By the point Shari Lewis charmed a technology with Lamb Chop’s Play-Alongside within the Nineties, her profession had already spanned 4 a long time, three community cycles, and a complete shift in what TV thought it was presupposed to be. And but, the brand new documentary Shari & Lamb Chop behaves as if it’s sufficient to sew collectively classic clips and shout “She was nice!” with out ever explaining how she bought there, whether or not she mattered, or why puppets have been ever of significance.

It’s not that Lewis doesn’t deserve a glowing retrospective. She was a tv pioneer, a gifted ventriloquist (again when ventriloquism was nonetheless a viable showbiz path), and a relentless performer who might juggle comedy, track, choreography, and character work — usually unexpectedly. However Shari & Lamb Chop treats her legacy as self-evident, leaning laborious on hagiography whereas skating over the a lot weirder, extra fascinating query: Why was a lady speaking to a sock puppet such a compelling determine in twentieth-century American tv?

This new movie from Lisa D’Apolito (Emmy-nominated producer and director of Love, Gilda) gives no historic context for why puppetry boomed within the early days of TV — or why it pale. When Lewis started her profession within the Fifties, TV was so new that there was no idea of “youngsters’s programming.” Puppetry, imported from vaudeville and dwell theater, was a default household-pleasant answer. And earlier than modifying tech made ventriloquism optionally available, studying to throw your voice was nonetheless thought of a vital talent. These are essential insights if you wish to perceive why somebody like Shari Lewis existed. Shari & Lamb Chop gives solely: “Her dad taught her puppets.”

In the meantime, the documentary spends far an excessive amount of time on Lewis’s private life — together with her husband’s late stage New Age infidelities — and far too little on the institutional and technological modifications that formed her profession. Her testimony earlier than Congress within the Eighties, through the battle to maintain PBS funded, is diminished to a novelty clip. The movie doesn’t ask why PBS was all of a sudden a battleground, or what it meant that puppets have been now defending public tv’s worth.

That is particularly uncooked within the season that the Republicans usually are not solely defunding Lamb Chop and Elmo however are gouging again cash that the U.S. folks have already promised to the beloved puppets.

Lewis, for her half, was a showbiz survivor. When Hollywood determined it didn’t need puppets anymore, she tailored — dancing with full-sized ones, producing her personal specials, doing no matter it took. That resilience will get some display time right here, however the movie nonetheless frames her as a curious eccentric, quite than a flexible artist navigating (and embodying) TV’s shifting priorities.

Crucially, Lewis doesn’t make sense to us. She didn’t have a model within the trendy sense. She didn’t stand for an thought — she did issues. Her movie star was rooted in efficiency, not persona — she was an grownup comedian for some time! That’s a part of what makes Lamb Chop’s Play-Alongside such a wierd and fascinating artifact. Made within the early ’90s for PBS, it arrived simply earlier than youngsters’s tv turned a website of worldwide branding. The present wasn’t passive or soothing. It was energetic, interactive, a loop of name-and-response and smooth chaos. Lewis didn’t need youngsters to sit down nonetheless. She wished them to sing alongside.

The documentary solely brushes towards this — the shift from participatory media like Lamb Chop to the branded sedation of Teletubbies, which premiered simply after Lewis’s demise. Puppets as Lewis (and Jim Henson) knew them, weren’t simply cute. They have been a sophisticated, analog expertise for getting youngsters to concentrate and suppose. They have been a method of sneaking one thing human into the display.

Within the realm of nostalgia docs, Shari & Lamb Chop lands properly under entries like Butterfly within the Sky, which understood that the idea behind Studying Rainbow was what made it revolutionary — not simply the charisma of LeVar Burton. With Lewis, the doc by no means fairly asks: Why deliver again a Captain Kangaroo-model present within the Nineties? What cultural void was she filling? Why did we cease making house for that sort of gradual, craft-pushed youngsters’s media?

To its credit score, the movie has deep archival gems and a couple of Muppet-world interviewees who acknowledge Lewis’s legacy. However when it brings in somebody like Ken Levine (sure, of M*A*S*H) for commentary, it’s laborious to not really feel like even the documentary is not sure what sort of legacy it’s curating.

There’s a missed alternative right here — to deal with Shari Lewis not simply as a nostalgic footnote, however as a prism by way of which we might look at how media for kids bought right here, and what it misplaced alongside the way in which. As a result of when The Track That By no means Ends loops, it’s not only a joke. It’s a refined lesson in rhythm, construction, and consideration span — the sort of factor that issues when your medium is greater than a model.

As a substitute, Shari & Lamb Chop leaves us with a scrapbook and a spotlight reel. Candy, positive. However the story deserves extra.