What made Barney, the purple dinosaur and ’90s kids’ TV sensation, so infuriatingly loathsome? A new two-episode docuseries from Peacock, “I Love You, You Hate Me,” dares to investigate.
”) Barney’s signature hit, “I Love You,” conveys the essence of the show’s approach, from the values-focussed lyrics to the pacing to the melody . The whole enterprise leads with safety and didacticism while insisting it’s having fun. I was in college during Barney’s rise to power, and in my memory, Barney, unlike Big Bird and other expressive, sensitive Muppets of my youth, had a completely immobile face, like a.
“I Love You, You Hate Me” shows that Barney’s creators meant well. The character was created in 1988, in a Dallas suburb, by Sheryl Leach, who’d grown up in the area. “I went to high school with Sheryl,” a friend says. “I’m from a Christian background, and we kept the same moral code.” Leach taught school for several years before working at a family-run company, Developmental Learning Materials, where she met her husband.
Leach considered focussing on a Teddy bear, but Patrick loved dinosaurs. “Kids of all ages are fascinated with dinosaurs,” Bill Nye, a fellow PBS veteran, tells us, waving his hands around. “They’re monsters, they’re vicious—a high-stakes life style.” Leach didn’t want Barney to have sharp teeth—or, the original head writer says, too much personality. He had envisioned a “fun, wisecracking” Barney, inspired by Bruce Willis’s character in “Moonlighting.” Leach had other ideas.
The love and togetherness wasn’t “Barney” ’s problem. The character himself was uniquely unnerving—morethan T. Rex, somehow dopey and condescending at once—and some of the outrage, I suspect, came from viewers’ impassioned feelings about what good educational TV should be. On PBS, “Barney” coincided with the rise of Elmo, the cutesy, shrill, baby-talking Muppet, who, as “Sesame Street” viewership aged down, began to elbow the show’s more lovable characters aside.
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