A new show from PBS Kids aims to teach kids and caregivers more about autism by featuring animal characters who display a range of symptoms and behaviors associated with the condition.
The first 14 episodes of the show, called Carl the Collector, were released digitally Nov. 14 and are rolling out daily on broadcast. Writers have completed 40 episodes, and about half have been fully produced, according to director Lisa Whittick.
Each episode, produced by Fuzzytown Productions and Spiffy Pictures and animated by Yowza! Animation, features two stories in which Carl the raccoon interacts with his five friends. In each scenario, the characters learn about what makes them unique.
In the story “The Fake Mustache Collection,” Carl’s friends struggle to tell apart identical twins Nico and Arugula, so Nico wears one of Carl’s fake mustaches to distinguish herself. Carl correctly identifies Nico and Arugula because he pays attention to details. He encourages his friends to learn about Nico’s and Arugula’s unique traits to identify them.
For PBS Kids’ first show featuring autistic protagonists, Whittick and producers determined early on what Carl’s autism would look like and created a document describing his character traits.
“He stims with his fingers, and he paces when he’s anxious, or he’ll jump on a trampoline,” Whittick said. “Those types of little details might visually show what Carl’s going through.”
Other characters exhibit different traits of autistic people, such as the fox Lotta, who is hypersensitive to loud sounds, strong smells and some foods. The goal is to spotlight many aspects of autism, Whittick said, adding that the show does not represent the entire autism spectrum. Episodes also depict characters with ADHD and nut allergies, she said, and characters learn how to regulate anger.
‘The whole spectrum of humanity’
Zachariah OHora created the show starting with his idea for a raccoon character named Carl who collected things.
“I write and illustrate picture books, and I’m always coming up with new characters,” OHora said. “And I love raccoons, and I was on like a tear of just watching raccoon videos online and making raccoon characters.”
OHora has illustrated 18 children’s books and written six. He also created the mascot for an electric vehicle manufacturer and has illustrated album covers. Carl the Collector is his first TV show.
He initially pitched the character of Carl to PBS as the protagonist of a show about camping and exploring nature, but that was too similar to Nature Cat, which PBS was developing at the time, OHora said.
As he considered other ideas, his kids were attending an elementary school where students get equal class time, social time and one-on-one time with their teachers regardless of their needs. It inspired him to pitch a show around exposure to diversity and to reconceive Carl as autistic.
“They knew that some people needed to take a little moment out of class or wore headphones or whatever it was,” he said. “And it was a light-bulb moment for me. I was like, ‘If we have more exposure to this at a younger age — the whole spectrum of humanity — then it’s a win for everybody.’”
Spiffy Pictures joined soon after PBS Kids accepted the pitch, OHora said. The production team recommended Yowza! Animation and, in turn, Whittick as director. Production staff, some of whom are autistic, incorporated their lived experiences into the series’ stories to accurately depict autism. Producers also hired autistic kids to voice characters and consulted with experts in psychiatry, special education and child development.
“With PBS, in starting the show, we wanted to have just the most authentic representation as possible,” OHora said.
Stephen Shore, a professor of special education at Adelphi University who is autistic, reviewed story drafts and animations “to make sure that Carl was authentically autistic,” he said.
As Shore and two other advisors read drafts and watched preliminary versions of the stories, he let the writers know whether autistic characters were behaving realistically. The advisors gave feedback on each step of production from story premise to animation, Shore said.
“I’d suggest, ‘Well, an autistic person might do this or might do that or might perseverate on a particular subject or have this particular reaction, or this is how they might work it out,’” he said. “And as time went on, I found that the writers were doing these things automatically more and more. It would be more of a review as to whether they did it correctly or authentically.”
The details and actions help autistic people see themselves in the show and learn how to address challenges, Shore said. Family members, teachers and others who support autistic people can also better understand them.
Shore said Carl the Collector teaches problem-solving skills and support strategies particularly well. “I’ve never seen any other shows do it as well as this,” he said. “So I think it’s going to be very, very helpful.”
Geraldine Oades-Sese, a child psychologist and children’s author who also advised Carl’s producers, said adding Lotta to the show was important because girls often present autism differently than boys.
“For females, it’s kind of hidden because they have this superpower of masking and camouflaging how they feel,” she said. “And so girls tend not to be diagnosed early enough because it’s often missed, and there’s a lot of professionals who don’t know what the signs are.”
Lotta’s autism is less visible than Carl’s, Oades-Sese said, but the show can help people look for those cues and, in turn, see a larger range of autism.
“I think it’s a very important skill for teachers and other professionals,” she said.
Striving for authenticity
PBS Kids is aiming the show at children from 2 to 8 years old, said Adriano Schmid, VP of content. Episodes feature conflicts and plots that kids may encounter to introduce speech patterns and behaviors to them. The key, he said, is staff members being authentic when producing the show.
“Being authentic means that they’re paying attention to gestures, to speech patterns, to behavior, to reactions and all of those things, and then just making sure that you’re doing it in a way that kids will understand that this is absolutely OK, this is absolutely normal,” Schmid said.
The advisors’ feedback has helped production staff pursue that authenticity, he said.
“By relying on all of that, I think we’re confident that we’re presenting a really good portrait of two characters in that community,” he said.
Viewers of early screenings have reacted positively, according to Schmid.
At a South Carolina ETV screening of the show Nov. 9, parents and kids participated in interactive activities. SCETV Chief Learning Officer Salandra Bowman said she saw parents connecting the activities to episode themes.
“One of my strongest observations was just that the learning was connecting for the parents while watching the screening, and I was very proud of the [SCETV] team for achieving that outcome,” she said. “In terms of other observations, I think it just looks like joy all around.”
For Caitlin Woodard, SCETV’s early learning and outreach coordinator, the excitement of Carl the Collector came from learning about the show’s production process.
“They were so intentional with everything, and I think that just shows how important and how seriously they take their work,” Woodard said. “And I think it shows and is reflected in the episodes themselves. It feels very authentic. It feels very natural.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Geraldine Oades-Sese as a child psychiatrist. She is a child psychologist.