Amazon aims more shows at youngsters
It is already the fourth season of Amazon Studios pilots — they are having such fun that last year they did it twice — in which prospective series are paraded for public view and comment.
It is no longer an experiment, and it shows.
The grown-up series make the news — Transparent, for example — but there is a children’s wing to the studio, too.
Whereas the adult Amazon pilots have tended toward the slightly edgy tone of premium cable, the kids’ shows — aimed at young eyes and meant to be more or less improving — have tended to be more familiar, more conservative.
Still, the latest crop of pilots — released to public view this week at Amazon.com — are mostly accomplished and ambitious, and perhaps just a little crazier. (They are also presented as more-finished products than in seasons past.) Half are directed toward preschool viewers and half ostensibly toward viewers 6 to 11, although the best will appeal to older kids as well.
What they share is the notion that children can, and often must, take control of their environment.
The Stinky and Dirty Show is a Cars- type cartoon about a garbage truck and a backhoe. They meet in the opening episode, and quickly form an effective cooperative dyad. It’s a problemsolving show, with an engineering thrust. In the pilot we learn that melons do not make good wheels and that round rolls better than square. Can you deny it? The show has an attractive handmade, crayon-andconstruction-paper look that I hope isn’t merely a function of an economizing pilot.
Buddy: Tech Detective a computer-animated series in which the child viewer is invited to help the characters solve problems. I approve of an evidence-based show pushing the scientific method, but the characters giggle too much.
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The third preschool pilot, Sara Solves It —a math-skills program with partial backing from WGBH-TV in Boston — was also among the first crop of Amazon kids’ pilots and the most finished and accomplished of them. It has an urban setting and a funky vibe. And, this time around, the episode has more characters.
Just Add Magic, adapted from a youngadult novel, is a liveaction fantasy series in the Gortimer Gibbons vein, about three young girls who are best friends. They discover a book of recipes that might, in fact, be a book of spells, and key to an epic battle of magical suburbia whose proportions are suggested only in its closing moments. It is predictable, and a little too forward with the charm, but likable and promising.
The handsomely made Niko and the Sword of Light is an animated adventure with nods to Lord of the Rings — child warrior Niko is on his way to a Cursed Volcano to rid his land of “the darkness” — and some visual debts to Don Bluth. The pilot handily mixes the epic and the vernacular; the storytelling is solid, the lines good, the jokes land, and the creatures (a lot of what might be called American swamp mutants) are memorable and memorably designed.
The best of the bunch is Table 58, a sparky single-camera middleschool comedy set among a group of misfits and reminiscent in tone of the great Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide. (Eating lunch at Table 58, one says, is “slightly better than eating alone in the bathroom. Never mind; it’s the same.”)