Kids’ Content, After the Goldrush

In 1848, a carpenter named James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill in California. Almost overnight, 300,000 people with little or no experience in mining headed out West, bought mules, pick axes and sluice pans, and trod out into the desert looking for gold. Towns sprouted up like milk mushrooms after a rainstorm. There was euphoria and whiskey. There were gamblers and gunfights and snake oil salesmen. A few years later, the party was over. Although some lucky folks made a few bucks, most did not, and by 1858 everyone who could returned to whatever they were doing before their bout of gold fever. What’s left of their irrational exuberance can be seen today in the broken shells of towns ghosting the desert.

I’ve been making preschool shows in one way or another for around 30 years, and I can say with confidence that this small and mostly overlooked corner of the entertainment industry has always attracted two types: The true believers for whom making quality, meaningful content for the youngest viewers is nothing less than a calling, and the more commercial folks who typically see preschool as something like a gateway drug to hook the little ones on a particular platform and/or brand in order to sell them colorful merchandise. Of course there is some spillover — and I myself have tried unsuccessfully to play in both sandboxes for years — but everyone knows which camp they’re in and what their ultimate goals are, for better or worse.

The streaming wars — which, like all wars, are expensive, lead to mass casualties and rarely produce an actual winner — have elicited very different reactions from these two preschool cohorts. For the more commercial types, there has of late been lots of weeping, moaning and gnashing of teeth as they accepted that the gush of commissions that had buoyed their bottom lines has now thinned to a trickle. As one colleague recently described it, “It feels like the children’s industry has sheered apart at the seams … I’m not sure if it’s just happening in Europe or if it’s a global thing, but I’ve never known things to slow down as much as they have!”

So, what happened here?

Well, last year it became all-too-apparent that the subscription models that the streamers prefer suffer from what Deadline calls “still-murky economics.” Producing new shows simply costs too much, there are too many offerings, too few hits, and most families can’t afford (or don’t want to pay) the monthly fees. As a result, the platforms — in a return to rationality — began unceremoniously decommissioning shows and started mass layoffs to slow the hemorrhaging of their stock value. And most of the studios — which have been propped up by the streamers’ war chests — began (and are still) panicking like miners when their canary dies.

That’s the first group. The second group, the preschool zealots (and you know who you are), have had a somewhat different reaction to the bursting of the kids’ streaming bubble. This group has never been particularly rational and they were never in the preschool business for the money — of which, historically, there has been almost none — so they had no reason to give up on this prospect when the gold rush subsided. In fact, many of them — including most the world’s venerable public broadcasters — felt a genuine sense of relief that they could once again have a seat at the kids’ table and return to relevance with their comparatively small bags of gold. In other words, things returned to the way they used to be, which wasn’t so bad.

When I was a teenager we lived year-round in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, a ramshackle hamlet of artists, scientists and vegetarians. It was paradise. But every summer our beloved main street swelled with tourists in nice cars going to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, and though we all appreciated their business, come Labor Day we were quite happy to see them go. This is how it feels today in the community of preschool loyalists as many of the larger companies pull up their preschool stakes and go off in search of their next golden opportunity. Godspeed.

As for the true believers, they will continue doing what they’ve always done: They will reach into the most fragile and uncertain parts of themselves — their own small tracts of land — and extract a few rare minerals to entertain and inspire the young viewers they so faithfully serve. Every great preschool show ever made has come from this same rich soil and every great preschool show always will. So, despite what you may have heard, things are looking up.

Josh Selig is the creator of many preschool series including The Wonder Pets!, Small Potatoes and P. King Duckling. He has received 12 Emmy Awards in multiple categories. Selig is currently the President of China Bridge Content, a company committed to building bridges of friendship and cooperation between China and the world. chinabridgecontent.com