Jack McBrayer does not wear a red cardigan or chat with hand puppets on his new children’s show, but you will want to be his neighbor. The actor, comedian and “30 Rock” alum is the host and executive producer of the Apple TV+ series “Hello, Jack! The Kindness Show.” The second season just premiered, and Jack McBrayer joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to share about his new show’s abundance of universal wisdom for kids.
Interview highlights:
A show sometimes called “the new ‘Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood'”:
“I’ll be honest — that association is so welcome, and really and truly, it was very much what I was striving to do,” said McBrayer. “Now, I am no fool. I am no Fred Rogers. He was such a special, such a unique individual. But I’ll tell you what, I grew up loving his show. I saw a need for more of those messages in 2022, and I wanted to honor that, and I wanted to pretty much just pick up the baton where he left off. So I will happily take the association, but believe you me, those shoes are impossible to fill. But Jack McBrayer has a way of doing it too, so let’s see what that looks like.”
“We were very excited to incorporate music into the show because as we know, kids latch onto the music. I remember, between ‘Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood’ and ‘Sesame Street,’ and one of my favorites, ‘The Electric Company,’ the music was such an integral part of it and that really stays with a child,” McBrayer said. “We were also fortunate enough to get the band OK Go to create all of the music for our show; between the theme song, and they create an original song for every single episode, and they just knocked it out of the park.”
Insight into the concerns and problems any young kid can encounter:
“Some of them are pretty timeless, pretty universal things that you and I faced when we were preschool age — feelings of fear. We have an episode where one of our characters is a little scared by some of the Halloween decorations. How do we deal with that? We have an episode where we kind of touch on disappointment. Plans fall through for an event, and how do we deal with the disappointment of things not going our way? Losing something — we deal with loss, we learn how to be patient. With all that being said, it is 2022, so I look forward to more episodes where we can touch on things that are a bit more current, a little more contemporary. For example, I didn’t have to deal with any issues with social media when I was growing up, and this of course is definitely part of the lives of our young people today.”
Bringing McBrayer’s prior comedy TV chops to the new show:
“I learned so much during my time on ’30 Rock,’ really, just seeing how a production comes together, but also when I got to witness Tina Fey wearing so many hats — i.e. being the star, being the creator, being a producer, being a writer. She was so busy all the time to create this incredible project, and I find myself, on a much smaller scale, trying to do the exact same thing. And there are some days we were like, ‘How did Tina do this?'”
“At the end of the day, it was important for me … that people understood this was a sincere, earnest children’s show, because so much of what people might know me from is comedic and perhaps a little, you know, edgy,” McBrayer reflected. “I wanted them to tune in and pay attention in a way that they might not if it was just a silly show or a sitcom.”
The new show “Hello Jack! The Kindness Show” can be streamed on Apple TV+ here.
