Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories
There seems to be an innate sense in us all that there is value in preservation. If I had to sit down and list every television show I watched as a child, I probably couldn’t name them all but would still take pleasure in trying to remember.
We often treat memory as something that never changes, even though our minds are changing constantly. We want our memories to remain the same; we want everyone in our memories to remain the same, but they just can’t.
Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories is a short YouTube series I came across when it posted two years ago. I was so captivated by the setting because it was exactly what children’s shows looked like when I was growing up.
The first episode of Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories.
The set even reminded me of My Special Book, which I do not remember seeing on TV, but I came across recently because children’s show lost media is a facet of the internet I am part of.
Children’s programming from the 90s and early 2000s often features bright colors, music, and lessons/advice, all of which are encapsulated in Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories. Even the puppets are living characters within the show, much like many of the programs I watched in my early childhood.
The YouTube series, all in all, explores what happens to our favorite shows when we forget about them. Shows that used to be our safe harbor and helped us grow into who we are now are left to decay, wondering if we will ever return.
The audience becomes a character in this show. The entire show’s existence depends on an audience to watch it. The full title of the abandoned show is Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories for Good Kids and Confused Adults, which makes the show inclusive of the adults who grew up watching the show and came back after remembering it for the first time in years.
Despite the characters expectance that the audience will never return again, Mr. Samuel tells us, “You are always welcome here.” All of the characters express loneliness and a desire to escape as the set slowly warps into a black void, representing the shifts in the audience’s memory and eventual forgetting entirely.
The second episode.
The fourth and final episode of the series shows just Mr. Samuel and the Sun puppet, even featuring the Sun’s puppeteer briefly. Since the set has mostly warped into nothingness and only one oddly-shaped window remains, there is nowhere for the puppeteer to hide and the illusion is broken. These characters only exist in the minds of the audience, who now experience guilt for forgetting about Mr. Samuel for so long.
Mr. Sun also represents the lack of any connection to the real world within the show. In reality, the show was created by real people who have since moved on with their lives. However, the realm of the show is entirely different. The characters, not the people playing the characters, but the characters themselves, seem to be trapped in an endless loop of performance and difficulty navigating existence after being left behind by their audience and their creators. They can’t go outside, and Mr. Sun is the only “sunlight” they will ever have.
Other characters featured in the series are Mr. Snail Mail and Gloomy Madeleine. Snail Mail is, of course, a snail, a slow-moving creature that is easy to leave behind because he will never catch up. Madeleine has the body of a human and the face of a clock–she sings songs about time and is criticized by Samuel for being a “bad timekeeper.”
The third episode.
As I mentioned above the setting is extremely relevant to my interpretation of Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories. The creator of the series, Yara Asmar, writes about the setting of the series in the description of each video. They refer to French architect Alphonse Laurencic, who built prison cells with disorienting geometric shapes and colors.
A journal article from an Architizer.com reads as follows:
Laurencic testified that the color theories of Wassily Kandinsky and others inspired him to coat the walls of his six-by-three-foot jail cells with disorienting geometric patterns. In order to add to the nauseating mood, the beds were tilted at 20-degree angles, ensuring that prisoners would slide off if they tried to sleep. The floors were covered with a maze of standing bricks designed to prevent prisoners from walking in a straight line. To top it all off, flashing lights were used to emphasize the garish colors of the space. Closed off from any possibility of repose, the prisoners had no choice but to fix their gazes on the infernal images plastered across the wall.
Laurencic meant for his prison cells to be dissonant as a means of psychologically torturing facist soldiers. Similarly, the set of Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories is disorienting and imprisoning to its characters.
Asmar states, “With an emphasis on set-building, the disintegrating world of Mr. Samuel manifests as a colored cell through a set that is falling apart.” This implies that Mr. Samuel is the only living character. Whether this means the other characters are part of his imagination or are manifestations of real people he once knew, I have no idea.
I want to shed some light on the interpretation that Mr. Samuel is a real person experiencing dementia. His world manifests as a children’s show because that invokes guilt within the viewer for whoever they left behind in their own lives.
The puppet characters in this interpretation are then, real people who are trying to keep Samuel where he is, never allowing him to go outside or experience anything real. He spends his final days holding on to his own memories as the disappear into the black void.
The fourth episode.
Once again, this interpretation involves the audience. We have all left someone behind in our lives; an old dying relative, or perhaps a friend from school who moved through life at a different pace from ourselves.
Once in a while, we remember the person we left behind. We felt we had no choice at the time, but guilt eats away at our consciousness regardless. I think setting this up as an abandoned children’s show was a genius way to garner attention.
I think both my memory interpretation and the dementia interpretation of Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories have merit. Maybe the series is about both of those things simultaneously.
At the end of the day, life isn’t about figuring out how to navigate the unknown–it’s about going through it anyway, even without a map. The shows we watched growing up taught us the lessons, but it’s up to us to apply what we learned.
Also, I would like to think it’s not a requirement to let go of our past. As I said before, the shows I watched in my early childhood helped me grow. They were entertaining and taught important life lessons. It’s okay to return to that “safe harbor” you discovered as a child. Just don’t allow it to imprison you in an endless cycle of guilt, because it’s also okay to move on.
Rest in peace to Dr. Michael Dennison, who played Mr. Samuel. Thank you for coming.
And thank you to you, my audience, for reading.