Babble

Now, this is a show I can get behind. Pinky's a little girl who lives in the Big Big City with her family, and tells fabulous stories to her little brother which involve using wit and imagination to get out of scrapes. Each episode conforms to a basic formula wherein Pinky has Big Ideas, mines her Story Box for creative juice, and the audience is treated to a nice meaty fifty-cent vocabulary word, which features frequently enough throughout that it often sticks with the young viewer.

Despite her name, Pinky is vocal about her distaste for the color pink and annoyed by the assumption that little girls should love it, which in this age of princessdom is pretty refreshing. When she has wrapped up her fable, the show concludes with a few audience-participation games compelling enough that my kids actually look forward to them and join right in. The silliness factor is high with this show; one of Pinky's adventures concerns everyone's shoes turning to meat, and she has to run around in her salami sandals solving the dilemma. But for young kids, that kind of zaniness passes for high art. In lieu of the late, lamented (by me, at least) Ellen's Acres, Pinky is a pretty worthy role model for ingenuity. – Patti Nichols

If I were ever to write a doctoral dissertation on how a kids TV show can master that thin line between cute and so heinously sweet that you want to choke, Clifford would be Exhibit A. How does the Big Red Dog do it? Clifford is sweet but he doesn't try so damn hard, like that wretched purple dinosaur. He and his friends — Cleo the purple girly-girl poodle and T-Bone, a tough pooch with a heart of gold — learn the requisite lessons about sharing and telling the truth, but they don't get all snotty about it. I also like Clifford because it's one of the rare shows that my kid can watch without me, allowing me a half hour for laundry and Soduku. I interrogated my three-and-half-year-old daughter about her love for the show: "Mom," she said, like I was an idiot, "Clifford is just nice. And he's silly." Good 'nuf for me. — Jennifer V. Hughes

My kids are addicted to Bravo's TV line-up and it's all my fault. It began so innocently, something to watch on a Sunday afternoon. But I knew that eleven-year-old Nathaniel and seven-year-old Serena were hooked when they began seriously discussing, in their free time, the relative merits of the contestants on Top Chef. Serena, being a girl, favored the female contestants and the hottest male. Nathaniel, in addition to being all over the drama that was often engineered between warring chefs, was actually interested in the cooking techniques and often critiqued their choices ("Chocolate? With chicken livers?"). Their addiction soon progressed, and please don't ask me how this happened, to the assigning of names to the various colors of Mike 'n Ike's candies, names that corresponded to their Top Chef chosen. For instance, Marcel? He's yellow. Elia is pink (of course), while Sam, an obvious favorite, is red. Ilan is green and Cliff, who got thrown off the show for unbecoming conduct, is orange. Kind of eerie when overheard, even when you know the context: "I'll give you two Marcels if you give me that Elia." I don't know if my kids will bond quite so strongly with the contestants on the new season, but here's hoping.— Karen Murphy

Jakers! — named after an Irish expression for joy and delight — is the show that I can't wait for my daughter to like. It's aimed at kids aged four to seven, so at three-and-a-half she's a bit too young to get all the nuances, but it's one of the best things on the tube. In the show's unconventional plot device, two modern kids (uh, well, pigs) go to their old Grandpa for advice and stories. As Grandpa reminisces, we see the stories from his youth unfold. He's Piggley Winks and his chums are Ferny the cow and Dannon the duck. All of them have cute Irish accents and are always listening to the radio. Many animated kid's shows now have that interlude with live actors and most of them, frankly, suck. On Jakers!, it's one of the best parts. Real kids watch mimes perform, see Native American dancers, listen to stories told in song. Then, at the end, there's a segment where real grandparents tell stories to their grandkids. It's freakin' adorable. Of course, there's also Mel Brooks (who does the voice of Wiley the sheep). And last but not least, it's brought a bit of the brogue to my daughter already. The other day she told me this story: "Mommy! A monster was chasing me and I said, 'Yikes! Jakers!'"— Jennifer V. Hughes

The one redeeming thing about Jay Jay the Jet Plane, which chronicles the adventures of a pudgy computer-animated airline fleet, is the music. Halfway through each ten-minute episode, the planes take to the sky and sing a rather sweet song that emphasizes the theme of the day. The remainder of Jay Jay's running time is filled with clunky animation (the plane's facial expressions change less than a Botox patient's), dopey "lessons" from Brenda Blue, the airport's human flight controller ("Think about it," she says, after making a startling revelation that colors are everywhere), and the grating speech impediment of Herky, a clingy helicopter who provides an object lesson for kids in how not to take social cues. My son and I will occasionally get sucked in by the theme song — but once the music stops, his interest flags, and I'm reaching for the remote. — Matt Wood

