Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Children, Television, and Fred Rogers (review)

With his trademark cardigan and old-timey sneakers, Fred Rogers hardly seems an exemplar of the subversive, antiestablishment media artist. After reading this book of essays in tribute to his years of work in children’s programming, I can argue that Rogers’s TV aesthetic provides an antidote to those slicker television productions intent on the manufacture of kid-size consumers with adult appetites for commodified pleasures of all sorts. As one critic notes, Fred Rogers combines the early television wizardry of Ernie Kovacs with a profound anticommercial sensibility (Bianculli 40). The program demonstrates an almost Brechtian focus on process as opposed to theatrical realism, and in postmodern parlance, erases the distinction between character and actor: Mister Rogers always and only plays himself. As a caring man attuned to the needs of children, he challenges prevalent gender stereotypes while celebrating the body in the best Whitmanesque manner, “a strain of ecstatic naturalism” in which the body is seen “as part of a real person” (Guy 104). Through his direct address and engagement with his child audience, Mister Rogers encourages children to be active, not passive, audiences. Perhaps most subversive, Mister Rogers is unabashedly for children, desirous of empowering them with strong inner resources to counter difficult public lives. And, like other artists who challenge dominant political interests, Fred Rogers has been vilified by the National Review as a “wimp”; in the testosterone-suffused world of children’s shows such as Power Rangers, that’s a compliment.

The journalists, child psychologists, and teachers who have joined to produce this hagiography of Fred Rogers wouldn’t term themselves postmodern critics and are not conversant in theories of current cultural scholarship. They don’t examine Rogers’s show in any particular historical context and do not subject their assumptions about media as a social force (or Rogers’s application of child development theories) to rigorous analysis or serious critique. Scholars of an empirical bent will find little to verify the critical claim that Rogers’s educational format provides sustained benefits to child viewers, and others may protest that the critical views expressed, as well as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood itself, indulge in cultural nostalgia far removed from children’s real lives. The writers speak in highly personal and anecdotal terms, clearly valuing a narrative sensibility—bookish, if you will—far removed from Bart Simpson’s vacant eyes and, as Bob Greenfield tells us, “nihilistic Ren and Stimpy madness” (xi). Converts want to spread the word; Greenfield’s “recovery” is underway, as he cheerfully tells us in his foreword, “My name is Bob and I want to be your neighbor. Born again in Rogers” (xii).

It is difficult to critique these essays in any but the terms they propose: that is, what does Fred Rogers, at home in his TV neighborhood, offer that caring adults believe is good for children? The essays in the book fall into three general categories, including considerations of the program in relation to developmental models, discussions contrasting Rogers’s contributions with the general dismissal of child-friendly policies by adults and the larger public, and admiring recollections of Rogers as a public and private individual (including a photo essay by Lynn Johnson). Although it seems clear that Rogers has been an influential force in children’s programming and that Rogers as a person promotes important values ignored by the culture at large, no clear program of resistance is advocated by the writers in this book. Even Marion Wright Edelman’s afterword calling for us to “create family-friendly neighborhoods . . . [meeting] family needs . . . [organizing] parent education programs . . . child-care policies and services” (224–25) seems more rhetoric for a bygone era than a serious strategy for radical reform of family policy. The most enlightening essays in the book helped me to put aside my jaded, Barney-weary viewing persona and look at Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with something akin to a child’s...