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
I would consider MythBusters an edutainment show given there were science, history and entertainment.
Kari and Tory now do a podcast together:
That is a fun example
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.
There are plenty of good YouTube channels that have this sort of stuff.
Veritasium is really good for exploring various topics of science, their videos are very well-made and they help to convey information in a digestible way. A newer channel called “The Rabbit Hole” is also excellent. And of course, minutephysics and MinuteEarth make very good videos on various topics that are quick and to the point. xkcd’s What If answers lots of silly hypotheticals that are fun to watch, like draining all the water from the oceans!
And there are plenty of other channels I like too that have specific niches. If you like maths, Numberphile, Stand Up Maths, and Tom Rocks Maths are awesome. Up and Atom does videos on various topics in maths, physics, and computer science that are quite interesting. If you like astrophysics*, I would recommend Arvin Ash and PBS Space Time.
If you like geography, Jay Foreman (+ Mark Cooper-Jones) makes fun videos on various different topics. You might also like Geography Now, who has made a video on every single (U.N. recognised) country. It’s very interesting to see how their quality of videos has increased from the beginning to the end. After finishing the Zimbabwe episode, Barbs (Barbie) now covers various other things like unrecognised / partially recognised territories.
If you want some history, The Cold War (run by Kings and Generals) is awesome if you are interested in anything that happened during the Cold War era, and TimeGhost History (run by Indy Neidell) has great coverage of the interwar years between the World Wars as well as the events post WWII.
Ryan Chapman has some videos on various ideas (like nationalism, Zionism, democracy, and Marxism) and assesses conflicts, and I find he does take the points of both sides and judges them fairly. His video on the Taiwan conflict is really good as well! Many people like Johhny Harris as well, and he does make entertaining videos, but some of them are a little oversimplified, especially given that the issues he discusses are very nuanced.
Technology Connections rants about dishwashers, light bulbs, and heat pumps, and covers all the topics nobody else does! And Hank Green makes videos on all sorts of things, and as he puts it, he doesn’t have a specific niche. He’s just Hank Green! Tom Scott has recently come back to the scene and is now doing a series on weird and interesting things in every county in England. Pretty neat!
*Not what you’re looking for, but Anton Petrov is AWESOME if you want to be up to date on all the astronomical discoveries that are happening
Georgaphy Now has been amazing as well as The Rabbit Hole and Tom Scott!
I have nothing to add to this, only a list of channels to check out!
All sound good, thanks
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.
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):
- Hydraulic Press Channel
- Technology Connections / Technology Connextras
- Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t
- styropyro
- NileRed / NileBlue
- Xyla Foxlin
- Chris Spargo
- Wilson Forest Lands
- James Condon
- FarmCraft101
- Tom Scott
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.
Some shows on YouTube fit as well, last week tonight comes to mind
I think “Adam Ruins Everything” work Adam Conover counts as edutainment. He examines things in society and then explains why they’re problematic.
Ze Frank on YouTube does animal documentaries spruced up with dick jokes and silly talk.
i hope there are at least a few animal dick jokes??
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).
Veritasium is awful. So much misinformation, holier-than-though attitude, and disguised advertising. They are just pre-AI slop: Stuff that sounds correct presented in a convincing way.
Several of the topics that they have covered are topics that I majored in (physics, math, materials). Other than some possible oversimplifications of highly technical topics, I haven’t found any errors in the information that they’ve presented.
I can’t verify their information in all fields, but in about 10 % of their content, I haven’t seen any issues that are really worth complaining about.
I am aware that some people disagree with some of their interpretations or presentation style, but other creators (e.g. Matt Parker, 3blue1brown) have covered the same topics or extended on Veritasium’s original videos and haven’t corrected anything presented in the original video.
I disagree with the characterization that they are a source of misinformation or slop. However, I’m always interested in learning more, so if you have other content creators that you would recommend I’d be happy to have those recommendations.
There was a scandal where they made a sponsored video without telling people, and may have selectively edited, but I might be misremembering.
Wasnt that the waymo video?
That rings a bell, I think it was self driving cars of some kind
It used to be exclusively what was on Discovery, History and TLC. Even when it was The Hitler Channel, at least they were still educating people on actual history.
Now they’re all crammed full of bullshit “reality” TV or pseudoscientific garbage. Ancient Aliens is what qualifies as adult edutainment now. Real history mixed with absolute marlarkay.
As fof “moral of the week” for adults, I immediately thought of Moral Orel from Adult Swim. But it’s not on the air anymore.
Not familiar with Moral Orel. Yeah Ancient Aliens is the worst. Their whole argument fir Ancient aliens is they think ancient humans were too stupid to do anything
Moral Orel is great. It’s a parody of Davey and Goliath but it’s dark and kinda fucked up. If you don’t know what Davey & Goliath was: Old claymation show about a boy and his dog that taught Christian values to children.
