You can add my name to the list of Caillou-haters. Since it’s been over a decade since the Firebug last watched any Caillou (he’s a teenager now), I can’t even tell you why anymore that I found it so abhorrent. It was really the only kids’ show he watched that I had that strong a reaction to. (Somehow we missed both Barney and the Teletubbies.)
There were one or two others that mildly annoyed me (can’t even remember what they were anymore), but that was the extent of it, other than Caillou.
N-thing Caillou, what a horrible little brat.
Dora the Explorer- I know it was aimed at very little kids, but it was so brain-dead and repetitive. I must have heard her say “Swiper, no swiping!” 57,000 times. Hey, he’s a weasel and his name is “Swiper”; what do you expect? I was happy when my kids aged out of watching that show.
Any show that put human-like faces on machinery. The Cars movies I could deal with, because the incorporated the faces into the cars fairly well. Thomas the Tank Engine and Jay Jay the Jet Plane are just plain creepy. The kids I work with now, who are 15 years or so younger than our kids, are basically saying “how the hell did kids ever want to watch this crap”?
Ugh, I had blocked out Jay Jay the Jet Plane. Awful!
Hey, here she is at a family get together!
NSFW?
Those child actors always turn into trainwrecks as teenagers, don’t they? 
I’ll see your Teletubbies and raise you Boobah. That is an LSD-fueled Fever Dream.
Or they’re just people who grew up with stuff like The Magic Roundabout and The Flowerpot Men
Me, I second Boobah.
I hated Teletubbies. Not because it looked drug-inspired (that part i thought was fun, honestly) but because i thought its central message to children was, “There is nothing more important than television. Always watch television.”
The characters would be doing something, happily engaged, and then one of their tummies started to glow. They all immediately stopped anything else they were doing so they could concentrate on the television screen.
That creeped me out. Fortunately, my husband tempted the kids with “Carmine Miranda”, and they decided they liked it more and stopped watching Teletubbies.
I never saw “Boobah”. Now I’m curious.
There used to be an oddly soothing Boobah website, where you could click on the various characters and see them dance or play some interesting music. Of course, the show wasn’t well known at the time in the U.S., so there was a big WTF factor for most visitors.
I once watched a few episodes of Caillou to see what all the fuss was about…wow, what a whiny little brat.
My kids are grown up and never watched it, but I had a friend whose teenage son was into that show. She kept pestering me to watch it because she knew I was a Survivor fan and insisted that I would like this too. I made it through about about five minutes of one episode. Awful. 
funny thing is the first two or 3 seasons of dora the explorer is a kid playing the dora the explorer computer game… thats why they just stand there and wait for the little arrow on the screen to point to the answer when it finally became popular they made the characters “alive”
Just don’t confuse it with “Booba”, which is also a LSD-fueled fever dream, but not necessarily in a bad way. Booba is about some weird creature who’s pretty much naive to the world and gets into all sorts of slapstick hijinks navigating it.
Boobah… don’t know about it, but it does look pretty bad.
In a counter to the prevailing sentiment, I kind of liked Teletubbies. In a stretch of my life when I had very small children and things were very stressful, I found watching Teletubbies with my children to be oddly and remarkably soothing. Weird, but soothing. It certainly wasn’t the typical hyperkinetic show aimed at toddlers, that’s for sure.
That article is pretty much the journalistic equivalent of Paw Patrol, FWIW. It reads to me a lot like the author doesn’t like Paw Patrol and had to think up reasons for it.
I mean, it’s not a BAD show, per-se. It’s just not an educational show, nor is it as relentlessly politically correct as so many shows these days with respect to the number of female characters, etc… It’s purely an entertainment show aimed I suspect, at 2-4 year old boys. And I suspect that’s part of the appeal; they’re not trying to teach you anything (which little kids tend to realize by the time they’re 3-4), it’s just fun to watch for kids that age.
I haven’t posted in this forum forever, but I couldn’t resist coming in to say that watching The Wiggles made me wonder if that was what it was like to be on LSD.
Also, Doc McStuffins was enraging. She just added “itis” to everything.
Oh, and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Stupidest solutions to the most ridiculous problems ever. Clearly if you can’t reach an apple in a tree (which was supposed to cure a sick stomach??), you need a giraffe, not a freaking ladder.
Calliou sucks like everyone else said. I think I hated Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood a bit more; it was just so fucking smarmy. Blaze and the Monster Machines sucked hard (think Paw Patrol with anthropomorphized trucks instead of puppies).
I forget the name, but there was some shit show with dinosaurs that would go around with these kids and wind up in some ‘dangerous situation’. They would go through all kind of crap to force the story. But the thing is, they could fly!
You are almost never in danger when you can simply fly away. Lame, lame and lame. And I seem to recall some pretty heavy-handed moralistic bullshit slathered on top.
And yet if I could go back 20 years, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Even if it meant having to sit through this shit.
Dora the Explorer is dumb as hell. Even my age appropriate child realized that pretty quick.
Spirit, a horse show, is pretty dumb. My daughter liked horses so we watched it and it kinda vindicated my obsession of Transformers at her age. It’s about the ‘thing’, the plot is just a rehashed frame for it.
Spongebob Squarepants got lots of flack from the study, but it wasn’t that bad and to me it just means parents aren’t paying attention cause there is far worse.
Barney here too. Though there were enough other choices that we only actually watched it a few times.
For older kids, iCarly was absolutely terrible. My daughter and her best friend loved it from the age of 11-13 or so. Carly’s best friend was regularly psychotically violent to their best male friend - because she secretly fancied him, natch - the home set-up made no sense, the older brother needed a carer, the “fat” kid was constantly getting his belly out and being made fun of, and every storyline was vile.
For current shows, I didn’t hate Bing, but man, he is a whiny little bugger. And why is he being raised by a toy rabbit thing that’s smaller than him? How does this universe work? My older daughter theorised that it was a post-apocalyptic world with genetically-engineered creatures as the only survivors.