From the home office,

it's the special "Daddy Day Care" edition of The Jersey Exile. While the little one busies herself with her toys on the living room floor, I thought I'd take this time to talk about children's television, a subject in which I'm rapidly becoming a self-styled expert by virtue of necessity. Overall I think my wife and I are fortunate that Andriana goes to daycare three days out of the week, where we know that her time will be entirely without the idiot box, but for the time she does spend in from of the T.V. it's comforting to know that there are at least a few shows out there aside from Sesame Street which aren't complete and total garbage. Here are my favorites, by category:

1. Best Educational Show: Stanley (Disney Channel). Unlike a lot of "edutainment" programming that grafts a weak moral lesson or some throwaway factual content into its episodes in order to make the cut, Stanley celebrates knowledge and the joy of learning from start to finish, and with nifty animation and memorable music to boot. The star of the show, Stanley, discovers all he can about the animal kingdom by consulting his Great Big Book of Everything, an encyclopedia/scrapbook that can transport him and his friends to the natural habitat of his quarry. There are moral lessons to be learned, as well, but they are always arrived upon from the knowledge Stanley gathers about his newfound animal friends. But really, what better lesson can you teach a kid than that books are cool?

2. Best Imaginative Show: ChalkZone (Nickelodeon). Rudy Tabootie is a kid with an active imagination and a supply of magic chalk that enables his drawings to come to life in a pocket dimension called the ChalkZone. Being the escapist creative type myself, this show really appeals to me for personal reasons, but it's wonderful to have a show where the main character must use his imagination and artistic skills to solve his problems.

3. Best "Moral" Show: Hey Arnold! (Nickelodeon). Not since Fat Albert and Friends has there been such a positive cartoon about kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Arnold is a kilt-wearing fourth grader with a misshapen head who lives with his grandparents in the skylight of their boarding house, which like the entire neighborhood is situated under an overpass in an anonymous big city. The urban jungle that the characters of Hey Arnold! romp through is depicted with a sly but warm wit that makes all of its grit and grime downright homey; and children and grownups alike are depicted realistically, learning their life lessons through trial and error and not by editorial fiat. The best part of this show by far, however, is Helga Pataki, the bully of the fourth grade who carries a torch for Arnold, unbeknownst to her tormentee of choice. And her secret shrine to Arnold is just plain inspired!

4. Best Eye Candy: Rolie Polie Olie (Disney Channel). This show is weak in every respect - plot, characters, faux factual content, and moral lessons that don't make much sense (e.g., "Grown-up robots used to be baby robots, too!" Umm, what?) - except for one, where it truly shines. With its bright, colorful computer-generated polygon characters and backdrop, Rolie Polie Olie is a visual feast that will fascinate your baby for hours on end, guaranteed. I bet it's even better with the mute button on. Still, the one thing that absolutely gives me the jibblies about this show is that virtually everything in this Rolie Polie world - the house; the sun, moon, and stars; the couch; the garbage can; even the television - has eyes that blink and follow you from room to room. So are these objects self-aware? If so, what kind of life is that? It reminds me of that scene in Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer and Darryl Hannah crash the apartment of the tinker who has created dozens of half-functioning cybernetic "friends" that sit around his pad and stare at you. Creepy!

5. Best Ear Candy: The Wiggles (Disney Channel). If you're a parent and somehow not in the know about this Fab Four from Down Under, then you obviously don't own a T.V.! The Wiggles offer a kind of variety show for the diaper set, including lame skits and borderline questionable educational content, but all your kid will keep coming back for are the songs, which are insidiously catchy - "Fruit salad, yummy yummy!" - and like it or not will have you humming them as well as you sit in traffic or wait for the elevator at work. Sometimes I wonder if the group, whose repertoire includes a ditty about Noah's Ark and a song in Hebrew, isn't a front for some kind of crypto-fundamentalist Christian cult, but hey, the baby really likes to do "The Monkey". So who am I to complain?

6. Best Brain Candy: George Shrinks (PBS). Finally a public television offering, and it's a damned good one. Stylish, smart, and inventive, George Shrinks is about a boy (named George Shrinks - hey, get it?) who for some reason is about the size of an action figure. His daily adventures thus consist of trying to make his way through the relatively giant "normal" world. The animation is in the Art Deco style, the music extraordinarily cool, which is only appropriate since his father is a Jazz musician (his mother is a sculptor - bonus points for the portrayal a nuclear family of Beatnik artists!), but the best thing about this cartoon is that the educational content comes out of seeing the world through the eyes of a six-inch tall protagonist. George Shrinks is the best kind of health food for the brain, the kind that tastes good in and of itself!