Everyone is so nice. Documentaries about nice people are in fashion. After 2018’s lovely Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a mold was formed in the documentary segment, and we want to explore nice people who provided us with good memories. You’ll see this kind of nostalgia all over the internet now, too, folks posting videos of Steve from Blue’s Clues or re-engaging with the innocence of their youth, as though these nostalgic markers no longer apply to this post-online world, wherein we’re all inundated with very unnice things, and must, as a force of intention, re-center nice people again. So, we arrive at this kind hearted documentary about a really sweet person.
Like Mister Rogers, Shari Lewis was a proprietor of puppets for children’s television. She came first, in fact, was one of the innovators in this space. As a kid, Shari learned specialized magic from her father, who was once dubbed “New York City’s Official Magician,” during the period of the Great Depression. From this influence, we find in Shari the same kind of resonant turn-toward-innocence that we are experiencing with online fixations on beige niceness today. There is a comfort here. A removal from the real world as we focus on something delightfully simple, like entertaining children with a sock puppet called Lamb Chop.
Shari went on to perform some of the most formative children’s puppet acts on television, setting precedence for Mister Rogers and Sesame Street, and everything else that would come after her work. She was charming. Near-sighted, so much so that she kept the puppet unnaturally close to her face, made the camera come to her, frame the interaction as intimate, and squared off in this personal space. That sort of defined how ventriloquism would look on television.
It’s not the most pressing subject — mostly we are dealing with archival footage and probably the audience is not so intimately familiar with the subject that very much of it will cause any recognition, but then, the point will be to experience it all for the first time. There’s nothing too salacious or juicy here, just a nice lady and her puppets, and a career that crested and waned as people floated in and out of her life, and television adapted and progressed. It’s worth a watch for anyone who like this kind of simple, nice presentation: sometimes an eccentric fun subject is all you need to make a documentary.