Kid Show Roundup

I try to salvage some good out of the centuries of TV my kid has consumed

As a child, I watched enough TV to give me a personality disorder, so it’s only fitting I provide my son the same opportunity. The TV shows shouldn’t suck, because that’s bad. Unfortunately, most of it does. Children’s media isn’t unique in that most of it is terrible, but it offends me more because hey–that’s my kid. Don’t make a shitty show for him. That children have no standards is no excuse to make bad art. “But they love it!!” Yeah they love carcinogenic dyes, corn syrup, and would probably watch livestreams of slot machines, too, so what?

What to watch is not a choice between Bergman and toy reviews. I know this, and I know TV time is a nice diversion between the good and normal things. Stupid bullshit is fine in moderation. It doesn’t have to be stupid bullshit to be fun and engaging, though. Kids like good stuff, so if it’s just a matter of choice, choose the good stuff. They’ll shut up as soon as things start moving on screen, anyway.

That being said, educational value is overrated. I’d take well-executed cartoon hijinks over something hideous, shrill, and technically accurate about rhesus macaques.

HEAVEN TIER

Bluey

Great writing and beautiful voice acting. My kid thinks it’s hilarious, and doesn’t seem to get sick of it. Probably at the ceiling of rigged animation quality. The finale was bad, but that’s fine, the rest of it is great. The only mark against it is its unrealistic standard of parental engagement. I once watched a dad have a pretend Pokemon battle with his daughter at the playground, and I’ve never seen a man want to crawl out of his own skin from embarrassment to that degree. I admired him for trying, but I blame Bandit. Tell your little girl to go play with other kids at the playground. The episode where Bluey learns to ride a bike, and the episode about cricket are sweet and moving depictions of what I love about being a dad. Bluey is also the only acceptable kind of show that purports to have stuff for grown ups, too, which is by being organic and universal. In one episode, Bluey insists that the sun melting her ice cream is unfair; her dad says “That’s about as fair as it gets, actually.”

Trash Truck

Gentle, sweet, lovely animation, fun characters. Its cheerful, friendly recurring visuals have the feel of a newspaper comic strip, which makes sense–his father, Glen Keane, was a Disney animator, and his grandfather created Family Circus. I know this is a strange thing to care about, but I like that the truck doesn’t talk. He’s more of a smart dog. I hate talking vehicles. Talking animals in stories goes back to prehistory, but I don’t like showing kids that a car can be your peer. It’s consumerism. To imagine you can talk to a vehicle is to anthropomorphize your purchases. May as well talk to an iPhone. This is why I think the Cars franchise is spiritually bankrupt, that and its tooth-rotting, weepy, fascist nostalgia.

Ms. Rachel

YouTube personalities are automatically suspect, children’s YouTube personalities doubly so. However, she pisses off Zionists for simply and calmly stating that children shouldn’t be liquidated, so she’s permanently on the Heaven Tier. She seems genuine, and she’s definitely captured some of the Sesame Street magic of education combined with entertainment. She taught my son to talk while I napped. Jules Hoffman, a frequent musical guest, got Raffi’s “You Brush Your Teeth” stuck in my head for probably the rest of my life.

Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse

I am hesitant to praise the work of The horrid mouse company, but this show is great. The animation clearly reveres the golden age of Looney Toons and Merrie Melodies. It’s clever without relying on adult comedy tics. It has no interest in educating anyone, which is a rare quality. Too much children’s media feels the need to justify itself.

Tumble Leaf

As far as educational material goes, it’s hard to beat Tumble Leaf. The animation is peerless, the music is really charming. Each episode is about an object the main character, Fig, finds having washed up from the sea. If anything, it can be a little precious–a few too many of things Fig the Fox finds in the Finding Place are twee millennial fetish items, like a film camera or a record player. It depicts a pre-digital world that I too yearn for, but it doesn’t exist. It’s hard to put my finger on the correct balance of utopian and realistic when it comes to worlds I want my child to occupy. 

DECENT TIER

Lucas the Spider

I hated this at first, but I’ve softened on it. The writing is pretty good. It’s a cute world that feels alive. I still want the dog and the owl euthanized, though. 

Logistics Training

This isn’t just one show, it’s a whole swamp of shows. They feature a small set of characters distinguished by one or two physical features (at most) who solve technical problems via teamwork, free of character development or emotional content. The team is a Mad Libs combination of dinosaurs, construction equipment, pets, vehicles, and/or Captain Planet style demographic spreads. The production budget is one penny because they outsource it to Korean sweat shops, and have locked 4 trillion gallons of petrochemicals into plastic figurines. Picture a pallet of Paw Patrol action figures grinning in the abyssal zone for 10,000 years. The shows are sometimes serviceable, but don’t warrant a mention on their own. They feel suspiciously like homework, like kids are being socialized to complete group projects.

Gabby’s Dollhouse

There’s worse out there. Forgettable and obnoxious, but competent and cute. Jason Manzoukis did a voice for the movie. The girl who plays Gabby is talented.

Story Bots

I’d rank this higher, but it’s a little too into itself. The celebrity cameos were adult-pandering, which I have no respect for. But overall the music is great, it’s funny, cute, and the animation is excellent.

Gigantosaurus

Beautifully animated, great character design. Incredibly strange theme–the title character is a non-speaking dinosaur. He is simultaneously a pet, a father, and a local god. None of the kids are being raised by parents, although a rotating cast of older dinosaurs chip in to guide them. The show has an obnoxious, moralizing tone and grating voice acting, but I like looking at it. The theme song sounds like Weird Al.

HELL TIER

Blippi

Evil. Will open the door for demons to enter your home. His enthusiasm is patronizing and cloying, like he’s trying to distract you from something. If the camera turned 180 degrees, you’d see ape torture. The man behind Blippi began his YouTube career as a prank show guy, and one of his hilarious videos featured him shitting on someone. He plays with toys to entertain children, which is pornographic; that is, it’s stimulating in a similar way to the deeply important and powerful activity it’s depicting (in this case, play) but without anything real.

True and the Rainbow Kingdom

Saccharine. So obstinate in its unwillingness to be funny I wonder if it’s intentional. Formulaic. Toy commercial. lazy ripoff of better material. 

Bubble Guppies

I have a gun, get away from me

Transformers

I have a soft spot for adventure show ephemera, but this shit sucks. The continued insistence that someone could be invested in the plight of these fucking robots is upsetting. It’s the quintessential toy commercial show, of course, but that it could have been on TV for 40+ years and still fail to produce something that has an ounce, a scrap, of meaning is shocking. Even before AI I didn’t find it credible that anyone would care about it, now I surely do not.

Cocomelon

Could a media ecosystem become complex enough to spawn new media? A YouTube data center full of OSHA training videos was struck by lightning and the first Cocomelon video appeared. Human involvement was marginal, this is the psychosphere in metastasis. I’d rather my son watch ISIS beheading videos.

Alien TV

Cheap, cynical, stupid, lazy. Extensive use of stock footage. How do you get a job making TV for kids when you hate kids this much?