The dinosaur and the kids-a diverse group of youngsters, brimming with forced cheer-sing strenuously wholesome songs and dance in awkward syncopation. Lest we doubt this, the show’s snappily militaristic theme song, a dulled-down riff on “Yankee Doodle,” sung by children, spells it out: “Barney is a dinosaur / from our imagination,” and so on. In it, a bunch of peppy children hang out at what appears to be an abandoned nursery school, and in later seasons, a park, unsupervised except for a six-foot dinosaur the dinosaur is the authority figure, yet the children have made him up. “Barney & Friends” ran on PBS from 1992 to 2010. “And so let the bashing begin!” Don’t mind if I do. “People couldn’t accept that this was just a show, that it talked about nice things and nice emotions and love and caring,” Al Roker says, frowning on a sofa. (“It’s believed the Pentagon forced prisoners at Gitmo to listen to ‘Barney’ for twenty-four straight hours,” a newscaster adds.) The documentary purports to examine our collective impulse to hate, but it also wants to spill some beans-to reflect, gawk, shudder, and heal-and, in true “Barney” spirit, it pursues its mission while resisting nuance. “I got dismemberment-of-my-family e-mails because of my music,” the show’s music director, Bob Singleton, says.
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Directed by Tommy Avallone, the series takes a “Behind the Music”-style approach to the “Barney & Friends” phenomenon, juxtaposing the show’s wholesomeness and wild popularity with end-of-innocence stunners. What made Barney, the purple dinosaur and nineties kids’-TV sensation, so infuriatingly loathsome? Was it his doofy voice and inane giggle, coming at you like a low-watt Pillsbury Doughboy? His menacing rictus and unnerving hat-band strip of teeth? His shameless abuse of nursery rhymes? His indifference to the anxious smiles on his young friends’ faces as they all danced in lockstep to “Indoor-Outdoor Voices”? The short answer is yes, it is all those things, and, as a result, he and his show inspired an acute degree of animosity a new two-episode docuseries from Peacock, “I Love You, You Hate Me,” dares to investigate. Photograph by Vinnie Zuffante / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty The new documentary “I Love You, You Hate Me” uses Barney to examine a broader phenomenon.
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