Listen, we’re in this together, so if a certain song is going to be playing in my head while I write this review, it can race around the phonological loop in your memory too while you read it:
I love you
You love me
We’re a happy family
With a great big hug
And a kiss from me to you
Won’t you say you love me too?
Sorry. It’ll go away eventually. Just like Barney did.
Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, “Barney & Friends” was a dominant purple force in children’s television, entertaining millions of toddlers with its simple songs and positive messaging while earning the gratitude of parents for keeping the little ones occupied — but also creating one of the most intense backlashes in pop culture history. In the two-part Peacock documentary series “I Love You, You Hate Me,” we revisit the genesis of Barney and watch in astonishment as a great American success story turns dark and sour, not only for the television show, but for the family of the person most responsible for bringing the oversized plush dino into this world.
Director Tommy Avallone has a fondness for late 1980s/early 1990s style graphics and visuals (time and again, we see VHS tapes inserted into VCRs), and he kicks off the series with a flickering graphic telling us: “IN 1988, SHERYL LEACH CREATED A MONSTER…” Official credit for creating the “Barney” as a TV show is split among Kathy Parker, Dennis DeShazer and Leach — but as “I Love You” makes clear, it was Leach who came up with the concept in the late 1980s, when she was looking for something to entertain her 2-year-old son, Patrick.
Leach wrote a number of rudimentary treatments for a show that had different toys coming to life, and Barney was originally a teddy bear — but after she took her son to a traveling dinosaur exhibit that went through Dallas and saw his face light up, Barney became a purple dinosaur. Original head writer Pat Reeder tells us he envisioned Barney as a wisecracking character modeled after Bruce Willis in “Moonlighting,” but Reeder was fired during the rewrite process, and even in the first few, relatively crude “Barney” VHS tapes, the character was there: a big, dopey, smiling and decidedly unscary dinosaur who was all about love and acceptance and happiness and tolerance.
We hear from the likes of Sloan Coleman, who came up with the idea of Barney birthday parties and pioneered the marketing of the hugely successful live shows, and Larry Rifkin, who was the head of programming at Connecticut Public Television and was instrumental in helping Barney go nationwide. We see archival footage of kids going crazy at live Barney shows. We meet Bob West, who gave voice to Barney, and former child actors Pia Hamilton, Hope Cervantes and Leah Montes, who speak fondly of their time on the show and rightfully note how “Barney & Friends” celebrated diversity and unity.
What could possibly go wrong? Let us count the ways.
Even early on, there was resentment of those annoying songs and that relentlessly cheery messaging. “It was hard for many grown-ups to watch because it was continually upbeat … in a sense, unrealistic,” notes Bill Nye (you know, the Science Guy). As Barney’s popularity soared in the 1990s, the culture was taking a cynical turn, from the comedy of David Letterman and “Beavis and Butt-head” to the emergence of grotesque confrontation-talk shows such as “Jerry Springer.”
Barney was mocked by “Wayne’s World” and “The X-Files. There was a Barney-bashing event at the University of Nebraska, an “I Hate Barney” newsletter and a role-playing game called “The Jihad to Destroy Barney the Purple Dinosaur.” Rumors circulated about Barney as the leader of a cult and Barney preying on children. The San Diego Chicken made a regular routine out of beating up a Barney lookalike, to the cheers of crowds.
In the second part of the series, we see how the enormous success of “Barney & Friends” became a double-edged sword for the Leach family. As Patrick grew older, he came to resent being Barney’s “brother” and battled a number of personal demons. When Patrick was 14 years old, his parents divorced; when he was 18, his father committed suicide. In 2013, when Patrick was 27, he got into a confrontation with a neighbor in Malibu and shot the man in the chest. Patrick was given a 15-year sentence for attempted murder. (Neither Sheryl nor Patrick is interviewed in present day for the documentary.)
“Barney & Friends” was canceled in 2010, but there’s no denying the indelible memories it created for generations of young viewers — and when we look back through the filter of “I Love You, You Hate Me,” it seems ludicrous that a mildly irritating children’s TV program could inspire such vitriol from adults in certain quarters. “Barney was never arguing that the world was a perfect place,” says Stephen White, head writer on the show from 1992-2005. “He was arguing that it could become a better place if all tried to make it a better place.”
And for that he took a beatdown.
