand, Timmy is always polite, caring, and happy to spend time with his family. On the other, female characters are generally as helpless as a fly in butter.

Families can talk about the differences between life now and how it was for Timmy and his family then (with the caveat that this was fiction then, too, and that real farm wives probably didn't cook in a dainty dress and pearl earrings). There's always room to talk about the role of women and any minority characters, as well as Timmy's scorn for anything "sissy" -- all concepts we might not want our kids to absorb today. Every episode has its own moral -- don't lie, don't disobey your parent or teacher, etc. -- and those, while didactic and obvious by the standards of today's kids, might still work on younger viewers.