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: 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
Ze Frank on YouTube does animal documentaries spruced up with dick jokes and silly talk.
+1 for Ze Frank’s True Facts, I love those
Sounds fun
What about Connections? (both the old and new versions)… too sciency?
Connections is one of my all time favorite shows. I missed that there was a 4th series released. Four series in 47 years.
I’m mot familiar with that show
If HIMYM counts, then check out The Good Place.
There’s plenty of educational stuff on YouTube that isn’t just tutorials. Veritasium is good. Primative technology (turn on subtitles).
I’ve seen The Good Place. It’s awesome. And come to think of it, it is educational in that it teaches a bit about moral philosophy
I feel like travel and food shows fit this nicely. Very entertaining, bit also very educational about other areas, cultures, histories, foods, traditions, etc.
I haven’t watched too much content like this, but “Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown” really got me hooked for a while, he did a great job with that show. And I feel like we need more knowledge and understanding about other cultures, now more than ever.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2845786
–Edit–
Actually, I don’t remember which one I watched No Reservations, or Parts Unknown, both seem good though.
Good point
If you haven’t yet watched Cosmos with Carl Sagan as the host, you should consider watching it. It’s borderline not what you asked for because it doesn’t really have fiction, however Carl was so incredibly good at storytelling and making incredibly complex Science understandable through his awesome narrative abilities, I’d recommend it if you hadn’t already seen it.
Some other mentions -
Chernobyl - HBO drama of the disaster, but the last episode goes into extreme detail of the actual event and why things happened the way they did. Fascinating
MythBusters - I’m sure you have likely seen this but it’s entertaining and you learn a lot. Lots of jokes and personality.
Forged in Fire - show where blacksmith/bladesmith contestants compete to make forged blades using varied metals, and then the judges put those finished blades through grueling tests, to ultimately crown a single smith as the winner each episode. I’m not anywhere close to this profession, yet it taught me a TON about blacksmithing and bladesmithing, and if I had an acreage with a big shop, I’d definitely be doing it as a hobby. So cool to see the things they create.
Those sound interesting. I have seen Mythbusters. That was a fun show
I know it’s not exactly what you’re after but kurzgesagt gives me major magic school bus vibes.
Just looked it up. Looks pretty cool
See it more as entertainment, they often get the details wrong. PBS Space Time is much better, but of course also further removed from the entertainment part.
There are some problems with Kurzgesagt who were mentioned in another comment. xkcd’s “What If?” can be a fun way to kill a few minutes in a similar-ish vein.
Something I’ve quickly come to embrace after watching this Zoe Bee video about Peterson “University” is the concept of “friction”, namely that your brain will trick you into thinking you’re learning a lot when there’s little friction (e.g. a lecture, an infographic, etc.) and vice-versa when there’s a lot of friction (e.g. solving problems on your own, having to teach others, etc.). She remarks that there needs to be friction for learning to happen (albeit that it is not sufficient for learning) and that people are consistently terrible at self-evaluating how much they’ve learned because of this inverted thinking.
I think 3Blue1Brown can achieve this edutainment ideal, for example, but I firmly believe that unless you already know the subject, those “pause and ponder” opportunities aren’t just a formality.
It’s on the lower–medium end of “friction”, but I genuinely think undergraduate-level history textbooks (where you don’t need to know a ton going in, unlike e.g. a STEM textbook where you could be lost) can be a great form of edutainment on their own. I’ve been reading “A Concise History of Korea” (2nd ed., 2016) by Michael J. Seth. It concisely (read: ~500 fairly dense pages, but hey, it’s an entire-ass country dating to at least 676 as a cohesive nation) covers the history of Korea that we know of from ancient times until 2015. The prose is engaging and understandable but not flowery, the end of every chapter has primary source material you can read, there are tons of interesting one-off stories (especially as it pertains to folklore), and to me, the coherence of the reality – the running threads throughout – is more interesting than fiction.
What I just said sounds absurd – that calling a history textbook “edutainment” must be a joke – but please, if your library has one of these and you have spare time for entertainment, spare it a thought the next time you’re picking out a book (or generally looking for something to do).
