Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared is a 6-episode, British web series made by filmmakers Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling that satirizes children's televisions programs and how the television industry in general can contort simple ideas for a darker purpose. In order to fully understand this review, I recommend at least watching the first, third, and sixth episodes.
Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C_HReR_McQ
Episode 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtkGtXtDlQA
Episode 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXOdn6vLCuU
Episode 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9FGgwCQ22w
Episode 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS_Xq7gSCBM
Episode 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbL-NSkXnl8
Each episode, with the exception of the last one, follows a formulaic pattern: the protagonists, three unnamed puppet characters, do a normal activity like playing a board game or having an picnic only to be strung into a musical number by the episode's "teacher". The topic each teacher focuses on can range from ordinary life skills like healthy eating or using the internet to broader, more subjective ideas such as creativity or love. However, each lesson, in one way or another, becomes more sinister and brutal as it goes on, often happening in short burst during the lesson and completely devolving at its closure.
Throughout the series, it is made painstakingly clear that the world that the protagonists live in is not real. The entire world of the series is made of felt and is brightly colored, which is heavily contrasted by dark imagery and sinister ideas. In the climaxes of episodes 1 and 4, there are shots that reveal things such as director's chairs, boom mics, and cameras.
The focus of each episode is not to satirize the lesson itself, but how it is taught. In the first episode, which focusses on creativity, the teacher makes great efforts to both force creativity into the lives of the protagonists and make creativity as subjective as possible. In a scene where the teacher attempts to show the protagonists how to look for shapes in clouds, the teacher tells them to "take a closer look" after they fail to find any shapes. After that line, the clouds rearrange themselves into shapes that are then sung by the puppets, implying that cloud shapes were actually made by the teacher and not the protagonists' creativity. The teacher continually attempts to limit the creativity of the yellow puppet in particular, telling him that his favorite color, green, was "not creative" and destroying a clown painting he made, telling him to slow it down. This behavior is eerily reminiscent of a dominant force giving the non-dominant masses a controlled form of freedom that completely contradicts freedom's true meaning - the teacher restricts creativity for the puppets to what it considers creativity, effectively manipulating them under the idea that they are in control.
The theme of teachers restricting typically broad ideas to specific, manipulative definitions is continued with the third episode's lesson on love. The teacher of this episode effectively forces his topic into the episode, stating that the yellow puppet's stomach was growling because he was not hungry, but lonely. He whisks away the puppet to see his "friends" who help perpetuate the lesson further. The teacher then forces his own dogma onto the yellow puppet, stating that he must save his love for his "special one", a character portrayed as a bastardized, feminized version of the puppet, and that love must be sealed with a ring, with a helper chiming in, "that's the way that all love goes", effectively teaching that heterosexual marriage is the only kind of sacred love. The teacher then guides the yelling puppet to come worship "Malcolm", a massive stone idol who the teacher and his friends call "the king of love" as a parody of religion. Soon after, the yellow puppet finds himself being indoctrinated into the cult of Malcolm, being told that his heart will find its home and that he will never lose his special one, jabbing at the hypocracy of religion's tendencies to indoctrinate followers under guises of community and love, whereas love can be felt in many different ways outside of what society associates it with. This episode, like the last one, forces a conformist, restrictive idea onto a very subjective element of life, satirizing both how easy it is for television to deliberately or non-deliberately misrepresent these ideals to maintain control over the masses and keep traditions from changing.
The ending of the series, to me, is what defines Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared as a satirical look at the possible corruption of the television industry and not a meaningless rant. After every character except for the yellow puppet has been removed from the "show", he is forced to face the episode's teacher(s) alone. However, the red puppet, after failing to come to terms with reality outside of the "show" discovers a dark secret: the show is actually a simulation implied to be created by a character named by the creators as Roy - a silent, brooding figure identified as the yellow puppet's father. The red puppet then cycles through a number of different teachers that eventually drive the yellow puppet mad. Roy stretches his hand over to the red puppet's shoulder in a sympathetic manner, seemingly trying to get him to understand his actions towards his son. The red puppet instead walks over to an oversized plug outlet powering the machine producing the teachers, intending to unplug. He stairs towards the camera asks the audience what will happen before unplugging the machine and cutting the video to black. However, the show seemingly restarts, with the three puppet characters in their exact starting positions from the first episode, but with their palettes swapped. The characters' new colorings directly parallel their favorite colors from the first episode, showing how the "show" has stayed the same, but with few, reflective changes. This idea coincides with a date emphasized throughout the series, June 19th, finally moving along to June 20th, implying that this reboot has made something in the world of the "show" fundamentally different.
To me, this ending emphasizes the message that Becky and Joe are trying to get through: while the television industry may appear to stay stagnate, it does change in subtle, meaningful ways. In this day and age, it isn't uncommon for control of the television industry to shift from those who use television for higher, more malicious purposes (Roy) to those who, despite still working within the boundaries of the industry, manage to give television heart and morals (the red puppet). Everything stays, but it still changes. Ever so slightly, in little ways.
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