Edutainment means shows that blend an entertaining story with educational material. For example, The Magic School Bus tells stories while also teaching about science.
There are educational shows for adults, they’re usually called documentaries. But any that blend educational material with fiction? I guess an argument can be made that biographical films fall into this category but they usually take creative liberties and aren’t fully historically accurate. An argument can also be made for medical dramas and legal dramas, but I’m not sure how accurate the medical and legal information in them is. Of course, The Magic School Bus also takes creative liberties and has inaccurate science, but there’s always a segment at the end explaining where they took creative liberties.
How I Met Your Mother kind of had the vibe of a kids show that teaches moral lessons, but for adults. Edit for clarity: the reason I bring this up is I consider “moral of the week” a genre closely related to edutainment but not quite the same thing
Edit: now that I’m thinking about it, I guess Jeopardy and other trivia based game shows could qualify as edutainment. They’re not fictional, but they do blend entertainment and education
10 watch Look Around You
20 goto 10Thanks, ants.
I used to fall asleep to that show.
Mindfield by Vsauce
No such thing as a fish podcast and TV show on bbc called Qi are all about fun and interesting facts
Now that I’m thinking about it some more, shows like All On The Family could qualify. It’s a fictional show that sought to educate the audience about social and political issues
many shows of that era. barney miller, sanford and son, star trek, mash. Heck even I dream of genie and bewitched had some moral tales. Honestly morality was really common in shows but the tv fare got sorta crappy at a certain point.
I love Star Trek. And Bewitched
its funny because I did not think much of it or I dream of jenie when they were pretty close to new but rewatching I have respect for the female leads who both played multiple chracters in the show pretty effectively. Where I am at they do a star trek evening block with TOS followed by TNG and now I see diana troys mom in nurse chappel and vice versa. Shows really seem to start going down hill in the late 70’s and through the 80’s but maybe Im forgetting something great.
Ze Frank on YouTube does animal documentaries spruced up with dick jokes and silly talk.
+1 for Ze Frank’s True Facts, I love those
Sounds fun
i hope there are at least a few animal dick jokes??
If you haven’t yet watched Cosmos with Carl Sagan as the host, you should consider watching it. It’s borderline not what you asked for because it doesn’t really have fiction, however Carl was so incredibly good at storytelling and making incredibly complex Science understandable through his awesome narrative abilities, I’d recommend it if you hadn’t already seen it.
Some other mentions -
Chernobyl - HBO drama of the disaster, but the last episode goes into extreme detail of the actual event and why things happened the way they did. Fascinating
MythBusters - I’m sure you have likely seen this but it’s entertaining and you learn a lot. Lots of jokes and personality.
Forged in Fire - show where blacksmith/bladesmith contestants compete to make forged blades using varied metals, and then the judges put those finished blades through grueling tests, to ultimately crown a single smith as the winner each episode. I’m not anywhere close to this profession, yet it taught me a TON about blacksmithing and bladesmithing, and if I had an acreage with a big shop, I’d definitely be doing it as a hobby. So cool to see the things they create.
Those sound interesting. I have seen Mythbusters. That was a fun show
Adam Savage has a cool one season show called “Savage Builds” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10233836/)
The Newsroom - this clip, from the pilot, you’ve probably seen.
Deep dives into 21st century US History, as it happened in real time. Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) style. Remixed with melodrama about the people within the Newsroom. Sloan Sabbith is my favourite.
Topics include:
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Deepwater Horizon
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SB 1070 (Arizona’s racist detention law)
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the Gabrielle Giffords shooting
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Arab Spring
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Citizens United ruling
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Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident
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the Death of Osama bin Laden
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Glass-Steagall Act (this video threads a few scenes together)
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the Tea Party (described as the American Taliban) - significant because The Tea Party is antecedent to MAGA
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Occupy Wall Street
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The Boston Marathon bombing
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Climate Polycrisis (chef’s kiss)
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Edward Snowden leaks
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How I Met Your Mother? Teaching morals? I think we didn’t watch the same show.
