Dear all, I join you from the most abrupt vibe switch I've experienced in years. On Wednesday night, forgetting the date, my friend Melissa and I booked to see Dorian: The Musical at Southwark Playhouse. A “modern queer fairy-tale” based on Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, we went straight from there to the Antic Pub in Elephant and Castle where everyone was, quite understandably, standing on the tables, singing. IT’S COMING HOME!! What a night. Also, shout out to new Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy for visiting CBBC already. I can barely keep up.
Anyway, the premise of Dorian: The Musical is that illegitimate grandson of the OG Dorian Gray is a rock star, the painting is a photo and everyone is very serious indeed. Now, look, call me old-fashioned, but if you call a stage show “XXXXX: The Musical” I am expecting there to be laughs, right? A knowing raised eyebrow, a touch of camp, some cheeky songs. But no: turns out this modern queer fairy tale is played very straight. Big feelings, sincere songs, a lot of on-stage deaths. 😬 At the same time, the singing was excellent and the costumes were enjoyably bonkers. I know how hard it is to do anything creative, from typing this, to picking up a paintbrush, to staging a musical, so I won’t be too mean about it.
But I will be mean about possibly the worst children’s TV show I’ve ever seen.
Babies / Who watched him when he rose to weep / And when he crouched to pray
Sometimes, when a TV programme starts, there’s some names it's just good to see. Tina Fey? Absolutely, yes please. Russell T. Davies? Fantastic. Steven Moffatt? This is going to be great, if a little prObleMatiC for the laydeez. Catherine Williams? Legend of kids TV. Andrew Davenport and/or Ragdoll? This is worth my licence fee on its own. So imagine how it feels when the executive producer is… IMC toys. Not a human person with experience of writing, directing or acting in a TV show, oh no. Just Barcelona’s premier peddlers of plastic nonsense. Let’s talk about two of the shows they mastermind. This week we’ll explore Cry Babies: Magic Tears; next week we’ll talk about VIP Pets, before switching up your whole life with a Netflix Block Button Tutorial.
Watching CB:MT is probably the closest you can come to experiencing a severe head injury without incurring lasting damage. Dozens of babies inexplicably inhabit a brightly-coloured world, where they are dressed in cute onesies (rainbow, ladybird, pinata llama, sparkle unicorn… you know the drill). They get lost, think their birthdays have been forgotten, receive mysterious parcels, until some plot point is reached. And then they cry – yes, full on wah wah wah crying, because you didn’t have enough of that when you had a newborn, right? – and everything gets magically fixed.
I want to give you a better description than that, but… I can’t. I can’t because the writing is so atrocious I have no clue what’s going on, even though I took the 20th century French Literature paper in my final year at university and am fine with unreliable narrators/textutal lacunae/the works of actual Sartre. This isn’t Margeurite Duras intentionally leaving a (w)hole at the centre of the protagonist’s experience. This is….ChatGPT? A bored intern who never learned how stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end? A nepo baby Cry Baby? As viewers, we are just dumped in the baby playland with some characters and they do some stuff. Exposition??? Cry harder, viewing parents. You shall have not one crumb. (Ironic that we got loads in Dorian: The Musical, even though everyone knows the story).
Like, Whatever Bestie, I’m So Totally Crying rn
On top of this, the dialogue is deeply strange. You know when people have Instagram reels and the girl robot AI voice reads out the subtitles – “Get ready with me for my ultimate prom”? It sounds like that. I feel an actual robot voice would have been too expensive (it’s a few years old, so precedes the ScarJo/Her/OpenAI drama). Is it just one actress doing all the voices? Or a few of them who sound eerily similar? Why do the babies sound like valley girls who’ve popped one Xanax too many? Like, I have so many questions? Me do cry cry until answer have.
I wish I could tell you more, but after even a few minutes, I can feel my brain cells atrophying. Oh no, Spotty Dotty and Cutie Tooty are sick! Who are they? Why should I care? Crying!!! All the characters do is get sick, take on too much and have a meltdown, which is somehow less relatable than it sounds. The other thing they do is get hypnotized. I feel super creeped out by hypnosis as a plot point in children’s TV. Mummy, why have they got swirly eyes… errrrr. This is not a good thing to be explaining to children. Mind control is not a good concept to be modelling to five year olds. They are trying really hard to control their own minds, to do things like sit at the dinner table, not run out into traffic, and pass the marshmallow test – introducing the concept of mesmerism just confuses things.
Finally, and most importantly: crying magically fixes things??? What a great lesson to teach our children*.
There’s probably a very highbrow criticism to be made about the fetishisation of female sadness, emotional labour (the babies could live carefree lives in a land of plenty, yet all they do is care for poorly pets… it’s giving Simone de Beauvoir) and maybe some deep underlying Spanish Catholic ~issues~, but I’m not going to bother, because it’s actually so unwatchably bad all that clever stuff is superfluous. Don’t just take my word for it: it has 4.3/10 on IMDB and this normally very nice, chill, funny, relaxed subreddit went with “Who ever created this literally needs to be castrated and I presume they're in some kind of witness protection after the show aired.”
So, that’s CB:MT. It exists. In fact there are seven series, for some unfathomable reason. The mere act of re-watching a couple of episodes to write this has aged me by several years. And I don’t even have a picture of myself in an attic to take the strain.
*Important disclaimer, obviously I am not saying crying is bad, we all need a little cathartic weep every now and then! Big feelings are valid. But crying as a magic deus ex machina plot resolution device? No thank you.
For a show of this type that's far better than it needs to be, Cory Carson (https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80237347) is quite an interesting case study. It's very clearly there to sell toys - it's made by VTech. But the writing is both sincere and funny, with several jokes that punch above their weight in most episodes (some good rule-of-three gags and a nice running thing in which the local coal train is called John Coal Train - not a joke as such but also that reference doesn't need to be made unless you're doing it at least somewhat out of love for the writing).