Charlie Brooker’s Cat Burglar has plenty going for it. As a celebration of maximalist mid-century, Tex Avery-style animation, it’s just about as genuine as love letters get. In terms of animation – and especially in terms of sound – it is a wild success.
Where it falls down, however, is with its interactivity. Intermittently, Cat Burglar grinds to a halt so that you can answer a pointless trivia question. This element of interactivity is wearying and repetitious, taking a brilliant idea and needlessly diluting it to the point of tedium. What’s so infuriating is that Netflix is capable of creating much more engaging interactive work – but most of this work is aimed squarely at children.
While interactive stories for adults are still treated as a novelty – with the only real efforts being Brooker’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and a special episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt – Netflix has been quietly carving out an entire library of them for children. From a practical viewpoint this makes total sense – kids love repetition and the illusion of control, so engagement data for this sort of storytelling must be through the roof – but the happier news is that some of these shows are really, actively, surprisingly brilliant – and just as much fun to play as an adult. If you have several afternoons to waste, these are the five best titles you should be seeking out.
5. You vs Wild
A wilderness survival series that has already spawned spin-offs and movies, You vs Wild puts you in control of none other than Bear Grylls. Dropped into one of many exotic locations, your job is to guide him to safety via a number of critical decisions. What’s great about You vs Wild is that it has multigenerational appeal. Put a kid in charge and (in my experience) they’ll treat each mission like it’s a national emergency, with Grylls’s safety being of the utmost importance. Meanwhile, if an adult has a go, they will almost certainly attempt to Mr Bean him into a series of catastrophes, with all the casual cruelty of someone who places no real value on human life. It is outstanding.
4. Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile
The Buddy Thunderstruck series about the adventures of a truck-racing dog, came and went five years ago without making much of an impact. And this is a shame because, as a pleasingly tactile stop-motion animation, there wasn’t really a lot else like it out there. Its final hurrah was arguably its best and the interactive episode, The Maybe Pile, is essentially a loose grab-bag of sketches, where the characters make a series of bad decisions that tend to resolve themselves with some level of gastrointestinal catastrophe. Part Wes Anderson and part Lonely Island, this is a real lost gem.
3. Carmen Sandiego: To Steal or Not to Steal
It was inevitable that Netflix’s revived Carmen Sandiego series would go interactive. After all, the character first existed in a video game almost 40 years ago, so a level of control comes baked in. To Steal or Not to Steal doesn’t mine as much comedy from its interactive premise as the other shows on this list, but that’s to its credit. It’s a tight, animated spy thriller.
2. The Boss Baby: Get That Baby!
The Boss Baby movies aren’t exactly held up as high art. And perhaps that’s why its interactive special plays so fast and loose with the form. Get That Baby! is essentially a job interview within a simulation within the Boss Baby universe. Depending on how you fare in a number of scenarios – fighting bad guys, participating in logic tests, chasing babies around haystack mazes – you end the episode being awarded with one of 16 Baby Corps jobs. What’s wonderful about this is that it really takes time to lead the viewer by the hand through the options, which means that you can find yourself glued to it for hours.
1. Captain Underpants Epic Choice-o-Rama
And now, the greatest success in Netflix’s interactive experiment so far. Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants books were riotous to begin with, but the ensuing Netflix series – equal parts jittery, restless and madcap – pushed their boundaries to the limit. Epic Choice-o-Rama was yet another leap forward. As a story, it’s all over the place, but its refusal to sit still for even a moment means that the interactivity often leads to genuinely unpredictable outcomes. There are changes in animation styles, leaps to invented TV shows, brutal dead ends and all manner of logic-defying mayhem, and it’s all presented with a knowingly silly wink to the viewers. Forget the kids and fire this up next time you get a minute. It’s a thing of beauty.
