Skip to main content

Apple releases two new trailers showing off its TV Plus children’s shows

Apple releases two new trailers showing off its TV Plus children’s shows

/

One from Sesame Workshop and a revival of Ghostwriter

Share this story

Image: Apple

Apple today posted trailers and new info for two of its original shows destined for its upcoming Apple TV Plus streaming service. The programs, the family-oriented shows Helpsters and Ghostwriter, are slated to arrive on launch day for TV Plus, which will be available starting November 1st. We can’t embed the trailers, but they’re available on the Apple TV Plus sites linked below.

The first, Helpsters, is a show for preschoolers about monsters who love to help people solve problems. The show is made by the Sesame Workshop, and in the trailer, the studio’s knack for blending puppets with real-world locations is on full display. The main monster, Cody, walks down a busy city street before singing a song with her monster companions at their store.

At Apple’s services event in March, Sesame Street’s Big Bird and Cody discussed onstage how the Helpsters will use ideas taken from computer programming to help solve problems, giving the show a unique educational benefit. The trailer doesn’t give any clues about what some of those problems might be, but it makes sense that Apple would want a show on Apple TV Plus that introduces kids to the concepts of coding.

Cody from Helpsters.
Cody from Helpsters.
Image: Apple

The other, Ghostwriter, is a reboot of the popular PBS series from the 90s that helped teach kids reading and writing. In the original, a ghost helped a group of kids in Brooklyn solve mysteries by changing words and letters in the world around them. The Apple TV Plus trailer doesn’t reveal how the reboot might differ, but there are clues that it will follow a similar approach.

A walking, talking rabbit asks kids at a school for the time — the way he talks and the way he’s dressed, he’s presumably the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland (he even calls himself “Mr. W. Rabbit”). But nobody can see him except for four friends, who speculate about whether or not the ghost sending them messages also sent the rabbit. (Spoiler warning: according to Apple’s description of the show, the ghost is, in fact, releasing fictional characters into the world.) I remember watching the original Ghostwriter a lot growing up, and I hope this show can hook a new generation on reading and writing.

The kids and a mysterious rabbit from Ghostwriter.
The kids and a mysterious rabbit from Ghostwriter.
Image: Apple

Helpsters and Ghostwriter will join fellow children’s show Snoopy in Space on Apple TV Plus when the service launches on November 1st for $4.99 a month.