Edutainment means shows that blend an entertaining story with educational material. For example, The Magic School Bus tells stories while also teaching about science.
There are educational shows for adults, they’re usually called documentaries. But any that blend educational material with fiction? I guess an argument can be made that biographical films fall into this category but they usually take creative liberties and aren’t fully historically accurate. An argument can also be made for medical dramas and legal dramas, but I’m not sure how accurate the medical and legal information in them is. Of course, The Magic School Bus also takes creative liberties and has inaccurate science, but there’s always a segment at the end explaining where they took creative liberties.
How I Met Your Mother kind of had the vibe of a kids show that teaches moral lessons, but for adults. Edit for clarity: the reason I bring this up is I consider “moral of the week” a genre closely related to edutainment but not quite the same thing
Edit: now that I’m thinking about it, I guess Jeopardy and other trivia based game shows could qualify as edutainment. They’re not fictional, but they do blend entertainment and education
How I Met Your Mother? Teaching morals? I think we didn’t watch the same show.
With this logic just watch any reality TV and it will look like a moral lesson too.
In each episode, the narrator attempted to instill some kind of moral to his children. I’m not saying it did a good job, I’m just saying that seemed to be the intent. Or perhaps they were trying to parody shows with moral lessons
The show is extremely immoral, no consistency (which is also necessary for morals to work in a show), and shows immoral characters positively (that’s why people love Barney for example even though the guy should at least be in jail).
So while The Good Place is a working recommendation that someone else made (that still has a LOT of flaws but at least try to add some concepts of morality, philosophy, etc), HIMYM does the opposite of that by refusing to ever think about moral issues of what is going on.
So my point is, if HIMYM seemed like a moral-teaching show to you, most shows will be, but that’s not positive.
If you want shows that try to talk about morals, you can look at the (old) star trek. I would say the least bad for that would be TNG and VOY, but they still need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Doctor Who also can work, if you want something a bit more on the horror/thriller/mystery side, but also needs a grain of salt and some critical thinking.
Science fiction in general tries to talk about philosophical subjects, while being entertaining, but a lot of what is seen as science fiction is just action movies in space.
My point was that How I Met Your Mother is structured like a kids show that tries to teach a moral in each episode. I never said it had good morals. In fact it may even be parodying that structure by showing a guy who is really bad at it
But then the show is not educational? I am confused by how you can ask for an educational show, mention HIMYM about its morals as an example, and then say that it might be a parody.
So you want an educational show, or a show that pictures characters trying to be educational within the show, to other characters?
I’m sorry if my mention of it was confusing, it was meant as kind of an aside. I wasn’t comparing it to edutainment, I was comparing it to kids shows that try to teach morals, which I guess is sort of a subcategory of edutainment. I was saying it can be seen as an adult version of a moral of the week type show, albeit a poor one. It was meant as kind of an aside because I don’t consider a moral of the week show as quite the same as edutainment but related to it
Ah, okay. My bad then, I misunderstood the point.
Eh, I’m bad at communicating sometimes