When Comcast acquired a controlling stake in NBCUniversal in 2011, its stake in Sprout went under the NBCUniversal umbrella. Sprout was co-founded by Comcast, PBS, Sesame Workshop, and HIT Entertainment. Launched in 2005, it was owned by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation. All right, you won’t find this on “The Barefoot Contessa.Sprout, formerly known as PBS Kids Sprout, was a cable television channel aimed at preschoolers. The food revolution has extended its tentacles here, too, resulting in a recipe for spiky, rice-infused meatballs. The emphasis is on making things bird feeders out of yogurt containers and ketchup-bottle lids, bricks from milk cartons. It too has an idle-hands-and-minds-are-the-devil’s-workshop feel about it.
Sprout tv shows series#
There were lessons in foreign words and echolocation (that’s animal sonar, for you adults).īy far the most interesting of the series is Sprout’s new live-action program, “Noodle and Doodle,” on weekend mornings. In one bit a mama bear instructed her child in the virtue of exercise. The emphasis on activity and knowledge acquisition didn’t necessarily seem compatible with the effects of a glass of zinfandel on an exhausted mother. But “The Good Night Show,” intended to help children decompress, returned this viewer to a state of confusion. Later in the day, “The Sprout Sharing Show,” a kind of show-and-tell that features videos submitted by viewers, feels less like mini-adult television. Just like “Today,” it is live and has its own versions of Willard Scott, positioned on sets seemingly forged from Play-Doh who say things like, “Milo is 4 and Milo is from Peru, Ind., and it is windy there.” Why this is better than subjecting a child to an actual NBC weather map is unclear. “The Sunny Side Up Show,”which runs each morning, for instance, is meant to be a kind of “Today” show for toddlers. The channel has a cheerful, earnest Yankee sense of industry about it, in line with the current fashion in parenting for scheduling.
It borrows programming previously shown on the air the still odious “Barney & Friends,” the still unsurpassable “Sesame Street,” and so on for some part of the day and devotes the mornings, a portion of the afternoon and the evening to original blocks of shows that are meant to correspond with the rhythms of the hour. Begun five years ago by PBS, Sesame Workshop and several private media companies, Sprout is aimed at 2- to 5-year-olds and competes with channels like Nick Jr. There may be toddlers who, though they have never watched a single second of “Dora the Explorer,” could hand you a nacho and talk third-down conversions.īut is it fair to force a child to live on Crimson Tide football alone? With this in mind, I approached an informal critical survey of Sprout. A baby getting increasingly mobile does not sit still during a changing of clothes unless, according to studies conducted in my living room, he’s put in front of a TV for a minute or two whether it’s “iCarly” or Harry Reid on “Morning Joe.” And fathers who love sports tend to feel that ESPN does not count as actual television. I understand how addictive the medium is, but refusing it (as the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends for children under age 2) feels too sanctimonious and unrealistic. Friends and strangers have posed this question to me repeatedly since my son was born a year ago, and I have yet to formulate a position. A NEW mother, who is also a television critic, is inevitably asked whether she will permit her child to share her public pleasure.
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