True Confessions of a Young Parent, cont'd

I gotta say, some Toddler TV is actually OK. No, not the Wiggles. Or Barney. They'll never be OK.

The Teletubbies, I must admit, offer up some fascination, due to the show's depiction of a strange postapocalyptic world where everyone has televisions in their bellies and eat nothing but pink custard.

But then there's Pingu. The claymation penguin is pretty much the most interesting offering on PBS Kids Sprout, the toddler TV network. Pingu and his friends and family live in the Antarctic and have various 10-minute adventures. Like the Teletubbies, they speak in gibberish (in Pengu's case, it's an obscure Penguin dialect. But unlike the Teletubbies, there seems to be a real structure to Pingu's stories. And it's simply more charming.