With this logic just watch any reality TV and it will look like a moral lesson too.
In each episode, the narrator attempted to instill some kind of moral to his children. I’m not saying it did a good job, I’m just saying that seemed to be the intent. Or perhaps they were trying to parody shows with moral lessons
The show is extremely immoral, no consistency (which is also necessary for morals to work in a show), and shows immoral characters positively (that’s why people love Barney for example even though the guy should at least be in jail).
So while The Good Place is a working recommendation that someone else made (that still has a LOT of flaws but at least try to add some concepts of morality, philosophy, etc), HIMYM does the opposite of that by refusing to ever think about moral issues of what is going on.
So my point is, if HIMYM seemed like a moral-teaching show to you, most shows will be, but that’s not positive.
If you want shows that try to talk about morals, you can look at the (old) star trek. I would say the least bad for that would be TNG and VOY, but they still need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Doctor Who also can work, if you want something a bit more on the horror/thriller/mystery side, but also needs a grain of salt and some critical thinking.
Science fiction in general tries to talk about philosophical subjects, while being entertaining, but a lot of what is seen as science fiction is just action movies in space.
My point was that How I Met Your Mother is structured like a kids show that tries to teach a moral in each episode. I never said it had good morals. In fact it may even be parodying that structure by showing a guy who is really bad at it
But then the show is not educational? I am confused by how you can ask for an educational show, mention HIMYM about its morals as an example, and then say that it might be a parody.
So you want an educational show, or a show that pictures characters trying to be educational within the show, to other characters?
I’m sorry if my mention of it was confusing, it was meant as kind of an aside. I wasn’t comparing it to edutainment, I was comparing it to kids shows that try to teach morals, which I guess is sort of a subcategory of edutainment. I was saying it can be seen as an adult version of a moral of the week type show, albeit a poor one. It was meant as kind of an aside because I don’t consider a moral of the week show as quite the same as edutainment but related to it
Ah, okay. My bad then, I misunderstood the point.
Eh, I’m bad at communicating sometimes
It used to be exclusively what was on Discovery, History and TLC. Even when it was The Hitler Channel, at least they were still educating people on actual history.
Now they’re all crammed full of bullshit “reality” TV or pseudoscientific garbage. Ancient Aliens is what qualifies as adult edutainment now. Real history mixed with absolute marlarkay.
As fof “moral of the week” for adults, I immediately thought of Moral Orel from Adult Swim. But it’s not on the air anymore.
Not familiar with Moral Orel. Yeah Ancient Aliens is the worst. Their whole argument fir Ancient aliens is they think ancient humans were too stupid to do anything
Moral Orel is great. It’s a parody of Davey and Goliath but it’s dark and kinda fucked up. If you don’t know what Davey & Goliath was: Old claymation show about a boy and his dog that taught Christian values to children.
There’s an anime called Dr. Stone that mildly touches on this. People are frozen in stone for thousands of years and when they begin to break out, a scientist shows them how to identify and use resources to replicate our modern tools
Sounds interesting
I enjoy it thoroughly, but it is still in all senses a kids show though.
To add to the anime recs, there’s a whole sub genre of “Cute girls do the author’s special interest” that can be a fun way to incidentally learn some stuff you’d never have thought to interact with otherwise.
The one that comes to mind at the moment is “Ruri Rocks” which is about geology.
Star trek TNG, DS9.
The Orville
I love those shows and they do try to teach a bit about science and sociology but I’m not sure I consider science fiction quite the same as edutainment
What science and sociology did you learn from these shows?
Kind of Americana/nostalgia but The Andy Griffith Show really does this well. In fact, I feel like a lot of the older shows from the 60s did this.
I’m not familiar with that show
Only podcasts, unfortunately 😭😭 sorry.
I would consider MythBusters an edutainment show given there were science, history and entertainment.
Kari and Tory now do a podcast together:
That is a fun example
The Pitt.
Scrubs.
