Don't Change That Channel

I belong to the first generation that spent hours in front of the TV. Twenty-five years ago, I began to consider what it was like to spend hours in front of the TV.

I’m not a member of the “Clifford the Big Red Dog” generation. I was more of a Captain Kangaroo / Pie in Soupy’s face / Rocky and Bullwinkle kid.

So when I joined my young son, “E,” to watch “Clifford” every afternoon in the early 2000s, I was a confused outsider. Was Clifford unusually big? Or was Emily Elizabeth, his owner, his dog pals Cleo and T-Bone and, come to think of it, every last resident of Birdwell Island unreasonably small? I was a new dad, what did I know?

I spent a lot of time while the show was on thinking about this. Eventually, confusion led to outrage. Clifford and his family had moved out of their urban tenement because he was too big to fit into the cramped apartment. With space the issue, the family inexplicably chose to move to a small island. The islanders took one look at the big red dog and imagined their island covered in big red poop.

There were murmurings that Clifford didn’t fit in. That he was going to cause big red problems. Know what turned them around? Filled them with affection? They found out that Clifford was useful. Like the time a fire was too big for the citizenry to extinguish. Clifford drank water from the lake and sprayed the fire out.

“Now everyone loves Clifford!” Emily Elizabeth gushed. Viewed as an allegory, “Clifford” is hardly an upbeat children’s show with dogs. It is a chilling reminder that someone with special needs (in this case big redness) can be ostracized at any moment — unless they’re productive, unless they can prove their worth.

Except for the occasional moral shortcoming, the shows on PBS Kids, like “Clifford,” were wholesome, and a new parent could be reasonably confident that his child would not be exposed to sarcasm, slapstick or irony.

I discovered that there were worse things than the exploitation of Clifford — “Barney,” for one. Mercifully, our “Barney” period lasted about a day. “Teletubbies” less than that. But I watched and absorbed multiple episodes of The Big Comfy Couch, Bob the Builder, The Wiggles and Caillou, the 4-year-old boy who, unlike most other cartoon children, does act his age.

What all these shows have in common is that they don’t care about the adults in the room. Watching, trying to find a morsel of intellectual stimulation to keep me from gouging out my eyes — that was my lot in life.

ARTHUR

“Arthur” was completely different. Yes, the characters were all animals (Arthur himself was an aardvark with glasses), but they didn’t wear their genus on their sleeves. Arthur, Muffy, Buster, Francine, Binky and the Brain were nominally third graders, but trying to hold them to that would have spoiled the fun. It was so easy to suspend disbelief.

And what you got in exchange were characters and scripts that were clever, didn’t talk down to anyone and (shh!) entertaining.

If the show had a creed, it was: “Read.” Arthur’s last name is Read. Arthur began as a series of illustrated books. Moving the reading mantra from the page to TV was ironic, but there we go suspending disbelief again.

In Elwood City (founder, cartoon lumber magnate Jacob Katzenellenbogan), the town library had a big role. A library card was just as liberating as a driver’s license.

During the Harry Potter mania of the early 2000s, the characters on “Arthur” competed to be the first to read the next Henry Skreever book.

It wasn’t easy. In “Prunella's Special Edition," classmate Prunella receives a special monogrammed copy of “Henry Skreever and the Cabbage of Mayhem” in the mail. But there’s been a mixup. Her copy is in Braille.

While at the library in the hopes of learning to read Braille in a hurry, Prunella meets a girl named Marina who is blind and looking to read the latest Henry Skreever book in Braille. A friendship blooms; Marina reads the book out loud for both of them. (As a bonus, both girls learn how to pronounce Persephone.)

Of all the characters, my favorite is DW, Arthur’s younger sister. (They also have a baby sister named Kate.) DW is nominally 5 years old, but her character goes where the script takes her.

DW is a spitfire and woe to the big brother who underestimates her.

In “Prove it!” Arthur won’t let DW come with him and his friend the Brain to the town’s hands-on science museum, the Exploratorium, because he thinks she’s too little and will bug them.

“Arthur, my theory is that one day you’re going to beg to go to the Explorarorium with me,” she tells him.

In the family’s yard, DW builds the“Explainarorium” where she conducts science experiments for neighborhood kids.

Why is H2O the formula for water? she says.

“The O is Oxygen,” she explains. “That’s air. This bucket is full of air. The H stands for Hose. So I turn on the hose which combines with the air in the bucket to make water.”

A horrified Arthur tries to give the real answer. “Prove it!” DW says and Arthur realizes he can’t. He turns to the Brain for help. Brain tells DW he can’t prove it either, but others have and their work is in books and museums.

This gives Arthur an idea, and he runs home to ask his parents if he and Brain can please take DW with them to the science museum.

After a fun day at the Exploratorium, Arthur asks DW, “Now do you see how things really work and why your crazy experiments were wrong?”

“I had only one experiment, Arthur,” DW tells him. “I said one day you’d beg to take me here. And here I am. My experiment was a complete success.”

In the fall of 2001, during the show’s sixth season, the gang gets into video games in a big way. And their teacher, Mr. Ratburn, after an awkward start adapts to the internet just fine. (He discovers online shopping and the “No strings attached Bunraku puppetry discussion group.”) “Sue Ellen Gets Her Goose Cooked” and “The Best of the Nest” are a time capsule of the period when kids were missing sleep to play games on computers that came with CD trays.

