YMMV / The Electric Company (2009)

• Cargo Ship: Manny and his Robot. It's almost canon.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Shock is definitely a darkhorse in the fandom due to being an Honorary True Companion who regularly aids the company, despite not having any vocabulary powers, and managing to have quite an expressionistic personality despite rarely ever speaking. Not to mention being an incredible beat-boxer, namely in the some of the intermission segments
• Evil Is Cool: The Pranksters are considered to be fan favorites for both kids and adults, due to being entertaining foils to the titular company as well as having a having a clear set of morals of standards, and being Friendly Enemies.
  • Danny Rebus is the most popular of the Pranksters due to his dramatic personality, being the most sympathetic of the Pranksters, and his actor's skills.
• Ho Yay: Not unheard of, but never explicit or likely intentional, given the show's intended target audience. Notably, when Hector and Danny become friends (it doesn't last), Danny is rather... possessive of Hector.
  • Les Yay: There is a surprising amount of Lisa/Annie shipping going on.
• Retroactive Recognition: Who would've thought that Lin-Manuel Miranda would teach you English through rapping?
  • And how Danny Rebus would eventually become Chidi.
  • And how Hector Ruiz would eventually become Prometheus.
• Rooting for the Empire: The members of the Pranksters (except for sometimes Francine) are arguably much more entertaining to watch than the members of the Electric Company.
  • There are even numerous episodes where the Pranksters barely do evil (nearly any episode with Danny, and various episodes showing Manny to be a genuine fan of the "Mighty Bright Knight" comics, but Hector not trusting him due to actions in the past) or have rather reasonable goals
  • "Spooky Summer Soirée" has Annie being frustrated over The Electric Company always having the best costumes at a costume party and nobody ever noticing her. The closest amoral actions she does are buying out all of the costumes from a discount costume store so that Jessica and Marcus — who didn't pick out their costumes yet — would be unable to get costumes from the store for their theme, and she could wear whatever she wanted to, and sending Gilda (usually Francine's assistant) to lead the two astray with a false address for a yard sale. It's hard not to feel just a little sympathetic over Annie's plight, and more than one person found themselves wanting Annie to succeed over the titular company.
• Spiritual Successor: Given the show's timeslot and premise, it can be hard not to think of Ghostwriter if you grew up in the 1990s.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Fans of the original thought a revival sounded promising, as the 1970s version used both short and long segments to deliver both knowledge and entertainment at no cost to either...but then they heard about all the changes, especially the part about using full-on stories and actually requiring the viewer to pay attention throughout. Although to be fair to the new show, the fact they want viewers to increase their attention spans is actually a pretty noble cause.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Keith Watson. Despite Keith supposedly being just as much a member of the Electric Company as the rest of the crew, and the pilot being all about Keith's inauguration onto the team, he rarely ever gets any focus or storylines, compared to everyone else on the team. He's in nearly all the episodes, but he's constantly being sidelined among Hector, Jessica or Lisa, and rarely, if ever, feels like his own person. Half the time, he feels like a secondary character in his own show. Even in some of his starring roles, he tends to need assistance from another company member. (Though to be fair, he used to be the newest member of the team, before Marcus eventually joined.) He's even one of the only members of the team with a known parent, and yet the show rarely address that plot point. Heck, even Marcus — who only appears in the third and final season — gets more growth and time to shine than Keith does over the entire series.
  • Sammy Spamboni and Amy Scrambler, Manny's little brother and Annie's little sister retrospectively, whose sole appearance was in "He's Not Frozen, He's Immobile". The two of them seemed like they had unhealthy relationships with their older siblings, with the latter being a Bratty Half-Pint towards Annie, and the former catching onto Manny's schemes and pranks, including constantly being frozen. Sammy had even proven to be a smart kid in his own right, considering he was able to reprogram one of Manny's gadgets without the latter even knowing. The two of them could have been great characters with the relationships between two of the Pranksters — especially Sammy, who had the making of being the Abel to Manny's Cain, or could have at least been a recurring ally to the Electric Company, and yet neither of them are ever seen again.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Related to Keith himself feeling wasted as a character as mentioned in They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character, his special skill was shown to be that he can draw sketches and images of whatever he can think of in midair, but it was also implied that his power had traces of Art Initiates Life in it, as some of Keith's drawings had interacted with other objects. And yet despite this, Keith rarely ever uses his power aside from quick illustrations of certain words. Imagine what would happen of Keith really used his power: He'd realize just how much potential he had, and that he could basically conjure up whatever he wants just by picturing it and drawing it in midair. This would make extremely powerful, and possibility the most essential member of the company.
  • "Scrambled Brains" has Annie and her uncle set up a hypnotism stand supposedly to help people, but was really a scam to trick Lisa into switching bodies with Annie, so the latter could ruin the former's reputation. And yet despite this, the worst that Annie does with Lisa's body is scramble the text on a bunch of signs, that the real Lisa could easily change back. Imagine if Annie really had fun with Lisa's body, and did something more heinous, like trash-talking some of the neighbors and/or Lisa's friends (outside of the Electric Company), or damaging some public property, or even going after Lisa's family. If Annie tried that, the after effects would be far stronger and more effective for Lisa, as Lisa wouldn't be able to fix the problem so easily. ^note Then again, it's entirely possible Annie had limits to what she was willing to do, and might not want to try something like that.
  • "Revolutionary Doughnuts" centers on Lisa discovering that her great(x10)-aunt was apparently a traitor to America as she gave the British Red Coats doughnuts during the Revolutionary War... only for Lisa to clear her ancestor's name after realizing the aforementioned doughnuts were simply to distract the British Red Coats and that her ancestor was actually a hero. To some viewers, this may feel like a wasted opportunity to teach young viewers that their ancestors' amoral past actions don't define the person they are now, and they didn't have to follow in their footsteps. But with Lisa's ancestor being a hero to the country, the message kind of feels lost.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Title Sequence got an Emmy for this in 2011.