Frog and Toad

TV Series Review

Frog and Toad are best friends. Frog knows this. Toad knows this. Everyone else knows this.

“Dear Toad,” writes Frog in Toad’s very first letter ever. “I am glad you are my best friend. Your best friend, Frog.”

As such, they do a lot together. They play checkers. They read stories. They search for lost buttons. They are close as two amphibians can be.

And that’s all we have to say about it. Almost.

What’s Hoppening?

They have other friends in this gentle, picturesque neighborhood. Robin sometimes flap in for a visit. Snail delivers the mail. (Get it?) Mole sometimes pops up—quite literally.

But Frog and Toad is mostly about Frog and Toad and their times together. They might cook or go on a bike ride. They might enjoy a spring day or help each other through a sickness. They might grab a couple of ice cream cones if one of them happens to get a coupon.

You won’t find any foxes or herons to muddy the waters. The two will not go on perilous adventures. They will not swear. They will not make obscene gestures or go to strip joints. They will occasionally teach simple lessons or offer gentle reflections or make you smile a little.

In short, this series captures the understated plotting and whimsical art of Arnold Lobel’s original award-winning book series.

And that’s all we have to say about it. Almost.

Warts and All

The origins of Lobel’s Frog and Toad series can be traced way back to when the author was in second grade. He’d been sick for much of the year, and creating art was his way of coping not just with sickness and boredom, but with the anxiety he felt about returning to school. Frog and Toad literally took shape then, and he introduced them to the world in 1970’s Frog and Toad Are Friends. Three more books and tons of acclaim followed.

But Lobel also told his family that he was gay in 1974—four years after the first Frog and Toad book was released—and his daughter Adrianne believes that the books may have been “the beginning of him coming out,” According to The New Yorker. She reminds us that the two main characters are “of the same sex, and they love each other. It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.”

As such, the Frog and Toad books—while beloved across a wide swath of both children and adults—have been particularly embraced in the LGBT community. And the characters’ subtext (whether Lobel intended it or not) has been retained in this Apple TV+ adaptation, with showrunner Rob Hoegee wanting to make sure that the show’s creators and the books’ myriad fans were represented.

“You can’t deny it,” Hoegee told The Daily Beast. “It is part of the books, it’s part of the legacy.”

The article in which Hoegee was quoted is titled, “Frog and Toad are Still Gay in Apple’s New Kids’ Show—If You Want Them to Be,” and that feels about right.

The exact nature of their relationship on screen—as it was in the books—does not come across as romantic, but rather deeply companiable. They share a lot of great times together, but they don’t share a house, or a kiss, or anything that would lead someone to say, “Aha!” Occasionally one wraps his arm around the other’s shoulder. They’ve been known to link arms. But no one—at least at this early juncture—is hoisting a rainbow flag over anyone’s premises.

Lobel himself never said whether his two most famous characters were gay. And I’d argue that Frog and Toad—both the books and the show—fall under similar umbrella as The Chronicles of Narnia do (in context, not in content). Many a kid from an agnostic or atheist family have read C.S. Lewis’ classic children’s stories without noticing the Christian allegory rumbling underneath. Likewise, your typical 5-year-old won’t see anything in Frog and Toad other than two very good friends.

And honestly, in terms of actual content issues, this show is (again at this early juncture) very clean and oh so gentle—so much so as to make Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories look like dark dystopian dramas by comparison.

But every family’s sensitivity to subtext—the arguable meaning behind the story—is different. And Frog and Toad’s friendship may be just too close for some parents’ comfort.