September 2016 festival XOXO. Drew Grant of The Observer described the series as "mind-melting". Freelance writer Benjamin Hiorns observed that "it's not the subject matter that makes these films so strangely alluring, it's the strikingly imaginative set and character design and the underlying Britishness of it all". Joe Blevins of The A.V. Club praised the show's "sense-to-nonsense ratio" and its production values. Samantha Joy of TenEighty praised the sixth episode of the series, writing that it "creates a provocative end to a pretty dark narrative about content creation". Television series Like the web series, the television series has also received critical acclaim. Toussaint Egan of Polygon states, "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared could be described as the demented British half-cousin of Sesame Street.. albeit less politically charged than the latter and more focused on taking a sledgehammer to the standard of children's educational television". Don't Hug Me I'm Scared has been named as one of the best TV shows of 2022 by several publications. The Telegraph ranked it at number 20, saying it was "unlucky not to be (in the top 10)". The Guardian ranked it at number 31, calling it "clever, bleak, charming, grotesque and funny". Radio Times ranked it at number 42, praising its "creepy and mysterious spin on vintage children’s television, brought vividly to life through inventive crafts and puppetry". The series was nominated for Best Scripted Comedy Show at the 2023 National Comedy Awards. Creators Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling are British graphic designers, artists and animators. Their advertising runs through commercial productions. The duo have worked as part of the THIS IS IT Collective. Their content consists of videos, graphic design art, animation, music, and working with real-life materials to resemble things in the real world as art. They have won multiple awards, including the 2012 SXSW Midnight Shorts Award, and the 2016 ADC Young Guns award. They have also co-written and did puppeteer work for Cartoon Network's The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Puppets" (season five, episode 36). Sloan and Baker Terry provided voices of Grady, Frank, and Howdy (the three puppets featured in the episode, who trap the main characters Gumball and Darwin in their world). This episode features a song where the puppets sing about never-ending fun to Darwin with toned-down disturbing content similar to the Don't Hug Me I'm Scared series in theme. A series of shorts based on the