The Amazing Digital Circus and the Case of the Borrowed Premise

[This post is taken from a recent Substack I published. You can subscribe here.]

There’s a TV show that everyone should know about, one that’s made for children and which has caused a major sensation among them.

It’s called The Amazing Digital Circus, and if you don’t have a kid you’re likely not to have heard of it. Or maybe I’m wrong; maybe everyone’s heard of it.

There’s only one episode, a pilot episode.

So far, from The Amazing Digital Circus, my children have learned what a pilot episode is, and how it works. The older one has explained it to me multiple times: they made this one episode of the show, and now all they need is someone to give them money. Then they’ll make more episodes, but until someone buys it they can’t really do that, because the animation is really hard to do, and it takes time. Etc.

I watched this pilot episode with my kids, because after trying out Demon Slayer I learned that good things can come of humoring my children when they want to show me something they like. And while this show is no Demon Slayer, it does interest me. I mean, it sucks ass, but it does it in a way that’s worth spending some paragraphs on.

The premise is that there’s this thing called the Digital Circus, a kind of video game that you enter by putting on a VR headset. It’s lorded over by an AI ringmaster, whose head is a giant pair of teeth with eyes and a tongue coming out of it. The other characters who populate this circus are the digital avatars of people who have put on one of these VR headsets and cannot take them off. They’re trapped! They all want to leave, but they can’t.

The protagonist is the newest addition, a kind of harlequin doll girl who spends this pilot episode realizing that by entering the game she has consigned herself to indefinite imprisonment inside it. Somewhere in the world, she is an actual person wearing a headset, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Now she’s a figment of this horrible place she didn’t realize would be so bad and dangerous.

When Moriah first described this show to me, I dutifully explained that this is exactly the premise of a Philip K Dick novel I read once. I think it’s A Maze of Death, from 1970. People are trapped in a simulation that keeps running over and over, and in which they die and are reborn endlessly.

I said, “This ain’t that tired premise’s first rodeo, little lady,” and she waited until I was done talking so she could tell me more about Digital Circus.

Later, I looked the show up on the Internet, via a personal computer, and learned from other people who know more than I do that its premise dates back to an even earlier story by Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” from 1967. It’s a story I’ve heard of but haven’t read. I’d like Moriah to read it with me. It’s hard to find time for it, though, because she’s so darn busy!

This circus nonsense wouldn’t be worth spending time on here, the way I’m spending time on it, if not for the apparent fervency with which this TV show has been embraced by children. It’s not just my children; judging from the proliferation of YouTubers who comment on the show, and analyze every scene as if it were not complete dogshit, it’s become a real sensation.

Something I feel is worth mentioning is that, because this show is on YouTube, when my kids watch it they have to suffer through regular commercial interruptions. I wondered, as I watched it with them, if this show is a ploy to get kids accustomed to those. I have always hated commercial interruptions. They make no sense! When I had to watch TV with commercials, I didn’t watch TV. For many years of trash like Lost and Alias I was checked out completely. It wasn’t until I had the option, via streaming, of never having to watch commercials, that I got into some new shows. But on YouTube, commercial interruptions are frequent. So now generations who have never had to see them have to see them. But then, my kids watch YouTube constantly, so this is nothing new.

What can I say about the way in which children are so fascinated by a show that depicts people who are trapped inside computers and can’t leave them? Only the most obvious thing, which is that the show is basically showing children an exaggerated form of what’s become of so many of their own lives. Kids love video games; kids love watching things on YouTube. They could go outside, but there’s nothing outside. In most neighborhoods, there’s nowhere to go if you don’t have a car. If someone saw a kid walking around, most places, they’d think something bad had happened. Like the harlequin doll whose name I didn’t bother remembering when I watched the show, America’s youths are trapped in the Digital Circus.

But then, so are the parents! What am I doing now but staring at a computer screen and typing on a computer? What will I do all the rest of today but continue to do more of that? Even if I take an afternoon shift as a sub, I’ll most likely have to show kids a video on YouTube, and give them tasks to perform on the laptops they’ve been assigned.

I’m not saying this is a horrible dystopia. Thanks to the glowing screen that’s in my face at all times, I get to work from home. If I want to, I can go and take a walk, and take a break from my digital circus.

I’m just saying, if I had to offer an explanation for why this show is so compelling, it would be that. Because I know that when I was a kid, and I loved Transformers, the reason was that I spent those formative years changing into a fully functioning automobile that could drive around, and changing back again into a small boy, making incredible unearthly machine sounds whenever I did it. When I learned that an animated TV show depicted a world that reflected my lived reality, I couldn’t take my eyes off it! I mean, holy cow.