TV - The Electric Company

☻☻☻☻☺

(four smiley faces out of five)

Hey you guuuuys!

The Electric Company has recently returned to television courtesy of the Sesame Workshop, and I’m happy to say that like the original, the new version is pretty freakin’ cool.

The Electric Company is a show that emphasizes language development, is aimed at kids from the ages of three to seven or so, and airs on PBS.

The Electric Company has changed from the original in that there are now six central characters in the show, each with a different sort of “literary superpower” that helps them to read and understand language. Now, I’m not going to detail those superpowers here, as that’s the one aspect of the show I find a little silly. I didn’t even notice as I was watching that the extraordinary gifts the characters displayed were … extraordinary; I just thought that some of the cool graphics and rearranging of scrambled letters to make words was part of the Electric Company being the Electric Company.

The episode we most recently watched at my house focused on the letter “C,” and the concepts of hard C and soft C. The show discussed various words that start with the letter C and their meanings. But a second focus was the concept of humanity: what makes humans, well, human.

Sounds like it could be pretty boring, right? Oh, you would be so wrong. The Electric Company is hip, urban, diverse and highly watchable. The writing is exemplary and the acting is excellent. The show incorporates rapping, hip-hop and beatboxing to help illustrate various language concepts and it’s done in such a fun, non-geeky way that I think you’ll find you and your child drawn in to the rhythms and rhymes.

Overall, I found the new Electric Company to be highly entertaining and educational, and I would gladly sit down with my kid to watch the Electric Company anytime.