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   Sweet Deals May 3, 2025 at

   Chip and Potato, like many Netflix series, is little more than a vapid screen babysitter. It is excessively cutesy, smiley, and bright. Chip’s school, the Rainbow Forest, is decorated with rainbows everywhere, and everything else is colored in a loud and clashing way. The plots are unfocused; each episode is 11 minutes but only a few minutes of each story are useful action. The rest is made up of hyperactive nonsense and annoying, repetitive song sequences to pad the runtime and distract from the fact that the storyline isn’t clever or interesting (and frankly, I am sick of “doing the welcome walkies” to school, or turning morning roll call into a disco ball dance party). Each episode leads directly from one to the next, because viewers are expected to binge them one after another instead of enjoying them individually, because none of the episodes have enough content in them to satisfy the viewer.

   Chip is four years old and is entering kindergarten for the first time. She has a pet mouse named Potato whom she carries around everywhere, but she asks Potato to pretend she’s only a toy and not a real mouse because she’s afraid her parents will get upset with her for having a real live mouse friend. Potato is Chip’s secret friend who helps Chip when others aren’t looking.

   The (mediocre and annoying) theme song sings that Chip is “fantastic at everything [she does]”. That is an eye-rollingly terrible lie. Chip wants to prove she’s a big girl and she can be independent; that is, she wants to prove she can do things on her own. However, while her parents smile a lot and tell Chip that she’s great, they routinely tell her she’s too small and that doing big-kid things is too hard for her, so she should wait until she’s bigger. Chip still volunteers to do the big-kid stuff anyway, but inevitably she always messes up or falls short, so in order to get things done she has to stop and ask someone else to help her do it or hold her hand while she does.

   One series of episodes goes like this: it’s show-and-tell day at school, and Chip wants to bring a cardboard dollhouse she made herself to show-and-tell. A classmate accidentally sits on the dollhouse before she gets the chance to show it. Chip scrambles to try and fix it, but there’s really nothing she can do. Potato covers for her by pretending to be a toy as her new show-and-tell item. Chip’s teacher sees what happens and tries to spare her feelings, saying that Chip obviously cares deeply for her toy and offers her the chance to take his own plush toy home to prove she can be responsible and take care of it. Chip accidentally forgets her teacher’s toy and leaves it behind in the park, and that night, it rains. She runs out of the house in the dark and in the rain to retrieve the toy and is praised for recovering it, even though it’s all wet and dirty. Chip realizes the toy is ruined and tries to clean the toy herself, but she only makes things worse when the toy falls apart. Then, Mom intervenes and sews the toy back together by herself, and doesn’t teach Chip how to repair her own mistake. Chip is then praised for taking such good care of the toy, even though she really hasn’t.

   When Chip does succeed, she’s given lots of extra cheerleading to make her small accomplishments feel like big ones. Her friend Nico is an exceptionally good piano player for his age, but Chip can only play a few notes. Nico’s excellent performance is considered ordinary, but Chip’s family performs a huge impromptu concert to celebrate Chip learning to play three notes. Chip is not a developmentally disabled dog, where this kind of behavior would be understandable. She’s a perfectly ordinary dog, and this kind of excessive praise often feels overwrought and undeserved.

   Other plots have Chip lose confidence and say she’s not ready to do something even when all the other kids have gone ahead of her, so the adults have to praise her so she’ll feel better about being a step behind. If Chip had done the kinds of things she’s done in this show thirty years ago, such as ending a sleepover early because she misses her parents who only live next door, her older brother and classmates would have mocked her relentlessly for it rather than have her parents coddle her for deciding that she’s not ready and giving up so soon.

   Back in the 1990s, many of the animators that worked at Nickelodeon had a philosophy that children were much smarter than adults gave them credit for. They created shows that reinforced the idea that kids, even at very young ages, could handle their own problems and be self-sufficient if they simply put their minds to it. Today, modern cartoons tell kids that even if they can’t do it, they’re still great anyway. If they try to do something basic on their own, they’ll fail, so they better ask someone else to help or cover for them because they won’t be able to figure it out for themselves. When they do fall and hurt themselves, instead of showing them that one scrape isn’t a big deal and they can simply bandage it and keep going, one scrape means that the fun is over and it’s time to go home and nurse the pain with popsicles. Constantly insulating children from failure, discomfort, and boredom robs them of important opportunities to learn how to be resilient and self-reliant. This kind of saccharine coddling not only hurts children, but it hurts adults, too. If you were constantly being told you couldn’t handle big responsibilities, you’d just mess up and make everything worse if you tried, you need grown-ups to cover for all your mistakes, saw how all the other kids are much more capable than you are and regularly got blatantly overpraised for underperforming, eventually you’d develop a deep sense of inadequacy and get too anxious and depressed to do things for yourself. Learned helplessness is far more destructive than any absurd identity politics. It erodes people’s sense of agency until they can’t do anything except sit around, eat takeout and watch bad Netflix shows because they’ve lost the confidence and the motivation to do anything else. And that’s what the woke really want; a population of anxious, inadequate, dependent adult children who can’t do anything for themselves.

   Chip and Potato is a mediocre show that encourages mediocrity. It’s a dull waste of time. Now, I need to take some anti-Netflix pills to get the sickeningly-sweet taste of loud rainbow colors and overpraised mediocrity out of my mouth.

   Let’s move on to the intersectionality:

   The school principal is a female llama who uses a wheelchair, because being permanently seated is an inclusivity requirement.

   After the elderly zebra family leaves the neighborhood, a new zebra family with two fathers moves into their old house shortly afterward, because homosexual couples are an inclusivity requirement, too. I’ve noticed that Netflix shows are dubbed in multiple languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Eastern European; countries where homosexuality isn’t tolerated, especially not on TV intended for children. And yet, it’s a requirement for Netflix shows to check the homosexuality box. Do the episodes containing homosexuality still run in those countries, or are they blocked or censored?

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