#I liked She-Ra more than AtLA but to be fair it was pandering directly to me

[fictionyoubelieve]

I feel like the “better” (as in, more tolerable to adults) class of “children’s show” is actually just the class aimed at teens rather than tweens and younger kids. Stuff like Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, and The Owl House is aimed at a slightly younger audience than AtLA, the She-Ra reboot, and the older Teen Titans. They have more complex story arcs, lean a bit more on drama vs humor, and have character development subplots more in line with teens or adults than with children.

There’s quite a bit of overlap in the actual audiences, of course. IMO a lot of the popularity of Phineas and Ferb was that it worked as a younger kids’ show (due to elements like the repetitive structure and obvious protagonists/antagonists) but had writing aimed at older kids. But the studios producing the shows are typically aiming for a particular demographic, and the show will be designed around that.

Personally, as someone who first watched all of these except P&F and TT as an adult, I think a big differentiating factor for AtLA compared to many similar shows was that it was originally planned as three seasons, and then they got to make those three seasons and no more. Compare to TT getting canceled with Terra’s arc unfinished, or Steven Universe having to awkwardly rush its finale and then make more content afterwards. Children’s programming also doesn’t usually allow the kind of strictly sequential presentation required for a story like AtLA’s; they typically need to sacrifice some development time to “filler” eps that can be moved around or played as reruns without confusing viewers. It’s easiest to not commit to complex arcs in the first place, and just have a couple key plot eps to be hyped up by the network at regular intervals.

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying I think the difference is in production more than writing. There are plenty of creators who could make another AtLA, but whether it actually gets made is subject to the motivations of the business.

I think AtLA kind of broke a lot of people's brains when it came to how we talk about and recommend children's TV - it's been overpraised to hell and back on this site but I do think in terms of quality it comfortably laps pretty much everything else made for that age group before or since.

One of my memories as a kid was watching TV at my grandparents' and how my grandma hated almost everything I watched but would sit down and watch with me whenever AtLA came on. It has some stinkers in the first season, but aside from that it's pretty smooth sailing - it's not high art or anything, but you can watch it all the way through as an adult and have a good time.

And that just isn't true of a lot of the other shows people recommend on here. People have selective memory. That's not to say that they aren't culturally significant (I do think it's a big deal that kids see gay people in the media they watch) or that, if you carefully filter which episodes you watch, you can't find an interesting story, but it's a bad idea to just recommend Gravity Falls to an adult without some caveats.