'I Love You, You Hate Me' Review: Peacock's Unconvincing Barney Documentary

I love you, you hate me Don’t want just empty celebration’ nostalgia, which I really respect, but it doesn’t have enough intellectual ammo to convincingly come up with a more ambitious View. It’s up to the audience to fail to fully explore whether its biggest debate makes I love you, you hate me borderline attack – once you’re parallel with the Barney haters in Charlotte Aside from the clunky structure and major sourcing issues in the white supremacist march in Zwil, the line is really blurry — or just flawed, and its title probably won’t inspire either in this documentary extreme.

As a reminder, Sheryl Leach is at 1988, When the PBS affiliate is at 1988. Barney & Friends ran away season and became iconic almost immediately thanks to its diverse cast Lineups, catchy songs, and a positive message of positive repetition. At the same time, it provoked a backlash, became the target of mockery and abuse, and spawned the urban legend of the so-called Barney’s Curse, despite the disproportionate tragedy experienced by Leach’s family.

I Love You, You Hate Me Trying to get a foothold in the two most prevalent nostalgia-driven genres in documentaries . They are contradictory genres. On the one hand, the things you loved as a child are still special and divine. In that category, I read about Mr. Rogers’ neighbors , Sesame Street and Read Rainbow in the last five years. And then there’s the one you liked as a kid that had a lower belly that should have been noticeable even then – those doctors who project light into the fleeting darkness of memory like Beanie Baby or Menudo.

In short, Childhood Confirmer and Childhood Destroyer.

Avalon’s documentary requires both, but this duality keeps it from doing things well.

The biggest problem is that Cheryl Leach refused to participate. Given what happened to her family, you can understand why. But if Barney & Friends has/has a meaningful and deep spirit, then she is the one who knows it. Aside from “Kids Love Dinosaurs”, “Kids Love Love” and “Kids Love Repetition”, hardly anyone here knowsBarney & Friends was a huge success The reason.

It’s baffling to have music director Bob Singleton in the room with no clue about the structure of the earworm songs on the show. Disappointingly, longtime Barney suit-wearing David Joiner was present and used him as a joke, lewdly laughing about his current profession as a “tantric energy healer” rather than talking about his performance What makes Barney so relevant. Every once in a while, you get an observation that feels concrete and meaningful—for example, child actress Pia Hamilton reflects on the importance of bringing her Filipino ancestry to her character—but more commonly, “We one big happy family” cliché.

The consensus throughout seems to be that Barney & Friends succeeded because the show unapologetically targeted Preschool audiences are on their own terms, making it a rare show for this demo, which makes no effort to provide anything for the accompanying adults. Then, one by one, it was baffling that a curriculum tailored only for three-year-olds both angered older audiences at the time and did not provide the ongoing wisdom to nourish a generation that once loved the show. Maybe there is a causal relationship between those things that no one here wants to delve into. Just like what works in the short term can be wrong in the long term. But what does this mean? There is a gap between irrational hatred and meaningful criticism, I love you, you hate me not ready to deal with it. Obviously people love the show or hate it for petty and revenge reasons.

Exploring these trivial and vindictive reasons yields different results here. Former Blue’s Clues host Steve Burns is actually pretty good at talking about the effectiveness of Barney’s method because he knows children’s TV better than anyone who assembles The logic and resonance of the talking head. Most experts and analysts offer some interesting rationalizations. Is there an undercurrent of homophobia in hating Barney? Maybe, but just saying that he is purple and presents an atypical masculinity description is an introductory sentence rather than a proof. Is the hatred of Barney just enough to meet the ever-expanding needs of the internet, and is it the first example of the internet’s discourse style characterized by hate? The first is definitely yes, the second is definitely yes.

But there is a leap between that and the quote at the top of the comment – a huge leap. Can you make a documentary that successfully demonstrates the views of anti-hate advocates? Definitely, though not your most attractive talking head is the San Diego Chicken mascot, which fits the character perfectly.

Fortunately, Santiago Chicken does not comment on hate and hate crimes, not even his own crimes against Barney, which the judge ruled were protected by parody. But the documentary has other oddballs commenting on things they’re not qualified to discuss, especially filling the void left by Shirley Ritchie’s absence. Like, why is the grown-up founder of the Barneys fan club talking about the details of Leach’s marriage? Because someone has to, I guess? Otherwise, the only person in the documentary close to the family is a former nanny whose exact credentials were never established, so she was allowed to speculate on everything with the same vague authority.

That babysitter was also used as a suspense between the first and second “episodes” that really should have been edited into -minute documentary. The babysitter shows up at the end of the first hour and says she’s thought about it and now has something to say about Shirley Leach’s son, and then we get to episode two and she really doesn’t have much to say. There’s a lot of false suspense like this in a “series” that feels more sensational, but isn’t actually any more interesting, given the need to make fun of Peacock’s ad breaks. It’s a silly and artistically antagonistic format that makes an otherwise entertaining documentary — even if underdeveloped — seen as more rubbish than it needs to be.