Growing up I never really paid that much attention to this show. I remember watching it but not really being all that invested into it. As far as the show goes it was alright. It just focused on a group of 4th graders who were pranksters at their school. It was cliché and alright for the time and now that I’m older I think I can really appreciate what this show was trying to teach us growing up.
In this show the students of the school have set up their own human society on the playground of their school for recess. It has its own government, class system, and set of unwritten laws just like a normal real world society. Only here it’s done with kids who are all unique and have their own individual character. Like for example we got the tomboy girl, the geeky genius, the gentle giant, the cool jock, the popular girls who all have the same name, and the show even adds in new character archetypes such as one of the kids being a hustler, a class snitch who has no problem being a snitch, a king who enforces the rules of the playground, kids obsessed with digging, and the kindergarteners are wild savages. Just a lot of characters who each have their own personality and character that makes them standout. The show’s primary theme was freedom as well as trying to find a balance between individuality and social order. Basically trying to be yourself while still adhering to the rules that society has thrown on us. In each episode the kids are defending their freedom which are always being threaten by adults, the social norm, or the school administration. The show does a good job showing both sides of the issue and showing how our characters can sometimes be wrong and often lead to problems. The show also shows that going one extreme is never the answer when facing an issue but instead trying to find a balance between the issue and your freedom is the way to go. Sometimes the show executed these lessons well and other times they didn’t. It was pretty much give and take. One episode I like is when the recess teacher who serves as the main antagonist of the show gets in a relationship and as a result becomes lax around recess and let’s the kids pretty much do anything they want. At first this is good but as time goes on things start to get out of hand and not even the main characters can handle it. The main theme of the episode is having too much freedom can be a bad thing and can lead to anarchy. There needs to a balance between freedom and order. One episode that I don’t like is when a kid named Gordy doesn’t like T.J and he has no reason for it, he just doesn’t like T.J because he doesn’t like T.J. The lesson that they’re trying to tell us is that some people will hate you for stupid reasons and that trying to please everyone out there is impossible (trust me, as a guy who writes stuff on the internet I’ve learned this lesson) but the episode doesn’t give the kid a reason to hate T.J and does a bad job portraying the lesson. If they had given the kid a reason such as T.J acts this way than the lesson could of work but as the episode goes with the kid having no reason to hate T.J it falls flat. So as a child I thought the show was alright but now that I’m an adult I can honestly say I really like this show and wished I paid more attention to it growing up.