The Bright Side of the Dark Side

Ruby Gloom gave goth-adjacent parents what they’d been quietly waiting for: a children’s cartoon they could actually put on without suffering through it. The setup is a gothic mansion populated by sweetly dysfunctional creatures—Iris, a small bat with a speech impediment who is also, specifically, afraid of flying; Frank and Len, conjoined twins whose idea of a perfect afternoon involves chips and dip; and Misery, a small purple entity who drifts through scenes looking perpetually half-dead and delivers observations in a voice completely detached from human warmth. Ruby herself is the optimist at the center of it all, the one who finds the upside in everything, which in this context is funnier than it sounds.

The theme song is genuinely great, and the show’s thesis—the bright side of the dark side—is exactly what it needs to be: light enough for children, dark enough for everyone else. There was something refreshing about this existing at a moment when children’s television meant either wobbly tube creatures, an overeager builder with a catchphrase, or a girl with a monkey who keeps asking you to help find things. Ruby Gloom understood that kids raised on Tim Burton and Edward Gorey deserved something with actual personality. The darkness is always decorative, but the warmth underneath it is real.