Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
The most unhinged three puppets on the internet graduated from YouTube to television, and the jump changed nothing about how badly they want to ruin your afternoon. Red Guy, Yellow Guy and Duck sit down for what looks like a friendly lesson, one topic per episode, taught by a cheerful talking object. Jobs, Death, Family, Friendship, Transport, Electricity. By the midpoint of every episode the lesson has come apart into body horror, existential dread and a teacher who usually dies.
Created by Becky Sloan, Joe Pelling and Baker Terry, the trio who made the six viral web shorts between 2011 and 2016, the Channel 4 series keeps everything that made those films escalate so violently: the handmade craft look, the earworm songs, the sudden tonal freefall. What the TV budget added was bigger sets and longer fuse, which makes the detonations land harder. The FLY teaser alone pulled two million views in a day before the series even aired.
Our take: it is a children’s show exoskeleton wrapped around adult nightmare fuel, played completely straight, and the satire of educational television’s manipulative cheerfulness is sharper than it has any right to be. Both the TV series and the original 2011-2016 web shorts stream on Dropout now, and we list all twelve in the episode guide below: the six web originals are Season 1, the Channel 4 run is Season 2. Watch Death or Jobs first. Do not watch at bedtime.
