'I Love You, You Hate Me' tries to tie Barney bashing to larger cultural tides

CNN  — 

Aside from planting that opus successful everyone’s caput (again), “I Love You, You Hate Me” is an amusing look backmost astatine the “Barney & Friends” phenomenon, and the over-the-top torrents of hostility the PBS children’s amusement elicited. Yet the two-part documentary is besides the soapy communicative of the creator and her family, which ends up eclipsing the overreaching impulse to link the purple dinosaur to thing much culturally profound.

Conceived by Sheryl Leach, a nonmigratory of Allen, Texas, successful 1988, “Barney” became an instant favourite among toddlers, successful portion due to the fact that of its elemental repetition and cheerfully cut-rate accumulation values. The amusement besides “hit a nervus astatine the dawn of the social-media era,” arsenic Bob West, the archetypal dependable of Barney, observes, with euphony manager Bob Singleton noting that worldly tailored to a 3 twelvemonth aged “will thrust a grownup crazy.”

By tapping into an under-served, fresh-out-of-diapers demographic, Leach became fabulously wealthy, yet selling the institution for $275 million. But the popularity of Barney exacted an astir Shakespearean toll connected her family, including her son, Patrick, who, it’s suggested, suffered for increasing up successful the shadiness of a felt-covered “sibling” whose fame eclipsed him.

“All that occurrence came astatine a price,” says Andrew Olsen, a devotee of “Barney” past and its memorabilia.

There are different unusual details successful manager Tommy Avallone’s film, similar however the archetypal histrion wrong the Barney suit, David Joyner, recovered a too-good-to-be-true (for media purposes, anyway) 2nd vocation arsenic a tantric massage therapist and healer, a signifier that included, by his admission, sleeping with astatine slightest immoderate of his clients.

Still, “I Love You” truly wants to stress the vitriol flung astatine Barney – the “You Hate Me” portion – arsenic grounds of a nasty crook successful the civilization during those years, from the snarky cognition embodied by David Letterman to the regular fistfights connected Jerry Springer’s speech show.

It’s a tenable constituent astatine first, but 1 the documentary overplays, particularly erstwhile there’s truthful overmuch odd, circumstantial worldly astir the amusement to excavation here. Sure, the Barney bashing (such arsenic an incidental with the celebrated San Diego Chicken) sailed into the ridiculous, but what that says America during those years doesn’t needfully correspond immoderate benignant of a consecutive line.

There are besides alternatively arbitrary voices brought into the mix, specified arsenic NBC’s Al Roker, which simply underscores that the database of radical with thing profound to stock astir Barney, which was canceled successful 2010, is comparatively short.

“I Love You, You Hate Me” has already generated media attraction for Peacock, truthful people it arsenic a triumph by that measure. But portion the task captures a precise circumstantial infinitesimal successful time, it runs retired of penetration earlier its clip is up.

“I Love You, You Hate Me” premieres October 12 connected Peacock.