Sometimes they know best. Other times, you wonder how they could be so clueless. Whether comforter or bumbler, curmudgeon or confidant, where would we — who were raised on television — be without our TV dads?
Since the medium’s infancy, viewers have leaned on our father figures for guidance and support in comedies, dramas, and even Westerns. In one of the most famous instances, the long-running sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, America watched a real-life family play an ever-so-slightly fictionalized version of themselves from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s.