Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
One of the best things about being a parent and a nerd is that you get to raise another little nerd. You get to shape their taste in series, movies, and books; to point out the amazing parts and the dubious ones. You get to say, “Come here, kid, I want to show you something, it’s really cool!”
And eventually, the moment arrives where they come running and say, “Mama, I want to show you something!”
This is, like, the best thing ever. Because now you find out just how weird and wonderful and different-from-you your child has become.
My daughter is newly minted 14 year old and – I state the obvious here – she lives in a completely different media world than the one her Gen X mother grew up in. She has YouTube at her fingertips. She has Netflix and Amazon Prime. Some of her favourite franchises are indie, often crowdfunded episode by episode, their merch and cosplay paraphenalia instantly available. The storylines she watches tend to therefore be more chaotic: less of a steady arch, confusing to me but also inspired, wicked and thoughtful. They borrow elements from horror, a creeping kind of horror balanced out by some sort of wry, cynical wit.
I try to remember the things I watched as a 13 year old. I think there was a lot of Knight Rider and maybe MacGyver and Magnum P.I.? Max Headroom was edgy, Mr. Bean was disturbing, Dallas and Falcon Crest reruns were mystifying. Eventually I found out about Monty Python and my whole world changed.
My point being a) I had to settle for whatever they showed on the only two TV channels we had, because my parents never sprung for cable. (For years I watched Russian lessons on TV every Saturday morning because there was nothing else on.) And b) everything I watched was incredibly safe. There were the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys (men, of course) always won, with a smirk on their lips. There was never a doubt. The bad was never allowed to just coexist with or in the good. When it did, it scared me.
I hated storylines where good people do weird or unreasonable things and it’s just treated as being human and they are still people you’re supposed to identify with. It’s the ambiguity I couldn’t handle. And the last thing I wanted was to see the underbelly of humanity.
Here, by contrast, are my Top 5 shows that my daughter introduced me to in the last two years.
- Hazbin Hotel (2019) – Literally set in hell. In an attempt to find a non-violent alternative for reducing Hell’s overpopulation, the daughter of Lucifer opens a rehabilitation hotel.
- Murder Drones (2021) – In a post-apocalyptic hellscape, worker drones like Uzi struggle to survive by hiding from rogue robots called Murder Drones. This is all about friendship and mayhem.
- Dead End: Paranormal Park (2022) – Two teens and a talking pug team up to battle demons at a haunted theme park and maybe even save the world from a supernatural apocalypse.
- The Amazing Digital Circus (2023) – A “surreal, dark psychological comedy” about a woman who gets trapped in a colourful virtual world. Together with her new friends she has to survive day to day, subject to the whims of wacky AI and personal trauma
- Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared (2022) – Follow Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Green Duck as they learn about family, electricity, and death. Beware the strange and dangerous twists that come their way as their seemingly safe house reveals that they live in an actual nightmare.
They’re all recommendable, by the way, and they all run to animated, disturbing, but also kind of adorable.
Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared (DHMIS) is the weirdest and most disturbing so far. In the format of a children’s puppet show, with a Sesame Street aesthetic, is follows the three puppets Red, Yellow and Duck. In each episode, some inanimate object comes to life to teach them about a concept: time, creativity, love, work, death, computers and so on. So far, so wholesome – but in every episode, things then take a darker turn. The breakfast egg is full of blood (guts feature heavily in all episodes). Love leads to a cult sacrifice. More disturbingly for me, the computer keeps interrupting their questions with a flood of useless information – it actively prevents them from understanding the world. In “Creativity“, the three puppets learn they’re doing it wrong: Green is not a creative colour. And also, their pictures deserve to be destroyed for being creative the wrong way.
The episode about work has them plunged into a factory setting and randomly assigned jobs in a Kafkaesque series of happenings: Yellow is on the factory floor, Red is in management (he made the mistake of picking up the phone) and Duck doesn’t fit in anywhere and has to be reeducated or get therapy or something. One blink and it’s 40 years later.
There are a lot of wild theories about DHMIS. For me, it is about the way children are indoctrinated into an inexplicable world and its expectations and just stunted. We drop explanations while they’re still too young to fully understand, and by the time they’re smart enough, they’ve been brainwashed into thinking that this is just how it is and has to be. Green is not a creative colour. It reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
It’s about the saccharine sweetness and authority of kids shows that know right and wrong and don’t allow those to coexist in one person. About looking behind the screens at the dark underbelly of what we have been taught. I look at my daughter and marvel at her capacity to take in and laugh at these things.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 