Where to find it: Apple TV+
Length: Ten 20-minute episodes
Synopsis: Cartoon about a privileged girl with no respect for boundaries
Recommendation rating: 2/5
What I like about it: the art is kinda cute, music from Courtney Barnett and Aloe Blacc, among others
What I don’t like about it: pointless, both outdated and anachronistic, not even much fun, a deeply awkward race episode
Review:
Apple continue to spend too much money making shows no one wants to see. This one is an adaptation of a beloved children’s book, stripped of anything that made the book work. Harriet lives with her media professional parents in a penthouse in the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1967. She constantly gets into trouble by spying on her neighbours and consistently avoids learning a lesson from it, as that would ruin the premise.
In fact, the simplistic moral messages which are the traditional stock-in-trade of children’s media are completely missing from the show, replaced by a vacuous and conspicuous consumerist individualism. Whenever Harriet feels sad, she buys something to cheer herself up! One might imagine that if she were born sixty years later like her target audience, she would probably treat herself to the latest Apple iPhone or highly-priced MP3s from Apple iTunes, that kind of thing.
Content notes (may contain spoilers):