How ‘Wonder Pets: In the City’ Carries the torch for empathy, inclusion at Apple TV+

Back in mid-December, Apple TV+ put out a press release announcing the then-new animated children’s series Wonder Pets: In the City. The show, produced by Nickelodeon Animation and developed by Emmy-winning author, illustrator, and director Jennifer Oxley, is described as “adorable” and meant to encourage children and their families to “come together to meet charming new characters and go on exciting adventures that spark curiosity and celebrate our unique differences.” Wonder Pets: In the City chronicles the adventures of heroic characters Izzy the Guinea Pig, Tate the Snake, and Zuri the Bunny. By day, the creatures live in a New York City kindergarten class, but by night, they travel the globe in their so-called “Jetcar” to rescue fellow animals in musical, operatic adventures. The show is a spinoff series of Wonder Pets.

I sat down with Oxley via videoconference late last year, not long before Forbes let me loose and my column ended, to discuss making Wonder Pets: In the City. She explained she likes to believe the series should be enjoyable to “everybody,” but said its target demographic is preschoolers. The premise of the show, she told me, was the class pets spring to life once the students and teachers leave school for the day. A craft project, a telephone made from a juice box, starts ringing with a distress cal from an animal in trouble. Oxley characterized Wonder Pets: In the City as having a “music-forward [and] mini-operetta” format, adding dialogue weaves between spoken lines and music. As the heroes are saving animals, they’re singing all the while, according to Oxley.

Notably, Wonder Pets: In the City includes characters created with disability in mind. There’s a snake who’s disabled, as well as an elephant who’s visually impaired. Oxley explained these classroom pets aren’t superheroes in the classical sense—they have no superpowers—but nevertheless “they bring their unique differences and points of view… they are powerful and can do anything,” she said. Teamwork and collaboration, Oxley added, is the trio’s superpower. In an effort to challenger herself and the rest of her creative team, Oxley told me she wanted to “push the storytelling forward” by trying to create stories with more socio-emotional tugs and inclusivity at their heart. The aforementioned snake embodies the push for greater inclusiveness. As Oxley said, he slithers rather than walks. He has no arms. His appearance, she told me, is a “great vehicle for telling stories.” She shares an anecdote about an episode in which a mother chicken has a problem in a runaway egg. When the heroes get to the farm to try to help locate the egg on the lam, the mother chicken wants nothing to do with Tate the Snake because, as Oxley said, he’s “slimy and sneaky.” Tate has to sit out the adventure due to her reticence, but the mother chicken eventually comes to realize “he’s not what she expected at all [and] she was wrong to judge him without getting to know him.”

The axiom to not judge a book by its cover absolutely applies to disabled people.

“Ultimately, we’ve got these three pets who have very different personalities and they’re different types of animals—yet they’re best friends and they come together as one,” Oxley said of her protagonists. “They can work together and find a way to bring all of their strengths to save the day. I’m hoping audience will feel that sort of love and heart and joy of helping others. I’m hoping that will be a takeaway message for them.”

However ostensibly tardy this piece is in being published because I spoke with Oxley before the holidays—running a one-man newsroom ain’t easy—the fact the story is running this week is fortuitous. Apple TV+ is widely known, and critically acclaimed, for cultural phenomenons such as Severance and Ted Lasso. CODA became the first streaming film to win a Best Picture Oscar in 2022. Severance is showing the hotly-anticipated Season 2 finale on Friday. Ted Lasso is coming back for a fourth season. I love both shows myself. Where Apple TV+ gets far less adulation lies in what Oxley and Wonder Pets: In the City have embraced: inclusivity. To wit, it’s extremely meaningful Apple TV+ is home to a slew of shows featuring disability prominently and matter-of-factly. From See to Little Voice to Best Foot Forward to El Deafo—incidentally, all of which I’ve covered in the past—Apple TV+ has an impressive roster of shows that put disabled people in the spotlight. None of them are active in terms of new episodes, and it’s fair to perhaps not like them as entertainment, but all are worth a watch if only to see people a lot like Tate the Snake: to see someone who look different actually be normal and, in the case of See, seeing blind people seriously kicking ass while simultaneously paying homage to the norms of the Blind and low vision community.

In a society where disability is commonly seen as a fate worse than death, and disabled people portrayed as moribund and generally hapless, that Apple TV+ is home to so many shows which depict the polar opposite is significant and downright triumphant. Although Severance gets the glitz and glam, and deservedly so, it means something, as a lifelong disabled person, to see others who look like me loom large in big budget Hollywood productions. Apple’s TV+ leaders in Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg both are deserving of the utmost credit for, amongst other things, taking the company’s ethos on accessibility with its consumer tech products and applying it to the myriad projects which emanate from Cupertino’s ever-burgeoning entertainment division.

For her part, Oxley credited pre-existing relationships with Apple TV+ executives such as Tara Sorensen, who leads children’s programming for the streaming service, as one reason Wonder Pets: In the City came to be. Apple, Oxley told me, has its own sensibility; she called it a “fun challenge and collaboration” to work with them in bringing Wonder Pets: In the City to life. Oxley wanted to stay true to the work, but make it pair well with Apple’s vision for shepherding its nearly 6-year-old entertainment arm.

When asked about the future, Oxley expressed enthusiasm and optimism. She confessed to not being the type who’s terminally online, toiling over umpteenth Reddit threads, but she’s aware there’s always going to be feedback, both good and bad. It’s her hope Wonder Pets: In the City will be as well-received as the original, as she knows it’s hard for reboots to pass muster with diehard fans. She’s confident, however, the new series stays true to the old and thinks audiences will pick up on that. Oxley wishes audiences will be appreciative of how “a lot of the original DNA is still in this new series.” She’s also hopeful Wonder Pets: In the City will attract new viewers, telling me the music in particular, what with recording a live orchestra for each episode, should resonate pretty deeply with veterans and rookies of the Wonder Pets canon alike.

All 13 episodes of Wonder Pets: In the City are available on Apple TV+ now.