Never watch children's television with me.
To counter their fabulous weekday children's programming (kids' stuff from 0700 or 0730 to 1800 except for an hour and a half in the early afternoon which is either arts/crafts or women's issues, then a half hour of a GED or ESL program), the statewide PBS in North Carolina puts their Saturday morning programming really early so there's crap to
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I think part of the problem is the greater amount of time a lot of stations want to fill with children's programming. My local station shows 9 1/2 hours of children's programming on weekdays, 8 of it non-repeating during the day (the same episodes of each in the early morning and late afternoon). I'd guess it's simply too expensive to fill that all with shows with the quality of Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, Between the Lions (which has a lot of writers from Sesame Street and The Electric Company) and Reading Rainbow (which will probably be ending this year as they've been producing fewer episodes for a few years due to a lack of funding).
If I ever come into a large amount of money, funding public television and radio is right up there on my list with funding women's health and health education programs.
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The loss of Reading Rainbow is sad. Some rich dude should descend from the skies and give Levar Burton a whole mess of money.
Also, A+ for wanting to fund Public Media.
Well, and the Women's Health/Health Education stuff too, it's just that we weren't really talking so much about that in the other posts.
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The presence of former Sesame Street and Electric Company writers on it is very obvious. Regular shorts in it include:
- Gawain's Word, a parody on Wayne's World where two knights "run together at high speeds to make a word", taped at a renfest and put together in post;
- Chicken Jane, an animated short with two Dick and Jane-type kids and their pet Chicken Jane, who scratches out words so they duck, scram, or whatever so they avoid somethng unpleasant while she takes the fall for them;
- Sam Spud, a pun-filled take on the detective genre starring a potato in a trench and fedora with his manual typewriter and, ocassionally, his assistant (a peach);
- Cliff Hanger, a silly animated short with a top-heavy adventurer hanging from a cliff who schemes to get off (he has a Survival Manual he regularly consults) but always winds up back up where he started;
- What's Cooking with Theo and Cleo, a silly cooking slot where the two adult lions follow a simple recipe for a meat dish but always stop at cooking it and just eat the meat instead (it's funnier than it sounds);
- various shorts involving Arty Smarty Pants (aka The Great Smartini) and his mother, Smarmy Marmy, as they do magic (putting words in his oversized smarty pants, heh), silly game shows (Not As Smart As A Puck) and other things.
If the sharp wit doesn't get you (I think I enjoy it more than Laurel does), the music will get you -- between their "in house" bands FONIX (three women that remind me of En Vogue sound-wise), Sloppy Pop (guitar-driven pop/rock quintet with a male lead singer) and 14 Karat Soul (male a cappella, they sing "Below the Street" on the Sesame Street album Sing-Along Travel Songs if you'd like me to rip you an MP3 of that track), the two adult lions parodying all sorts of genres (Theo does BB The King of Beasts, Cleo's done a torch song ("S-H") and a country-western one ("W Troubles") that really stuck in my head), and the guest musicians (India.Arie has been my favorite so far, but it's almost as varied as Sesame Street), it's the best half-hour of original PBS programming right now.
If I haven't scared you off with my glowing adoration for the show, I should tell you where Theo (the adult male lion) got his name from -- Dr. Seuss.
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