Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorn. I want to tell you about a kids show. It's called

City of Ghosts. It's on Netflix. And I will admit it is a little hard to explain, so

I guess I will start with the animation. The characters are three-dimensional mostly

children. You look a little like, I don't know, maybe like more thoughtfully designed

Nintendo Wii avatars. The show is set in Los Angeles, which is where we record Bullseye,

and the backgrounds are real places that thousands of people here walk through every day. The

subway station in Koreatown, skate parks and Venice, restaurants in East LA. And the premise

of the show is relatively simple. It's framed like a documentary and your hosts are a group

of kids who are all members of the Ghost Club. The Ghost Club, as the name implies, gets reports

about ghosts in the city, goes to find them, and then once they do find them, sits down to

interview them. The members of the Ghost Club are voiced by kids with little to no acting

experience. In the questions they ask the ghosts sound genuine because they are genuine.

The ghosts and the other adults in the show are also real people, telling more or less real

stories. City of Ghosts takes the real world we live in, sometimes a scary alienating place,

and combines it with a plot device that can be even more scary, ghosts. And despite that,

City of Ghosts, the show, isn't scary or alienating. In fact, it's the opposite. It's warm,

it's inviting and illuminating. It gives the viewer, whether they're a kid or an adult,

a better idea of the world around us without sacrificing our capacity for imagination.

That's a tough thing to do, but Elizabeth Edo, the show's creator, managed to pull it off.

You don't need to take my word for it, either. City of Ghosts just nabbed a Peabody award

for its brilliant first season, a Peabody, to celebrate where replaying my interview with

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