Shows that attempt to teach valuable science lessons in the basic format of a Saturday Morning Kids’ Show or Sketch Comedy. Usually, each episode is focused on a specific field. The host of such a show is often an endearing Mad Scientist type in a lab coat.
A common format is that the audience/viewers are invited to ask questions about science and the show's resident experts set about to answer them, typically in the most entertaining way possible.
Very common in The '80s, when making educational programs had major benefits under Reagan administration policy. (See And Knowing Is Half the Battle.)
The Edutainment Show is its parent trope, the Experiment Show is a common form of it.
Examples:
- Ævar Vísindamaður
- Bill Nye the Science Guy
- Blast Lab
- Beakman's World
- C'est pas sorcier, a French show with one or two hosts who go in the field and a second/third one who stays in his lab explaining things with models.
- Cro
- The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!
- The Curiosity Show is an Aussie example.
- Doctor Who began as this combined with a history show. Considering that it now involves fighting alien cyborgs with 'scientific' terms like "instantaneous biological meta-crisis" you can see that its experienced something of a Genre Shift in the last 50 years.
- Don't Ask Me, a 1970s UK series with professional crazy scientist Magnus Pyke.
- Look Up
- Watch Mr. Wizard
- Briefly parodied in an episode of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
- Repeatedly parodied as a Show Within a Show in Dinosaurs. ("Ask Mr. Lizard")
- In the science fiction book The Calculating Stars, Don Herbert repeatedly invites the protagonist (who he knows from his time in the Air Force) to appear on Mr. Wizard.
- Mystery Hunters, which showed the science that can be used to explain paranormal activities.
- Newton's Apple
- Not Another Science Show
- Science Court (later Squigglevision)
- Square One TV, but with mathematics instead of science.
- Mixed with Cooking Show to create Alton Brown's Good Eats.
- 3-2-1 Contact, a Retool of The Curiosity Show for American audiences.
- The BBC series Tomorrows World ran for over 30 years.
- Owl/TV
- Sid the Science Kid, aimed at preschoolers
- Some shows are aimed at young adults rather than children, e.g. Brainiac: Science Abuse, Mythbusters.
- Parodied by Bob & Ray in the "Mr. Science" skits.
- Marie And Gali is a rare Japanese example. Its view on Curie temperature
is highly creative, to say the least.
- Definitely at the hard science end are Rough Science and Science Shack, by The Open University.
- Wonder Why, appearing at the beginning of 1990s.
- Oddities
- Science Time with Susan Tieman is what it would look like if Aperture Science made one.
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
- Fictional example: Professor Proton, a Show Within a Show on The Big Bang Theory and its spin-off Young Sheldon.
- Parodied on The Ren & Stimpy Show with the "Ask Dr. Stupid" segments.
- WGBH invited Isaac Asimov, John Hansen, and David O Woodbury to present on the importance of clear communication for science and technical ideas. So Dr Asimov wrote "Insert Knob A in Hole B" during the show.
- Dr. STONE is another Japanese example. Its premise has Omnidisciplinary Scientist and Teen Genius Senku wake up in a post-apocalyptic world in which humanity has regressed to the Stone Age, and Senku strives to bring living conditions back up to the 21st century. In doing so, he re-invents or re-discovers all of humanity's key achievements, such as iron, electricity, the internal combustion engine, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications, and the narrative demonstrates how Senku does each of these with the resources he has. In the process, it also indirectly demonstrates that humanity's knowledge of science is cumulative, and that even breakthroughs as simple as stoves and basic agriculture require other breakthroughs to be created first.note
- The Infinite Monkey Cage is a comedy science panel discussion aimed at adults.
- Emily's Wonder Lab, a kid's science show hosted by science communicator and former MIT engineer Emily Calandrelli.
- Sine'skewla, a Filipino series produced by ABS-CBN that ran during The '90s and The 2000s.
