The Weird and Wonderful World of Children’s Television

A random show-by-show rundown of the bizarre world of kids’ TV that we don’t usually blink an eye at

Blaze

Post-apocalyptic snapshot of a world with few remaining humans and mostly populated by (probably late Trump-era) monster trucks that have become sentient and seem to only exist to amuse themselves.

Paw Patrol

A libertarian dystopia in which children and trained animals provide all public services, politicians serve only ceremonial roles, and industry seems to consist entirely of food production, possibly because there’s no time or money for anything else.

Curious George

An unusually smart ape teaches children to solve problems and navigate a world populated with adults who are often extraordinarily neurotic. The amount of time children spend alone with George’s exceptionally odd, single caretaker at home, on camping trips, etc. seems generally inadvisable. The movie spinoffs complicate things by introducing more quirky but non-canonical characters and swamping the world with saccharine Jack Johnson-/Ben Lee-style jangle pop.

Go Diego Go

A peyote dream in which unaccompanied children employ CIA technology to rescue talking animals while navigating a world filled with new age visions, trickster gods in the form of monkey siblings, a backpack that can transform into all manner of things disallowed by the conservation of matter, and a camera whose user interface is predictably not improved by the inclusion of Rosie Perez’s voice.

Backyardigans

Some young animals (who might actually be AI constructs) hack the Matrix and experience temporary shared hallucinations.

Bubble Guppies

During their school day taught by an obviously vegetarian grouper, small and bizarrely coiffed fish experience anomalous physics and pop music while learning about things of no use to a fish.

Sophie La Girafe

The most tedious show ever created, useful perhaps as part of an aversion therapy regime designed to wean kids off TV altogether.

Caillou

A young cancer survivor has become so convinced of his centrality to the universe that he can’t even see the world all the way to the edges of the TV screen. Every episode concerns his perpetual struggle to deal with a world not entirely constructed to satisfy or amuse him.

Thomas the Tank Engine

Some kind of Victorian-era political allegory, and only a tenth as interesting as that sounds.

Doc McStuffins

An under-supervised child constructs a fantasy world around conversations with stuffed animals. This effort is so successful that adults are eventually pulled into her delusions and become full participants, eventually supplanting much of the real world.

Dinosaur Train

Talking dinosaurs learn about dinosaurs. Scientific integrity is protected by the use of a time-traveling train that shuttles the curious creatures across various periods of the Mesozoic Era in much the same way that actual trains don’t do anything ever.