CYBERCHASE

Remember when corporations were as likely as not to stick a small “e” or “cyber” in front of the name of their product to make it seem fresh and hip? The “e” was for “electronic,” as in email, and cyber — the tantalizing internet and the guts of the personal computer.

I remember my first forays into that alternate reality. In real life I had a great sense of direction. But when I landed on one website or another, I was confounded by the fact that I had no idea how I got there, where I started from, and why I clicked on the links (it was mostly links, then) that I did. I was in a dream or hallucination. Imagine traveling to a place just by typing it.

Because I was primed, I didn’t need an explanation for why three kids got sucked into cyberspace at the behest of the its great feminine protector known as Motherboard. It was enough to know that Motherboard was under attack by the scheming, vengeful, very bad guy, The Hacker.

This was the premise of “Cyberchase” — the three kids, Matt, Inez and Jackie, must use math skills and some creative problem solving to save Motherboard and cyberspace for another day. The Hacker, voiced by Christopher Lloyd, is aided in his villainy by the not-so-competent Buzz and Delete. The three kids can usually count on the help of screechy-voiced bird Digit, played by the screechy-voiced Gilbert Gottfried (z”l).

The whole look of cyberspace is screechy as well. “I conceived, visualized and designed imagery that felt and looked all but synthetic,” wrote designer Edward Bakst.

Cyberchase came in handy when there was some real-life problem and, instead of explaining an abstraction, I could say, “Remember on Cyberchase when they foiled the Hacker by using doughnuts for money?

To drive a point home, each show ended with a live-action segment. Bianca DeGroat as Bianca and Matthew A. Wilson as Harry took turns working out the episode’s key problem.

There was the time when Bianca couldn’t decide which of two movies to see, so she flipped a coin. It came up heads. Two more coin flips came up heads. One more flip came up tails.

“Is it fair? Even Steven? Fifty-Fifty?” she said suspiciously.

Over the course of the segment, she learned that “You have to flip a lot more than four times” for the results to be fair.

She enlists people waiting in line for a movie to each flip a coin. (Ten people flipping a coin once is the same as one person flipping a coin 10 times, we learn.) But the results still weren’t 50-50. So she takes a bullhorn and asks about 350 people waiting in the bleachers for a football game to each flip a coin. The results were about half heads and half tails.

It’s been about a quarter century since then. DeGroat is now a mom of two. I contacted her to ask about what her kids watch.

“I try to be really intentional with what she watches, really depending on where she’s at in her development,” DeGroat wrote to me about her older child, her 4 1/2-year-old daughter. “Like, right now she has somehow decided that she doesn’t like her curly hair, which I am low-key devastated by, so there is always a curly haired, brown skinned girl in whatever she is watching.

“Right now she loves ‘Meekah’ and ‘Gabby’s Dollhouse,’ and she actually loved ‘Wicked,’ especially Elphaba, so we’re watching (and listening to) a lot of that as well.”

BLELLOW

When I was in nursery school, some idealistic young person with a guitar gathered us together and introduced us to a brand new and thoroughly dispiriting folk song called “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Central to understanding the song was the line, “One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more.” The effect on Puff of the loss of his human friend was devastating: he ceased his fearless roar.

The message was clear to me: Life — friendships, consistency, everything — was gray and tenuous. And not just in the land of Honah Lee.

Eventually the day came. E took the remote control out of my hand and switched off PBS Kids. I tried to lead him back to the quiet and safety of public television, but it was already too late. He was channel surfing.

He landed on “Malcolm in the Middle,” joyfully profane and sentiment free, where the sons bicker and nobody uses their indoor voice. In the early episodes, Malcolm is adjusting to the news that he’s a genius. Older brother Reese can’t seem to rub two brain cells together. Older-still brother Francis is in military school. And little brother Dewey is practically a prop early in the series. Mom Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) is overwhelmed and often loses track of her boundaries. And Dad Hal (Bryan Cranston) would rather be a kid again or, maybe, Walter White.

As I said, that’s where we landed. And in some ways we never left.

The TV channel we watched broadcast two episodes a day, each from a different part of the series. We’d finish one episode from early on when everyone was young and cute and then watch one from late in the series when they weren’t.

That first afternoon, though, I thought E had yanked our innocence away from us. The damn show had commercials. Soon I’d be receiving demands for Nothing-But-The-Crunchberries Cereal and Tang. There would be 40 years of reruns, “Knight Rider” and “Rugrats.”

“Malcolm” turned out to be better than them all. If you’ve never watched the show, there are loads of “Best Ofs.” There was the time Hal went crazy and was attacked by bees. And when Lois, standing precariously at the top of a water slide, began lecturing Malcolm and Reese: “Do you think we’re wealthy?” And when Reese conducted a science experiment and concluded he had made a great discovery. And when best friend, Stevie, decides to make a movie about Malcolm.

I think there were lessons to be learned from “Malcolm,” but I can’t be certain. None of them were about being useful. Or paying attention in math class. I guess if there was something I’d want E to pass down to his children, it’s this: Don’t yell at the boys when you’re all at the top of a water slide.

And don’t push your parent.