Graham MacAree: So. Sarah and Duck: a great children’s show, or the great children’s show?

Ryan Nanni: The only children’s show. Much like there are many stars but only one sun, Sarah and Duck is the center of our peaceful parenting entertainment system.

GM: It feels like most children’s shows accept that they’re going to slowly drive parents insane and so don’t bother with mitigation strategies.

Whereas Sarah and Duck doesn’t hate us.

RN: No, and this is because Sarah and Duck presents a world that seems much like our own but is, in fact, radically different. Let’s start with the first and most meaningful change: in this universe, all children are quiet.

GM: I wouldn’t swap my children for Sarah. But also, I wouldn’t not swap my children for Sarah (children, don’t read this).

The quietness is so impressive compared to, I don’t know, Paw Patrol. Their introductions couldn’t be more different.

RN: Everything that happens to Sarah and her friends on this show is met with the quiet version of the appropriate emotion. You fall down, and you wince quietly. You get a great present, and you grin and let out a tiny squeal. You eat something that doesn’t taste good, and you stick out your tongue and say “yuck” very softly. Not a single child lives this way, but that doesn’t make it any less aspirational.

GM: Sarah and Duck takes the presumption that quietness is coupled to ‘boring’ and demolishes it through ... I don’t know, sheer surrealism?

Those episodes must be hard to write — there’s no formula. If there’s a problem it’ll get resolved, but the shape of the problem and the shape of the resolution are not telegraphed at all. And mostly interesting, quiet things happen, and are reacted to, quietly. And then the curtain comes down seven minutes later. It’s fascinating that they’ve managed to construct a passable world out of these vignettes.

RN: Sarah and Duck embraces two truths that help with that, I think. The first is that problems come in various sizes. Sometimes your bouncy ball is insufficiently bouncy. Sometimes your yard floods. Both are stressful! The second truth is that resolution often is a matter of shifting your attitude, not changing the world around you. Take an episode where Scarf Lady wants to sell knit goods in the park, but the weather’s too hot for hats or sweaters. The answer isn’t to make something else. It’s to find a different use for those items, so a hat becomes a Frisbee, and a sweater becomes something comfy to sit on in the grass.

GM: The wool Frisbee didn’t work very well, but yes.

Apart from quietness, one of the things I most love about Sarah and Duck is that it is relentlessly, relentlessly kind. The combination of the general placidness and active acts of goodness make it extraordinarily soothing.

RN: There’s not really a mean character on the show, is there?

GM: No. Although Plate Girl is sort of jarring — while she’s not actively antagonistic to Sarah or Duck, she’s a little antagonistic to the ethos. I used to have John in that category too, but Season Three redeems him so thoroughly his appearances in the first two seasons are retroactively better.

Who’s your favorite character?

RN: Probably Moon. He’s got a surprisingly developed backstory and a lot of layers considering the character could literally just be “I’m the Moon, and I hang out in the sky at night.” What about you?

GM: I love Moon as well. It’s the kindness again, I think — we get to see him develop into an extraordinary painter over the first two seasons, and rather than flaunt his skill he is almost perversely appreciative of Sarah’s role in getting him started. I’ve actually started trying to steal his reaction when someone compliments his work: “Do you really think so? That’s very kind of you!” which is a step up from my usual “Well, obviously.”

But since you’ve already picked Moon, I love what they did with Duck.

In a kid’s show about a little girl and her duck, you’d expect them to have the duck talk. Duck doesn’t talk. He’s more communicative and thoughtful than the average duck, but mostly he’s sort of a nuisance who’s just in it for the bread.

RN: They also don’t do the typical kids show thing where Duck only plays one type of foil. He can be the troublemaker, or the coward, or overly helpful, or just tag along.

GM: Right. And then in Season Three, almost a hundred episodes in, they decide to make him preternaturally good at decorating cakes, which is a great delayed payoff to his being fundamentally a duck in all other ways.

RN: Here’s a tricky question. Most television for children is overtly about teaching. Do you think Sarah and Duck adheres to that? If not, is that a strength or a weakness?

GM: Not exactly. But I’m not convinced teaching small children matters much anyway. Really, what you want is to inspire a deep and (hopefully) insatiable curiosity about the world.

