Why Is ‘Caillou’ So Hated? The Kids’ TV Show Hit American TV 25 Years Ago & Became an Instant Target

Caillou may be inquisitive, yes, but he’s also whiny, and that seems to be one of the biggest knocks against the TV show. That, and Caillou seems to face zero consequences for his bad behavior. To put it bluntly, Caillou is a brat, and his parents are enablers.

“This has understandably led to theories that this is an accurate portrayal of Canadian parenting and that Canada is raising a generation of psychopaths,” said Hopper. “If show producers were to recast Caillou as an unstable hostage-taker who points a weapon at everyone he talks to, almost none of the show’s dialogue would look out of place.”

In a 2014 SBNation take-down, Spencer Hall called the character a “despicable, spineless 4-year-old boy who cannot do anything.”

Hall added, “It’s not even that Caillou is bad at things. I have a 4-year-old. They are astonishingly inept at things, but they try, and also randomly excel at things they’ve never even tried before. … No human has ever given up and cried at every single thing ever attempted and then whined into his [parent’s] sweater.”

The following year, The A.V. Club’s Gwen Ihanat listed Caillou No. 1 on a list of kids’ shows to avoid at all costs, writing, “When people say that they hate children’s television (or even children), this is what they’re talking about.”

And it wasn’t just journalists hating on the TV show. Change.org petitions bear names like “Cancel Caillou” and “Remove Caillou from YouTube and every channel” and “Caillou should be banned from TV and the internet.” A Facebook group named “I Hate Caillou” has hundreds of members; the r/caillouhate Reddit community boasts around 10,000.

Another chief complaint about Caillou is that the show seems to have no educational value — certainly not anything promoting emotional development or coping skills. “Caillou is definitely enemy number one on a lot of my friends’ lists,” Ohio Public Radio’s Andy Chow told Current in 2021. “As someone who’s watched many episodes, I still haven’t been able to actually understand what it’s trying to accomplish.”

Unfortunately for those parents, Caillou ran hundreds of segments across dozens of new episodes for more than a decade, and a digital remake dubbed Caillou’s New Adventure kept the infantile action going online for years longer.

When PBS finally pulled Caillou reruns from the airwaves in 2021, parents practically bounded for joy, as The Independent reported.

“Everyone is thrilled that Caillou got canceled,” one person wrote on social media at the time. Someone else exclaimed, “Caillou’s reign of terror is over!”

Except, it wasn’t. In 2022, that chrome-domed kid mounted a comeback with an order of 52 CGI-animated new episodes that made it to Peacock in 2024.

“This is yet another example of how we’re reinvigorating treasured brands from our evergreen library,” Josh Scherba, president of media company WildBrain, said at the time, per The Canadian Press.

All we want to know is, treasured by whom?