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
Technically almost everything is educational in some way, if you’re willing to engage with it in the right way. Like you said, period dramas and historical dramas are often a great way of learning about (some aspects of) history. The problem is you need to be able to sort out the fictional elements from the non-fictional elements and without at least a little bit of background that becomes challenging. Some methods that might be useful is cross-referencing by watching multiple shows about the same topic from different sources. If both shows include the same element, there’s a good chance it’s based on some real historical evidence. But you also have to understand that evidence is not proof, and there’s a lot of disagreement in science and understanding, and that’s good and natural. Not everything is going to match up exactly. You have to do your own research and actually study real sources and do your own experiments. This is why edutainment starts to become of limited value.
The problem with growing up is that you’re getting to a higher level of education and understanding, and that comes with caveats. No longer can you just rely on simplistic expositions of “this is absolutely how it works” and you start to get into a lot of “seems” and “maybes”. There’s a lot of stuff we just don’t know with absolute confidence and as we have learned from the historical documentary Star Wars, only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Most things at the adult level are not explicitly going to teach you things (because they effectively can’t) as much as they are going to motivate you to research further, experiment yourself, or become interested in things you might not otherwise find interesting.
With that said, there is tons of educational and entertaining content out there. Sometimes stuff that seems stupid is actually very educational. Sometimes stuff that seems boring and educational can be entertaining as hell. If you want a bunch of Youtube channels to help point your recommendation algorithm in the right direction, try some of these channels (in no particular order or topic consistency):
Honorable mention for bugfishhhh’s insane and comedic hour-long video on the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England which came out of nowhere but I’m here for it.
Bugfish’s channel is incredible. The Lord Of The Rings analysis alone is peak Youtube. Underrated channel.
I would add:
Yeah, I spend a lot of time on YouTube…
Woah how did you get my list of YouTube subs?!?
Kurzgesagt is half the time propaganda.
I mean they sucked Gates’ dick so hard it turned blue.
All good points. I feel like I learned a little about history from Downton Abbey, but it must be taken with a grain of salt. You can’t assume the information in it is accurate, you have to check other sources