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
Ze Frank on YouTube does animal documentaries spruced up with dick jokes and silly talk.
+1 for Ze Frank’s True Facts, I love those
Sounds fun
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).
I’ve seen The Good Place. It’s awesome. And come to think of it, it is educational in that it teaches a bit about moral philosophy
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
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.
I would add:
- Veritasium
- Half as Interesting
- Kurzgesagt
- 70 Sekunden wiki (in German)
- Periodic Videos, Computerphile and other channels of the university of Nottingham
- EngineerGuy
- HistoryGraph
- History Matters
- The fat electrician (despite the name, also history)
- Johnny Harris
- Kyle Hill
- Smarter Every Day
- Physics Girl
- Steve Mould
- B1M
- Backyard Scientist
- Wendover
Yeah, I spend a lot of time on YouTube…
- Astrum
- John Michael Godier
- LGR
- 8 Bit Guy
- Kosmo
- SEA
- Nation Squid
- Kings and Generals
- History of the Earth
- Storied
- SciShow
- MinuteEarth
- Simple History
- toldinstone
- Moth Light Media
- PBS Terra
- Branch Education
- Linfamy
- NORTH 02
- Animal Origins
- Knowledgia
- Dreksler Astral
- Primitive Technology
- Ze Frank
- Fire of Learning
- Trey the Explainer
- Cool Worlds
- Cogito
- Invicta
- Historia Civilis
- History Scope
All good points. I feel like I learned a little about history from Downton Abbey, but it must be taken with a grain of salt. You can’t assume the information in it is accurate, you have to check other sources
Bugfish’s channel is incredible. The Lord Of The Rings analysis alone is peak Youtube. Underrated channel.
I feel like travel and food shows fit this nicely. Very entertaining, bit also very educational about other areas, cultures, histories, foods, traditions, etc.
I haven’t watched too much content like this, but “Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown” really got me hooked for a while, he did a great job with that show. And I feel like we need more knowledge and understanding about other cultures, now more than ever.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2845786
–Edit–
Actually, I don’t remember which one I watched No Reservations, or Parts Unknown, both seem good though.
Good point
There’s an anime called Dr. Stone that mildly touches on this. People are frozen in stone for thousands of years and when they begin to break out, a scientist shows them how to identify and use resources to replicate our modern tools
Sounds interesting
To add to the anime recs, there’s a whole sub genre of “Cute girls do the author’s special interest” that can be a fun way to incidentally learn some stuff you’d never have thought to interact with otherwise.
The one that comes to mind at the moment is “Ruri Rocks” which is about geology.
EDIT: I thought of some more:
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Ascendance of a Bookworm: A woman is reincarnated into a medieval fantasy world. She loves books, but can’t get any because without the printing press books are super expensive. So she sets out to make her own. There’s a lot more going on in the story as well as them eventually getting into magic stuff, but at least the first part or spends a decent amount of time talking about different methods of writing, printing, etc.
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A Place Further Than the Universe: A group of girls go on a trip to Antarctica with a research team. So you get to learn a bit about the place and everything that goes into preparing to get there and survive.
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Keep You Hands off Eizouken: About making anime/animation.
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Golden Kamuy: Historical fiction set in the northern parts of sometime after the Russo-Japanese War during the Meiji period. You end up learning a lot about the Indigenous people who lived there before Japan basically wiped them out.
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I didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep watching, but there was a whole anime that was just about the author’s obsession with this one specific model of moped. It’s called “Super Cub.” You want to see an anime girl read the user manual for an old scooter and then fix it with a lot of detail? This is your show I guess.
I’d be shocked if there wasn’t an anime about trains. I know of one set on a train, but the particulars of how the train works isn’t the focus, it’s just the vehicle that gets them from one story to another. If anyone knows of any I’d love to hear it.
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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.
My point was that How I Met Your Mother is structured like a kids show that tries to teach a moral in each episode. I never said it had good morals. In fact it may even be parodying that structure by showing a guy who is really bad at it
But then the show is not educational? I am confused by how you can ask for an educational show, mention HIMYM about its morals as an example, and then say that it might be a parody.
So you want an educational show, or a show that pictures characters trying to be educational within the show, to other characters?
I’m sorry if my mention of it was confusing, it was meant as kind of an aside. I wasn’t comparing it to edutainment, I was comparing it to kids shows that try to teach morals, which I guess is sort of a subcategory of edutainment. I was saying it can be seen as an adult version of a moral of the week type show, albeit a poor one. It was meant as kind of an aside because I don’t consider a moral of the week show as quite the same as edutainment but related to it
Ah, okay. My bad then, I misunderstood the point.
Eh, I’m bad at communicating sometimes
10 watch Look Around You
20 goto 10Thanks, ants.
What about Connections? (both the old and new versions)… too sciency?
