DIRECTED BY: Becky Sloan, Joseph Pelling, Baker Terry

PLOT: Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck find their days consistently interrupted by anthropomorphized objects in their home and uninvited guests who insist on teaching them lessons about life via song, dance, and increasingly unsettling interactions.

COMMENTS: There’s a reason that children’s television is, on the whole, weird. After all, there are two competing, even contradictory goals at work: these shows often want to teach young people some valuable life lesson (the alphabet, how the mail is delivered, treating your friends with decency and respect), but hold the audience’s notoriously wandering attention while doing so. All those talking aardvarks and talking Blue Heelers and talking magical unicorns are handwaving determined to steal a child’s focus with any degree of strangeness necessary. Landmarks of the genre going back decades—“Captain Kangaroo,” “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” —have all danced along the line where oddness tips over from charming to off-putting. Even the grand poobah of them all, “Sesame Street,” had to overcome initial concerns that its central conceit—humans and puppets living side-by-side—would be incomprehensible to children. Obviously, the kids figured it out.

Any success inspires parody, satire, and critique. Children’s TV has certainly earned its fair share, as can be seen in the stressful adulthood of the characters in Avenue Q, the aggressive surrealism of “Wonder Showzen,” and the oppressive nightmare of today’s subject, “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.” This British web-series-turned-TV-show is perfectly captures the way that just living in the world can feel like unavoidable oppression. The machinations of people who are venal, stupid, or both conspire against “Don’t Hug Me”‘s characters, through the lens of two puppets and a guy with a crimson mop for a head who just want to get through the day. For anyone who remembers childhood as an endless series of grownups trying to kill your fun with their wondrous tales of adulthood and education, this is a show that sees you clear as day.

“Don’t Hug Me” began as a web series, and it establishes its theme—the world is fundamentally cruel—right away. In the very first short, a singing sketchpad shows up to share the wonders of thinking with boundless imagination, and after engaging the trio, she immediately proceeds to shut down their creative efforts with helpful corrections like “Green is not a creative color.” And there’s always room for things to get worse. A collection of creatures trying to describe love pile on more and more parameters and qualifiers, culminating in the revelation that they worship a giant idol and feed it gravel. An interest in food spurs on a storm of questionable nutrition advice, recommending aspic and referring to vegetables as “soil food.” These shorts last no more than 6 minutes, but the onslaught of demands and unsought responsibilities is relentless.

In 2022, the show made the move to commercial television on Britain’s Channel Four, and in some sort of miracle, the show thrives in the expansion to 23-minute episodes, with the motives of the helpful outsiders even more insidious and the desperation of the core characters more developed. In fact, the new theme song establishes the core conflict: “There’s three of us / Just three of us,” they sing, but there are far more trying to worm their way in, and they’re constantly showing up to convince the trio that they should be working or traveling or even dead. Imagine the pressure of outsiders constantly coming to your door to teach you new words or explain how things are made. This show imagines exactly that, and it’s an anxiety-ridden, frequently bloody nightmare.

Something that’s not getting across in all I’ve said so far is that this is a very funny show. It thrives on the amusing (and highly British) way that the three stars constantly snipe at each other, but all seem to genuinely like one another as long as nothing is going wrong. And the horrible scenarios in which they find themselves are wickedly dark, sometimes because of their Orwellian manipulation and sometimes because they go straight for Raimi-esque goofy gore. Every episode is loaded with songs that capture the sweetness of the kid-show ethos even as they narrate threats and falsehoods. Plus, the show’s production design is spectacular, awash in primary colors and seemingly made entirely of felt, making antagonists out of objects as ordinary as cars, coffee machines, and caskets. It’s awful and silly, which makes the show a surprisingly good fit for its new home on Dropout TV, sitting comfortably alongside the platform’s usual fare of improv-infused game shows, chat shows, and extensive actual-play RPG campaigns.

The six full-length episodes and six web shorts that make up “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” hit an impressively consistent sweet spot, distilling the weird frustrations of modern life through the lens of the cheeriest presentation for toddlers. It’s silly, it’s scary, it’s spot-on. You could binge the whole thing in an afternoon… as long as no one shows up at your door to interrupt you and try to teach you a lesson.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…looks like Sesame Street and plays like David Lynch… It’s clever, bleak, charming, grotesque and funny. More than that, it is clearly still – just as the original web series was – the genuine, idiosyncratic result of two people’s own vision, one shared off-kilter sensibility and retains the sense that they are, at all times, having fun. Which only makes the creepy horror and hallucinatory edge all the more unsettling..” – Lucy Mangan, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

(“Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” was nominated for review anonymously. Suggest a weird show of your own here.)