Series · Netflix · 2020

Trash Truck

A child, a useful machine, and a day that ends. One of the few that respects a small viewer's time.

Trash Truck is built for a small child and then it stops, which is a moral quality. The truck is useful, the boy is not the mayor of the universe, and nobody's father is the punchline. It will not carry an evening. It will carry twenty minutes without teaching contempt. That is a pass.

The eight

Industry
6/10
The truck has a route. The work of the town is not a joke.
Household
6/10
A boy and the people on his street. Home is where he starts and finishes.
Piety
4/10
Kindness is the weather. No one is mocked for it.
Courage
4/10
The brave thing is a new block, and it is enough.
Republic
6/10
A town small enough to have a route.
Temperance
8/10
Soft, finished, and not selling the next want.
Truth
6/10
A truck does a job. The show does not dress it up as magic.
Stewardship
6/10
A child can copy helping with a real chore.

Live historicallyLet the child take one real thing to the bin and call that the rest of the episode.

Series · Disney+ · 2018

9-1-1

People who answer the call. The disasters are opera. The job is still a real one.

The fantasy disasters are absurd, and the series knows you know. Under them is a truer picture than most shows will sit with: a dispatcher who stays on the line, a firefighter who goes back in, a city that works only because some people answer. The personal plots are soap. The work, when they let it be work, is the reason the show is not empty.

Older teens can watch an episode with you and then you should tell them about a real emergency you know, which was smaller and not choreographed. Admire the answering. Do not admire the tornado.

The eight

Industry
8/10
The shifts are the moral fact: someone has to go in when the house is on fire.
Household
5/10
Found families and broken ones. The station is more stable than the marriages.
Piety
3/10
A chaplain sometimes. Mostly the creed is the job.
Courage
8/10
They go into the ridiculous and the awful for strangers.
Republic
7/10
A city held together by people on a radio.
Temperance
4/10
The spectacle is turned up past belief, on purpose.
Truth
5/10
Personal lies run under the rescues.
Stewardship
6/10
A rookie, a captain, a standard being passed at the table in the station.

Live historicallyPut the real local number and a plan somewhere the whole house can find it.