In a recent column I said I didn’t get to watch much TV these days, but this doesn’t quite tell the whole story. The fact is, I watch plenty of TV, it’s just that about 80% of it is done against my will and for the enjoyment of my kids. There are few advantages to watching so much kids’ telly. The zip and verve of adult fare is rarely to be found in the shows beloved of a two- or six-year-old. Not for them, third-act twists and nuanced antiheroes, complex ruminations on trauma or exquisite action set-pieces.
But then, some outliers in their viewing diet fill me with hope, or get me hooked. So, in this month of year-end lists, reviews and gongs, I humbly present the best television I’ve watched against my will in 2024.
I first encountered Captain Underpants in print form, since my six-year-old son is devoted to the book series by Dav Pilkey, and its numerous Dog Man and Cat Kid spin-offs.
None of their antic charm is lost in the cartoon version, a genuinely funny and spirited adaptation that oozes personality. It corners the market on what I call ‘smart-stupid’ – alien bathrobes, living toilets, sentient farts – better than almost anything else on kids’ TV.
It joins longstanding favourite Hilda as a comic-to-TV adaptation that enhances everything we loved about the originals. It is only surmounted by pleasingly scary and richly lored Jurassic Park spin-off Camp Cretaceous, which earns the even more coveted award for ‘show that I definitely enjoy more than he does, which means I rarely get to watch it any more’.
Turning to younger fare, my daughter’s favourite, Gecko’s Garage, is apparently the creation of a husband-and-wife team from the Wirral – which is odd because I could have sworn it was French-Canadian. In childhood, any time I found a cartoon a bit too weird for my tastes, it always ended up being French-Canadian. Granted, the weirdness in those cases was dialogue that had clearly been translated into English by a horse, and – regrettably impossible for me to avoid reporting – the kind of indiscriminate horniness typically avoided by kids TV nowadays, even in the Francophone parts of Canada.
Gecko’s strangeness is more in its tone of indiscriminate cheeriness. The title character is a friendly reptile who fixes vehicles. If you want to know what else happens in the show, just read that sentence again. I originally loathed its near-total aversion to incident, but became hypnotised by its kind heart, DayGlo colours and subliminal environmentalism. It doesn’t hurt that it has also supplanted my daughter’s brain-annihilating obsession with nursery rhyme-adjacent slop, like the bafflingly awful Pinkfong & Baby Shark’s Space Adventure or the truly godless abhorrence of CoComelon Lane.
But, predictably enough, no show this year came close to Bluey: the best kids show’ on TV might just be the best show on TV full stop. A show which – whisper it – I might even watch when no kids are around at all.
