Mister Rogers

Back after a few days away. I think I'll be dropping down to 3-4 posts a week so as not to feel bad when I don't post every single day.

For today: One of the odder things I've been doing with my DVR of late is recording re-runs of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. PBS no longer officially broadcasts that show, but individual stations may show it in syndication. Lucky for me, my local PBS station shows one episode twice a weekend at 6:00 AM.

What can I say? Watching that show is like enjoying a cool cup of distilled water after a week of drinking nothing but lukewarm, off-brand soda pop. It's pure and unpretentious at once. Every episode is the same familiar formula--the "Won't You Be My Neighbor" entrance, the changeover from business to sweaters-and-sneakers, some fairly aimless activities, songs, and reflective talk; a trip to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe; and then back with Mr. Rogers for more talk, a song, and then the final changeover and goodbye set to "It's Such a Good Feeling."

And every activity, every song, every reflection unfolds guided Fred Rogers's unhurried, sincere, gentle attention focused right at the camera, i.e., at you, his "television neighbors." He peppers the show with reminders--all delivered naturally, like an old lesson he's just rediscovered--"You know, there's only one person like you in all the whole wide world. You're special and fine because you're you."

Only now, watching it armed with my Professional Dramaturgical Eye do I see how excellent it is on the level of pure craft. Take Fred Rogers as an actor, presenting himself as a character in every show. I mean, Rogers delivered practically the same basic message every day ("you're a special person") and never does it come off as anything but utterly honest, utterly motivated and appropriate to the moment. He has a talent for tapping into some reservoir of joyful fascination with anything--any object, any process, any person--he happens to meet. I know actors who work years and never achieve anything like that level of conviction.

Watching those 6 AM reruns, I realize that part of what makes the show so refreshing, so unusual, stems from its avoidance of any irony, camp, tongue-in-cheekness, or innuendo. We are used to children's programming that operates on at least two levels, one pitched toward the youngsters and one signaling to the adults. There's a winking awareness of grittier or more sexual aspects of life even in shows like Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer (I won't even get into the hyper-sexualized preteen fare of the Disney Channel et al.).

In Mister Rogers, though, what you see is what you get. What people say is purely and literally what they mean. Even the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, a land of fantasy costumes and characters ruled by a puppet king, remains firmly framed as make-believe. On several occasions Rogers shows his audience exactly how the puppets work, reinforcing a realistic substrate to all of the imagination and disguise play going on.

Of course, such unironic sincerity makes the show an easy target for parodies in which a cynical or sexualized subtext gets laced into the show's format. So pervasive are such parodies that I sometimes find myself thinking of the show through the lens of the parodist, i.e., as a doofy, moralizing, high-handed exercise in naivete.

Watching the show, though, erases such misconceptions. Rogers does a surprisingly minimal amount of moral instruction. Most of his reflections and monologues deal not with what you should do or shouldn't do but how things are. "Sometimes we get angry, don't we?" he says with absolute conviction, "Or sometimes we get lonely." And then he pauses to let that sink in. He's surprisingly frank about the reality of unpleasant events, scary things, and sad feelings. There's no theodicy here; the show scrupulously avoids any overtly religious subtext. Things simply aren't always as we would have them.

And what does Mister Rogers do with such darker realities? He encourages us to express them as such, explores our reaction to them, and reassures us that nothing that happens affects the fact of our worth as special people.

Case in point: from an episode I recorded recently and which by some miracle was uploaded to Youtube:







Aside from noting the truly clever songwriting and the talented performers (Rogers as Daniel and Betty Aberlin as Lady Aberlin), I'm blown away by the simple, powerful ethic of valuing the other that's expressed here.

I mean, isn't this precisely what agape is? How different would Christianity be if we imagined God (not always, but sometimes) as the one who sings to us when we feel like mistakes? This would be the God who doesn't merely tolerate us, who doesn't have to hold God's nose to deal with us, who isn't defined by wrathful-with-a-touch-of-grace. This would be the God (and we would be the Church) who sees everyone as a neighbor. This would be the God/Church that sings to everyone they meet that "it's such a good feeling/to know you're alive."

Be well,

JF