I loved watching McGee and Me with you and your brother. It’s a sweet memory ❤

This has quickly become one of my favorite channels -- and over 1K subscribers already. Great work!

Ahhhhh what a blast from the past! Core memory unlocked for me, our substitute Sunday school teacher def used this series like our substitute public school teacher would magic school bus tapes. Off to watch every episode so I can be sure I’ve unlearned all its lessons, thanks for the free therapy session!

Great to revisit this series! My parents bought a couple of the VHS's when I was a kid. The rest were in our church library and we watched them regularly. In combination with Adventures in Odyssey, we were a very FOTF family. I still remember Twister and Shout with some fondness, especially the depth of that candlelit heart-to-heart the kids have, but I never considered how muddled its use of Psalm 23 is, or how blatantly M&M refuses to engage with the idea of temptation in the first episode you discussed. After all, if all the worldly things are repulsive, why is anyone into them? I swallowed the messages of this show as a kid but never considered any of what you offer here. Thank you for this.

this is so weird. About two months ago I saw an episode (never heard of the show before). I looked it up and saw a youtube short showing that the main actor spent a long time in addiction recovery. I needed to know more about this show now and gained a weird hyperfixation on it. The moral of the entire Mcgee and Me series is to discourage kids from having big dreams and trying too hard to escape the status quo. It's ingenius how they do it Any time Nick does something even a little rebellious or selfish or just feels an extreme emotion, it's painted in the nastiest of light and the punishment is tragicomical. He can't just be a little prideful, he has to be a snivveling little shit. The suffering before and after is exaggerated. It's like, "This is how YOU look when you sin." and when he gets punished we can shake our heads in "That's what you get for sinning." I kept thinking, "What kid would want to watch a show where the leads do nothing but lose? I would have hated that. it's depressing." it's because we aren't enjoying a narrative, we're watching a mini passion play. See the sinner express a feeling that I feel from time to time. The sinner does something I might have imagined doing but resisted. I can allow my feelings to be expressed, and a little meaner than I would in reality but that's to show to me that it's a bad thing to do this. See the sinner carry my imagined sin to the slaughtered for sacrifice so I didn't have to do it. And anyway, even if you DO sin, it's not fun anyway. It'll be disappointing. So why try? Btw the baseball episode is the best one. And yes that house is insane.

I grew up Mormon. The LDS church is also very big on consuming exclusively "uplifting" media -- even elements in some PG movies are too spicy for the squeakiest of Mormons. At the same time, you're constantly taught in church that you're preparing to become omnipotent and omniscient like God, and there's an article of faith that says "we hope to be able to endure all things." It never made a lick of sense to me that we were supposed to avoid anything less than perfectly wholesome (by republican "family values" standards) while we were here, learning how to act as independent beings. Isn't the point of raising a child to help them become a happy and functioning adult? So how could God sheltering his baby gods from messy reality do anything but hinder their development? If you wanna be resilient, you need to actually endure some things.

There was a simple solution to all of this: Nick is what? 11? 12? at this point in the episodes? Video rental was a big thing around this time. Wait until it comes out on video and have dad screen it beforehand and if it's just too over the top completely, he could say no at that point, or censor certain parts of the movie. Granted, it's supposedly an American movie and Americans have never really had a problem with violence. It's making love depicted on screen that usually terrifies parents. There's no way as a parent that you win in this situation, except in your own narrow mind. If you say no and give some feeble excuse like it's too violent, the kid is just going to watch the film at a friend's house when it comes out on video. If you try to prevent that, you're just making your kid your mortal enemy. Trust me. I was that kid. I wasn't allowed to have friends. My birthdays were incredibly lonely. My dad said other kids were a "bad influence" on me. I learned to hate him and waited 38 agonizing years after he'd ruined my academic and professional future before he finally died. Either you rule by fear and ruin your kid's life or you have a honest conversation and a relationship based on mutual trust and respect that is earned or you have to delude yourself that you're a great parent because your kid never goes out - as he or she sits in they bedroom fantasizing about jumping out of the window. That was me as a teenager. I had one girlfriend and when she dumped me, it broke me. I'm never having kids, because I'd be a terrible parent. I don't have suicidal ideation anymore, but I'm not going to pretend that life is easy or that I don't curse him every single day.

nick is the sheep