By setting up a really interesting world with a coherent, if bizarre, internal physics, I think Sarah and Duck does do that. Things happen pseudo-logically and in repeatable ways. Exploring the world has payoffs in an episode, and well after the episode.

RN: Yeah, the world of the show is oddly fascinating. There are adults, and most of them have normal jobs. (The Cloud Captain is a notable exception.) There’s a big department store and public transit. (Though the bus can also go underwater.) Also all the children seem to live by themselves, but they do responsible things like grocery shopping and cleaning up.

GM: Do they live alone? It’s not clear to me whether the Narrator is an actual presence in Sarah’s life or not.

RN: Let me amend my statement: no child on the show ever refers to their parents or a guardian of any sort.

GM: Right. But the Narrator (he’s played by Roger Allam, who is probably the single biggest reason the show is Quiet) is sometimes obviously Sarah’s dad and sometimes sort of a ghostly presence in her adventures. The show is totally uninterested in resolving this, which is the right approach, because the revelation would be uninteresting.

RN: Wait, I did think of a slightly mean character: Scarf Lady’s nemesis, Hat Lady.

GM: I hope they get further into the backstory behind their relationship. Scarf Lady has enough history to merit her own spin-off show, and Hat Lady is a great pseudo-villain in both episodes in which she appears.

RN: You mean how she’s just casually an Olympian? Or at least the equivalent in this universe, since the Olympics would absolutely sue a TV show for kids.

GM: And owns, for no apparent reason, a jet-propelled hot air balloon? And a talking bag?

As an aside, it is pretty great that everything talks in Sarah and Duck except the animals.

RN: There’s a talking CAKE. Cake winds up living in a bakery, where he watches dozens of his baked brethren sold for consumption and is ... never bothered by it, I guess? Sometimes it’s best to not think too hard about the logistics.

GM: Rainbow is also fun, especially when they start using the mechanics of him getting yanked around by the weather to tell stories.

The way Sarah and Duck manages to expand everything that happens into something else down the line is magnificent. The show has huge, intersecting plot arcs!

Granted, those arcs don’t matter, but the intricacy gives the illusion of a huge world the writers are exploring, rather than one they’re creating per se.

RN: I think that goes back to the spirit of curiosity you mentioned. Sarah and Duck doesn’t focus a ton on existing character dynamics. It takes them into the world and shows them new people or objects or experiences, and it treats them all as equally interesting. And it reflects something very true about children: fascination can come from anywhere. (Any parent who has given a child a Christmas gift where the ribbon was more intriguing than the toy knows this to be so.)

GM: Ultimately, I think Sarah and Duck is trying to be a kids’ show in that it’s built to show off the world through children’s eyes rather than a show built to amuse kids with shiny lights and loud noises.

There’s an ugly cynicism to most children’s entertainment which Sarah and Duck completely elides.

RN: I agree. In most shows, the adults are there to teach and guide the children. The adults in Sarah and Duck aren’t really much wiser or more capable, they’re just older. In many ways, it’s about the value and joy kids find in doing things independently.

GM: The care and craftsmanship isn’t just in the writing either. The overall aesthetic is beautiful, and the music and sound design is gorgeous.

RN: Is it fair to say the visuals are beautiful and complex in their simplicity?

GM: Yes. But also, the attention to detail is stupendous. Watch what the characters and environment are doing when they’re not the focus of a scene, for instance. It all ties back to the world feeling like a place to be inhabited and explored rather than one being sketched in on the fly.

RN: The music is extraordinarily pleasant as well. Most scenes are highlighted by just one or two instruments playing a calm, friendly tune, and the original songs are 1) short, 2) easy for a child or their tone-deaf parent to sing, and 3) again, not shouted.

GM: My one-year-old thinks the ‘theme song’ is shouted.

RN: Again, the show’s quiet is purely an aspiration, not a reality.

GM: Speaking of aspiration, one of the few things keeping me sensible in the year of our lord 2020 is that Season Four is going to be announced. I suspect it won’t be, because that’s how the world goes ... but wouldn’t it be nice?

RN: Season Four would be a wonderful surprise. But if we have to spend 2020 rewatching old episodes, well, that’d be pleasant, too.