I’m not familiar with that show
Despite it feeling dated, Old Connections is amazing and I love it.
Mindfield by Vsauce
If you haven’t yet watched Cosmos with Carl Sagan as the host, you should consider watching it. It’s borderline not what you asked for because it doesn’t really have fiction, however Carl was so incredibly good at storytelling and making incredibly complex Science understandable through his awesome narrative abilities, I’d recommend it if you hadn’t already seen it.
Some other mentions -
Chernobyl - HBO drama of the disaster, but the last episode goes into extreme detail of the actual event and why things happened the way they did. Fascinating
MythBusters - I’m sure you have likely seen this but it’s entertaining and you learn a lot. Lots of jokes and personality.
Forged in Fire - show where blacksmith/bladesmith contestants compete to make forged blades using varied metals, and then the judges put those finished blades through grueling tests, to ultimately crown a single smith as the winner each episode. I’m not anywhere close to this profession, yet it taught me a TON about blacksmithing and bladesmithing, and if I had an acreage with a big shop, I’d definitely be doing it as a hobby. So cool to see the things they create.
Those sound interesting. I have seen Mythbusters. That was a fun show
There are some problems with Kurzgesagt who were mentioned in another comment. xkcd’s “What If?” can be a fun way to kill a few minutes in a similar-ish vein.
Something I’ve quickly come to embrace after watching this Zoe Bee video about Peterson “University” is the concept of “friction”, namely that your brain will trick you into thinking you’re learning a lot when there’s little friction (e.g. a lecture, an infographic, etc.) and vice-versa when there’s a lot of friction (e.g. solving problems on your own, having to teach others, etc.). She remarks that there needs to be friction for learning to happen (albeit that it is not sufficient for learning) and that people are consistently terrible at self-evaluating how much they’ve learned because of this inverted thinking.
I think 3Blue1Brown can achieve this edutainment ideal, for example, but I firmly believe that unless you already know the subject, those “pause and ponder” opportunities aren’t just a formality.
It’s on the lower–medium end of “friction”, but I genuinely think undergraduate-level history textbooks (where you don’t need to know a ton going in, unlike e.g. a STEM textbook where you could be lost) can be a great form of edutainment on their own. I’ve been reading “A Concise History of Korea” (2nd ed., 2016) by Michael J. Seth. It concisely (read: ~500 fairly dense pages, but hey, it’s an entire-ass country dating to at least 676 as a cohesive nation) covers the history of Korea that we know of from ancient times until 2015. The prose is engaging and understandable but not flowery, the end of every chapter has primary source material you can read, there are tons of interesting one-off stories (especially as it pertains to folklore), and to me, the coherence of the reality – the running threads throughout – is more interesting than fiction.
What I just said sounds absurd – that calling a history textbook “edutainment” must be a joke – but please, if your library has one of these and you have spare time for entertainment, spare it a thought the next time you’re picking out a book (or generally looking for something to do).
Very interesting
The Newsroom - this clip, from the pilot, you’ve probably seen.
Deep dives into 21st century US History, as it happened in real time. Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) style. Remixed with melodrama about the people within the Newsroom. Sloan Sabbith is my favourite.
Topics include:
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Deepwater Horizon
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SB 1070 (Arizona’s racist detention law)
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the Gabrielle Giffords shooting
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Arab Spring
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Citizens United ruling
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Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident
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the Death of Osama bin Laden
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Glass-Steagall Act (this video threads a few scenes together)
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the Tea Party (described as the American Taliban) - significant because The Tea Party is antecedent to MAGA
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Occupy Wall Street
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The Boston Marathon bombing
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Climate Polycrisis (chef’s kiss)
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Edward Snowden leaks
Sounds interesting
Good stuff.
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I love historical fiction in any form. The best stuff is about a historical event. I absolutely love the musical play Suffs, it’s about the suffragist fight from 1913 to 1920 and follows women’s rights leaders Alice Paul, Inez Milholland, Doris Stevens, Ruza Wenclawska, and Lucy Burns. There’s also a B plot about Ida B. Wells and Mary Terrell
Sounds pretty good
If you’re able to, you should absolutely watch the play too! It’s an hour longer than the album
Someone mentioned in a lower level reply, but Startrek and the Orville are great for political / social commentary.
I think a fair amount of sitcoms have some element of educating on social norms. Seinfeld and Its Always Sunny maybe require more prior knowledge about subject matters, but covering things like abortion, immigration, racism, etc.
Mythbusters and similar are pretty good about being “adult” science shows.
Maybe documentaries don’t really count as “entertainment” the way you’re looking for, but Planet Earth is a great series.
All good points. I think most fictional shows try to have social commentary on some level but I’m not sure I’d quite consider them edutainment. I dunno, it is hard to define
