“People couldn’t accept that this was just a show, that it talked about nice things and nice emotions and love and caring,” Al Roker says, frowning on a sofa. (“It’s believed the Pentagon forced prisoners at Gitmo to listen to ‘Barney’ for twenty-four straight hours,” a newscaster adds.) The documentary purports to examine our collective impulse to hate, but it also wants to spill some beans-to reflect, gawk, shudder, and heal-and, in true “Barney” spirit, it pursues its mission while resisting nuance. “I got dismemberment-of-my-family e-mails because of my music,” the show’s music director, Bob Singleton, says. Directed by Tommy Avallone, the series takes a “Behind the Music”-style approach to the “Barney & Friends” phenomenon, juxtaposing the show’s wholesomeness and wild popularity with end-of-innocence stunners. What made Barney, the purple dinosaur and nineties kids’-TV sensation, so infuriatingly loathsome? Was it his doofy voice and inane giggle, coming at you like a low-watt Pillsbury Doughboy? His menacing rictus and unnerving hat-band strip of teeth? His shameless abuse of nursery rhymes? His indifference to the anxious smiles on his young friends’ faces as they all danced in lockstep to “Indoor-Outdoor Voices”? The short answer is yes, it is all those things, and, as a result, he and his show inspired an acute degree of animosity a new two-episode docuseries from Peacock, “I Love You, You Hate Me,” dares to investigate. Photograph by Vinnie Zuffante / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty The new documentary “I Love You, You Hate Me” uses Barney to examine a broader phenomenon.
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