I was tempted to say that Disney shouldn't mess with a classic, but My Friends Tigger & Pooh does right by the original A.A. Milne stories. In this incarnation, Tigger and Pooh team up with a new six-year-old girl named Darby to form the "Super Sleuths" and solve mysteries throughout the Hundred Acre Wood. The classic supporting characters — Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit and Roo — are all there and just as delightful as ever. The show looks gorgeous, with the kind of slick CG animation that one would expect from Disney, and it features recurring songs that had my son singing along after the second episode. The only problem is that it leans a little too heavily on the Dora-esque, "Hey kids, help us solve this problem!" trope. Then again, there are only so many plot devices preschoolers can process. And you have a cold, cold heart if you don't enjoy watching Pooh talk to his tummy. — Matt Wood

Narrated by the main character's grandmother and scored by sickeningly sweet flute riffs, this PBS Kids creation lays on the schmaltz with a steamroller. Caillou, a four-year-old Charlie Brown look-alike, explores his neighborhood, plays with friends and learns the requisite lessons about sharing and patience, often ending in heart-to-heart conversations with his parents, like this:

Dad: Caillou, I heard you made [your sister] Rosie cry today. I know you don't always want to play with Rosie, but she is your sister, so you should be kind to her.

Caillou: Okay, Daddy.

After that, they share some cookies and laugh at each other's milk mustaches. Even my two-year-old rolled his eyes at that one. Nevertheless, something about it turns him into a zombie, and our friends report the same effect on their kids. I suppose if they're going to be mesmerized by a cartoon, it might as well go down with a spoonful of sugar. — Matt Wood

If you tend to avoid animated fairy-tale retellings for fear of bombardment by cookie-cutter blondes with oversized, um, marketing teams, but would love your child to be exposed to the classic folktales of Western culture and beyond, HBO's Happily Ever After might be for you. The animated series refashions the most timeless tales, funking them up and playing fast and loose with the original settings. "The Emperor's New Clothes," for instance, is moved to China, "Robinita Hood" is a female bandit and "Snow White" is retold as a Native American legend. Each new variation drives home the message that fairy tale themes are universal, and it's a delight to see the same old stories given a kick into the modern world. The show is narrated by Robert Guillaume (aw, Benson!) and executive-produced by his wife, Donna. And the voiceovers? I'll just say this: Denzel Washington is Humpty Dumpty. Mm-hmm. - Patti Nichols

The Doodlebops are Disney's answer to The Wiggles, competing for the title of Kids Musical Group Most Likely to Plant Songs in Your Head for Days at a Time. Deedee, Moe and Rooney Doodle are members of a pop band who live in a clubhouse reminiscent of Peewee's Playhouse, complete with trap doors and a talking moose head. The Doodlebops are played by live actors dressed up in wigs and makeup, with fuzzy plush fingers that don't seem to impede their musical abilities. Episodes have a standard format: the band starts in the clubhouse, introduces the theme of the day, gets a visit from their rhyming manager, Jazzmin, then Bus Driver Bob takes them to a concert in the Mystery Machine. (This part has the catchiest song; I always picture Bob smoking pot with the roadies during the show.) It's all a little bit trippy, but the music isn't bad, and it gets my son to do his best pirouetting, fist-pumping dance moves. — Matt Wood

My husband mocks me relentlessly for this, but I'm pretty obsessed with this PBS show. The plot involves three kids — Matt, Inez and Jackie — jumping into "Cyberspace" to rescue it from arch-villain The Hacker, using math skills. Cyberspace, much like outerspace, is filled with other worlds, such as the Dracula-inspired Castleblanca. It's also home to characters like Master Pi, a Zen master who teaches the math behind doubling numbers, and a Steve Irwin doppelganger who just might have snatched the cyber-croc Choocroca from EcoHaven (the kids use algebra to nail the culprit). Christopher Lloyd as The Hacker is deliciously over-the-top, a preening, pocket-protector wearing baddie. Jackie has the best catch phrase of any animated kid I know: when faced with a difficult problem she snaps: "Make room. I gotta pace." Other points in its favor: the episodes have titles like "Return to Sensible Flats," Inez wears cool Daniel Liebskind eyeglasses and my three-year-old daughter laughs hysterically at everything squawked by the wise-cracking robo-bird Digit (voiced by Gilbert Godfried). But the real reason I love it is that I can actually figure out the math problems. Most of the time. — Jennifer V. Hughes