Don't Hug Me I'm Scared (often abbreviated as DHMIS) is a British web and television series created by Becky Sloan, Joe Pelling, and Baker Terry. The series is notable for its blending of surreal comedy and black comedy with psychological horror and comedy horror, as well as incorporating musicals. Its production is also notable for diversity, combining puppetry, live action, and other different styles of animation including stop motion, traditional animation, flash animation, clay animation, and computer animation. The original series consisted of 6 short episodes released from 29 July 2011 to 19 June 2016 on YouTube. A follow-up television series was released in 2022 on All 4 and Channel 4. In the series, each episode starts like a typical children's series, consisting of anthropomorphic puppets akin to those featured in Sesame Street or The Muppets. The series parodies and satirises these TV programmes by contrasting its childlike, colourful environment and its inhabitants against disturbing themes; each episode features a surreal plot twist in the climax, including psychedelic content and imagery involving graphic violence, dark humour, existentialism, and psychological horror. The six episodes of the web series explore and discuss basic subjects typically found in preschool, namely creativity, time, love, technology, diet, and dreams, while the television series touched on jobs, death, family, friendship, transport, and electricity. The web series received widespread acclaim for its story, production design, psychological horror, humour, hidden themes, lore, and characters, and is regarded by many as one of the greatest web series of all time. The television series was met with similar acclaim. Premise Each episode revolves around three characters: a yellow childlike humanoid with blue hair and overalls, an anthropomorphic green mallard duck with a tweed jacket, and a red humanoid with a mop-like head. They have no names explicitly stated within the series but are often referred to as Yellow Guy, Duck and Red Guy respectively. The characters only ever refer to each other with pronouns, never by name. Yellow Guy's father, Roy, also occasionally appears. An episode typically goes with the three main characters meeting one or several anthropomorphic characters, who begin a musical number related to a basic concept of day-to-day life with an upbeat melody, similar to that of a Sesame Street segment. As each song progresses, it becomes apparent that its moral or message is nonsensical and self-contradicting, and that the "teacher" character has ulterior sinister motives. The