Suzy Cato has rebuilt You and Me for YouTube, betting that slow Kiwi kids’ television can still hold a preschooler’s attention

Anyone who grew up in New Zealand in the 1990s probably remembers the slow, warm voice of Suzy Cato asking a small puppet a question and then waiting — actually waiting — for the answer. The original You and Me ran from 1993 to 1998, ate the morning slot on TVNZ, and shaped the inner monologues of an entire generation of preschoolers. Now Cato has rebuilt it, with NZ On Air’s backing, and the new version of the show is going head to head with Paw Patrol and Bluey on the platform where every preschooler under five now spends most of their screen time. YouTube.

The remake keeps the bones of the original. Songs, puppet segments, te reo Māori threaded through the everyday, and the unhurried pace that was the show’s quiet trademark. What is new is that segments are filmed inside actual New Zealand preschools, drawing in real children from a wider range of communities than the studio set ever allowed. The new You and Me streams free on YouTube and on RNZ’s website, which puts it on the same screens as everything else a four-year-old is being shown.

NZ On Air’s head of funding Amie Mills said the remake was deliberately designed to give local children a refuge inside the world’s biggest video platform. It is, she said, an attempt to build “a safe space on YouTube for local children’s content.” That phrasing is more loaded than it sounds. The default state of YouTube for a preschooler in 2026 is the algorithm picking the next video, and the algorithm rewards whatever holds attention longest. The faster the cuts, the brighter the colours, the more cliffhanger-shaped the storytelling, the more views the next clip earns. Slow, conversational, locally made television is at a structural disadvantage on those terms before it even gets uploaded.

Cato told RNZ that the modern landscape was the reason the show needed to come back. “We need a show like this now because life is so busy,” she said. “We’re the veggies, we’re the veggie burger, you know.” The veggie-burger framing captures it well enough. New Zealand kids are not going to stop watching Paw Patrol. The argument is that they should also have something on the same shelf that talks back to them, that hears them out, and that does not assume their attention span is broken before they have one.

The technical term for what You and Me does and what shows like Paw Patrol largely do not is proto-conversational scaffolding. Cato asks a question, leaves a deliberate pause, and lets the child at home fill the silence. Decades of research on preschool language acquisition has shown those tiny conversational beats matter. They turn passive watching into something closer to a back-and-forth, and they teach the rhythm of conversation as much as the vocabulary inside it. The showy fast-cut content that dominates kids’ streaming has stripped that scaffolding out almost entirely, partly because pauses do not retain attention on autoplay platforms and partly because the maths of international syndication does not reward dwell time.

It is worth noting that none of this is unique to New Zealand. Educators on every continent have been writing increasingly worried think-pieces about what high-velocity preschool content is doing to early language development, and the World Health Organization’s screen-time guidance for children under five has not budged. New Zealand’s own guideline still recommends less than one hour a day of quality programming for that age group, and the operative word is quality. An hour of You and Me lands very differently to an hour of YouTube short loops.

The structural challenge for local content goes beyond pedagogy. New Zealand has a small population and an even smaller children’s-television budget, and the cost of producing a single half-hour of original kids’ television is broadly the same here as it is in Britain or the United States. The international shows that dominate our preschool screens have amortised their production cost across audiences in the tens of millions before they ever land in a Kiwi living room. NZ On Air funding does not equalise that maths, but it does mean that something local can exist at all. Without it, You and Me does not get remade, and the cultural drift continues.

The other thing worth saying is that for a particular generation of New Zealand parents — anyone now somewhere between thirty and forty-five — Cato is not just a children’s broadcaster. She is a piece of childhood. The fact that she is still doing this work, with the same warmth and the same patience, and is now showing it to her audience’s children rather than to her audience, is a small piece of cultural continuity in a country that often does not bother to maintain those threads.

Whether the algorithm rewards her remains to be seen. YouTube’s default state is to push children toward whatever is fastest and loudest, and the long-term test of NZ On Air’s refuge-on-YouTube strategy will be whether enough parents click through, subscribe and let the show autoplay long enough for it to show up in recommendations. That part is on us, not on Cato.

Did you grow up watching the original You and Me, and would you put the new version on for your own kids? Drop a comment below.