The Snoopy Show review round-up

The first season of The Snoopy Show is now available to stream on Apple TV+ with six episodes now online for viewers to enjoy. The series follows “the world’s most famous Beagle, and his best bud, Woodstock” as they go on adventures with the rest of the Peanuts gang.

The series joins the streaming service’s offerings of acclaimed children’s shows, such as Daytime Emmy Award-nominated “Snoopy in Space” and Daytime Emmy Award-winner “Peanuts in Space: Secrets of Apollo 10.”

IndieWire’s Kristen Lopez describes each episode of The Snoopy Show as “a beautiful world of bright colors and imagination.” Lopez praises the portrayal of the complex feelings of adolescence embodied within the series. Lopez gives the show a B+.

It’d be easy for a series like “The Snoopy Show” to fly under the radar. It doesn’t seek to teach grand lessons, but more about the coexistence and wondrousness of life for children. The silent antics of Snoopy and Woodstock might seem tailor-made for a quieter, younger audience, but there’s a lot to enjoy if you’re older. Snoopy, really, is all of us and after the year we’ve had we need something peppy and engaging like this. If you’re looking for something calm for what ails you, this is great. What the creators evince is a remarkable sweet element of innocence, fun, and whimsy, that’s so worth watching. “The Snoopy Show” is pure joy distilled into 22 minutes.

Decider’s Joel Keller had some mixed opinions regarding the series. According to Keller, the show lost some of its charm due to the heavy focus on Snoopy and Woodstock. Though Keller concludes his review by deeming the show as worth streaming, he does say the episodes are more “kid oriented than usual.”

Here, though, while we appreciate that the storytelling is rooted in the comic’s history — we get a glimpse of all of Snoopy’s brothers and sisters on the farm, for instance — we just wish that the show was a touch more sophisticated than it is. If it looked more like the early specials, where we got a good mix of the gang interacting with each other plus Snoopy and Woodstock in their own little world (think A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving), then we’d enjoy The Snoopy Show more.

Vulture’s Jen Chaney review highlights how all the references in The Snoopy Show to the Peanuts comic strip and holiday specials help give the series a warm and fuzzy blanket of nostalgia. Chaney goes on to say that the series does not feel like a cash grab from Apple TV+, instead, it feels authentic like it belongs in some “TV circle of life.”

To make the strategy work, though, these shows shouldn’t feel strategic. They should feel like part of some TV circle of life. The Snoopy Show succeeds in that effort. It’s something parents will enjoy sharing with their kids while also being reminded of their own more innocent times, spent in front of living-room televisions staring at animated Snoopys from their past. It’s a new Peanuts security blanket, wrapped in a comforting and familiar Peanuts security blanket. It’s a reminder that happiness was, and still is, a warm puppy.

Primetimer’s Aaron Barnhart describes the series as repetitive, “Dog and bird get into a scrape together, quarrel, escalate their quarrel to an epic battle (one involves dueling leaf blowers, in another Woodstock and Snoopy become housemates, which never ends well), before making amends like the best friends they are, all in about eight minutes.”

The Snoopy Show is well-paced and nicely designed to appeal to five-year-olds, teaching them about friendship and yada yada. For me, though, watching it is bittersweet in the way that watching Sesame Street, as I wrote on that show’s 50th anniversary, is bittersweet. Much as I never got the appeal of Elmo, I never saw “Peanuts” as primarily about the big-snouted dog but rather, the big-headed little boy of my youth. Oh well. As Charlie Brown’s friend Linus Van Pelt might have said, quoting Saint Paul, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

Cult of Mac’s Scout Tafoya’s short and sweet review puts emphasis on the stress-free premise of the show, “No matter what happens, no matter the stress and fuss kicked up during each episode’s three eight-minute-or-so vignettes, everything always sorts itself out nicely.”

The Snoopy Show is deliberately low-key, nicely low-energy and thoroughly relaxing. I’ll always be grateful for more time with these characters and their creator’s gentle worldview.

In conclusion, fans of the original Peanuts series should definitely check out The Snoopy Show. Though the series may not offer complex storylines or a focus on the side characters, it will allow users to slip back into a care-free time of their lives when reading a Peanut’s comic strip was the best party of their day or when the only exciting thing about a holiday was that they could look forward to a new holiday special.

To promote the launch of The Snoopy Show, Apple updated its apple.com homepage to feature Snoopy-themed animated on each section for the iPhone 12, iPad Air, HomePods Mini, and Apple TV 4K.