Since Fred Rogers died in 2003, The Kingdom of Make Believe has undergone a coup. Gone are the charming, expressionless rubber handpuppets who populated the kingdom, replaced by technicolored offspring of the characters who bop around in cut out animation and try to practice behavior modification.
In “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” making its debut this morning on PBS, any edges of the old show have been burnished off, the eccentricities of the individual characters left to catch phrases, and everyone is cheerful and instructive in the manner of just about every other children’s show these days: cloying, trying too hard to create a teachable moment, not much fun. Certainly, the osul of the old show have been lost in the colorful remake.
I was fond of the old “Mister Rogers” even as a young adult, there was something appealing and odd about Fred Rogers’ approach, though it hardly mattered – he was speaking directly to kids and connecting.
And when the trolley took you to the Neighborhood of Make Believe, there was a kind of melancholy there, in the ways the characters were trapped in their mannerisms (Henrietta Pussycat could only say a few words among her “meow meow meow” and especially Lady Aberlin – beautiful, perhaps a bit touched, confined to a world of make believe.
Best of all it was only one segment of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” so you could get out of there when King Friday or Queen Sara or X the Owl or Lady Elaine Fairchilde got a little too much. We’d always escape back to the real neighborhood, where there was something interesting to learn or discover.
The whole tone is changed in “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” maybe because the target audience has dropped to about 3. There are all of those unnerving pauses when Daniel speaks to the audience and waits for a response. (It’s not clear what feels more uncomfortable as an adult watcher: Answering or not answering – they wait so expectantly).
And maybe Fred Rogers’ songs weren’t top flight, but the ones in the new show fall really flat: Sing-songy things you might come up with off the top of your head.
But they do pound in those lessons! In the first episode it’s “When something seems bad turn it around and find something good.”
So let’s see. It will remind oldsters how much they miss the original show. It may encourage them to get the old shows out to share with their kids instead.
But, Kevin Morrison of the Fred Rogers Company, a producer on the show says “it’s almost not important whether you know who Mr. Rogers is.”
Speaking to reporters at the TV Critics summer press tour, he said Rogers “spent 40 years making a landmark piece of children’s television, and we wanted to do something for 21st century children that was something that Fred would have approved of.”
Even if no knowledge of the previous show is necessary, the show is loaded with winks to parents who might remember, says producer Angela Santomero. And they’ve developed elaborate backstories.
“When people want to know what happened with Lady Elaine,” she says, “I get to tell them that she got married to Music Man Stan and they live in the neighborhood and they have they have Miss Elaina and she works you know, she lives in the Museum Go Round, but she works at the factory.
Further, she adds, “We did King Friday and Queen Sarah Saturday, are actually part of the show with Prince Tuesday. And then they have a later in life baby, which is Prince Wednesday.”
Underlying the whole show is a kind of social engineering, says Lesli Rotenberg, senior vide president of children’s media at PBS.
“By helping children recognize, understand, and express the feelings that are a part of these real world experiences, Daniel addresses the social emotional lessons that child development experts see as vital to future success,” she says.
“According to Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, emotional development is built into the architecture of young children’s brains, and when children don’t learn skills like managing their feelings at an early age, actual thinking can be impaired,” Rotenberg says. “In other words, when kids aren’t prepared to calm down or self regulate by the time they reach school, their emotions can get in the way of their own learning. Teachers cite this kind of uncontrolled behavior as the most common reason for poor achievement in the classroom.
“Like ‘Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood’ before it,” she says, “Daniel meets the problem head on.”