Very interesting
The Newsroom - this clip, from the pilot, you’ve probably seen.
Deep dives into 21st century US History, as it happened in real time. Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) style. Remixed with melodrama about the people within the Newsroom. Sloan Sabbith is my favourite.
Topics include:
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Deepwater Horizon
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SB 1070 (Arizona’s racist detention law)
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the Gabrielle Giffords shooting
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Arab Spring
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Citizens United ruling
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Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident
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the Death of Osama bin Laden
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Glass-Steagall Act (this video threads a few scenes together)
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the Tea Party (described as the American Taliban) - significant because The Tea Party is antecedent to MAGA
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Occupy Wall Street
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The Boston Marathon bombing
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Climate Polycrisis (chef’s kiss)
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Edward Snowden leaks
Sounds interesting
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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.
What about nature documentaries like “Meerkat Manor” and “Uptown Otters” that assign names to the animals and give them personalities to construct a storyline.
Or historical fiction comedy like “Our Flag Means Death” and “The Great”.
BBC mockumentaries “Look Around You” and “Cunk on Earth”.
I haven’t seen most of those but I have seen Cunk on Earth. It was funny
Patis Mexican Table for food fans. Deeply educating, endlessly charming, and good food to boot! And her free show on YouTube La Frontera is as good, if not, better!
Piers anthony has a series called geoddysey that teaches history in the story. It kinda has a hard to explain gimmick. The story is cohesive but each chapter jumps in time. So it starts in the stone age and ends in the future but along the way goes through some significant eras of humanity. From the characters perspective though everything in the story happened to them in the era they are in. So its like your watching reincarnations of lives where the events of their lives reapeat.
That sounds interesting
If you’re looking for a medical drama that health care workers seem to find an acceptable representation of their work, take a look at The Pitt. Apparently they put a lot of effort into being as accurate as possible.
Overall I think your definition of edutainment as requiring a narrative is overly restrictive, I think we could call narrative-less science shows like this edutainment, despite lacking narrative:
All that said, the specific combination of scientific accuracy, narrative and for-adults does seem to be a rarer combination of traits. I cannot think of very many at all, and those I can do tend to fudge some of the accuracy here and there for dramatic appeal.
Yeah, now that you mention it, maybe my criteria of it having fictional elements was a bit overly restrictive. Some edutainment shows for kids are more documentary-like. Like Bill Nye the Science Guy. As I was thinking about this just now, I thought of The Crocodile Hunter, which I remember being like Kratt’s Creatures but I think Crocodile Hunter was more made for adults.
Once you lift the narrative requirement, the number of hits balloons into the millions. I would personally draw the line between education and edutainment on the issue of thoroughness. Education needs to be fairly thorough, while edutainment can skip all the boring (but necessary for full understanding) parts and exclusively handle the fun ideas-based stuff, usually with some oversimplification here and there just to keep things moving in an entertaining way.
I would describe Kings & Generals on youtube as a solid example of good quality military history edutainment.
Good points
The Pitt is on my list to watch
Now that I’m thinking about it some more, shows like All On The Family could qualify. It’s a fictional show that sought to educate the audience about social and political issues
many shows of that era. barney miller, sanford and son, star trek, mash. Heck even I dream of genie and bewitched had some moral tales. Honestly morality was really common in shows but the tv fare got sorta crappy at a certain point.
I love Star Trek. And Bewitched
its funny because I did not think much of it or I dream of jenie when they were pretty close to new but rewatching I have respect for the female leads who both played multiple chracters in the show pretty effectively. Where I am at they do a star trek evening block with TOS followed by TNG and now I see diana troys mom in nurse chappel and vice versa. Shows really seem to start going down hill in the late 70’s and through the 80’s but maybe Im forgetting something great.
There are some more current-affairs-y shows that use comedy to make deep dives into difficult-to-understand issues more palatable. I think Comedy Central and HBO both have some.
Good examples. Though not necessarily fictional, they combine comedy and education. As I said in another comment, I enjoy CNN’s Have I Got News For You, which is based on a British show
