General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

The Who Was? Show

The Who Was? Show is an American live-action sketch comedy series for children that premiered on Netflix on May 11, 2018, based on Penguin Workshop's bestselling Who Was? biography book series. Each of its 13 episodes pairs two seemingly unrelated historical figures, such as Marie Antoinette and Louis Armstrong or Bruce Lee and Julius Caesar, and tells their stories through improv, sketches, impersonations, music videos, and animated shorts in a show-within-a-show format.¹

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	May 11, 2018, on Netflix Kids & Family; all 13 episodes of the single season aired that day¹^•²
Format	Show-within-a-show sketch comedy: a group of kids produces a history show overseen by a clueless network executive, Ron, played by Andy Daly³
Episode structure	Two unlike historical figures per episode, with sketches, songs, improv, music videos, animation, and guest appearances¹
Young cast	Haley Tju, Lilla Crawford, Bentley Green, Adam Hochstetter, Zach Timson, and Kirrilee Berger³
Guest stars	Ellie Kemper, H. Jon Benjamin, Jane Krakowski, John Oliver, and Andy Daly, among others¹
Episode length and rating	About 24 minutes per episode; rated TV-Y7 by Common Sense Media and TV-PG by streaming listings²^•⁴
Status	Canceled after one season⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Season 1 (13 episodes)

The series opens inside the show the kids make. Each episode is built around a pairing of two historical figures chosen because a theme links them: Shakespeare and Tut share fame and mystery, Sacagawea and Blackbeard share adventure, Picasso and the Wright Brothers share invention, and the season finale, "Julius Caesar & Bruce Lee," aired May 11, 2018, brings together two men famous for striking blows.⁸^•¹⁰ Around these pairings the six kid hosts run sketches, fake commercials, and interview segments, all supervised by a network executive (Andy Daly) who keeps pitching terrible notes from his office.¹¹

The sketches are the real engine. Ben Franklin (Adam Hochstetter) and Gandhi (Haley Tju) rap about being on money, Franklin recalls his work on the Declaration of Independence, and Gandhi sings a song about vegetables. Franklin's actual essay on flatulence becomes the jumping-off point for roughly two straight minutes of farting, which is exactly the kind of joke the show trusts its audience to love.¹²

The standout recurring bits turn history into parodies of modern television, and the best of them is Galileo walking into "Ye Olde Shark Tank." Galileo, in period dress, pitches his telescope to a panel of Renaissance investors in the exact format of the reality show, complete with a cameo by Mark Cuban playing himself across the centuries. The joke lands because the format does all the work: the sharks scoff, Galileo insists you will want to see the stars up close, and the audience gets the actual point of the telescope without anyone lecturing. The same parody engine produces "Tut Talks," a talk show hosted by a boy king; "The Fast and the Curie-ous," a faux action-movie trailer for Marie Curie; and "WhoTubes," a running video-clip segment.¹³

The show also borrows from older television. A crew of famous explorers hosts the "Who Was? Roast of Marco Polo," staged like a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, with explorers taking turns insulting the man whose travelogues they all secretly used. The references to Laugh-In and the celebrity roasts give parents something to recognize while the kids learn who Marco Polo was.¹³

Between sketches, the frame story keeps moving: the kids pitch segments, the executive pushes back with notes that would ruin them, and the show they fight to protect is the one the viewer is watching. Guest stars drop in as themselves or as historical figures, including John Oliver, Ellie Kemper, and Jane Krakowski.¹¹^•¹³ The season runs through its roster of pairings and closes with the Caesar and Bruce Lee episode, ending the run after 13 episodes with no second season.

Characters

The kid hosts are the ensemble, played by Haley Tju, Lilla Crawford, Bentley Green, Adam Hochstetter, Zach Timson, and Kirrilee Berger. They anchor the frame story as the producers and performers of the show, and they double as historical figures in sketches, most prominently Tju's Gandhi and Hochstetter's Ben Franklin.¹¹

The network executive (Andy Daly) is the adult antagonist of the frame story, a clueless suit whose notes threaten to flatten the show into generic kids' TV. H. Jon Benjamin narrates every episode, his deadpan voice tying the sketches together.¹¹^•¹³

Interpretations and controversies

The main criticism is educational rather than dramatic. Common Sense Media's parent reviews note that the show is fun and engaging but historically inaccurate and full of crass humor, making it entertainment first and a rigorous teaching tool never. The Decider critic wondered aloud whether pairing Ben Franklin and Gandhi in a rap video is really the best way for kids to learn about historic figures, even while recommending the show.⁸^•¹²

Source material

The series adapts the Who Was? books, Penguin Young Readers' illustrated biography series for children and a #1 New York Times bestseller, which profiles historical figures with cartoon covers and bobblehead-style portraits. The show translates the books' breezy, joke-friendly tone into sketch form rather than dramatizing any single volume.¹⁴

Origin and development

The idea came from Francesco Sedita, president and publisher of Penguin Workshop, who also served as an executive producer. He described the show's tone as "The Muppets meets SNL meets You Can't Do That on Television." Sedita created a pilot episode, and the Penguin Workshop team pitched the project to potential partners at the Kidscreen conference, where Netflix picked it up.¹

Sedita had worked as a writing intern at Saturday Night Live earlier in his career and drew on that sketch-comedy experience, recruiting creative collaborators from his NYU days. He said the decision to produce the show with Penguin Workshop's own resources came from confidence that the books' rich content could carry a comedic treatment.⁶

The sketch format itself took shape when Penguin and Fremantle approached producer Adam Korson about adapting the books. Korson saw the potential for a sketch series, and Netflix supported giving it "more of a late-night sensibility, with the sketches having a bit of an edge and satire baked into it."³ The writing and directing team drew credits including The Daily Show, Conan O'Brien, Great Minds with Dan Harmon, and Roseanne.¹

Format and content

Each episode builds its sketches around an unlikely pairing of historical figures and draws comparisons between their stories and legacies. Examples include Gandhi and Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare and King Tut, Isaac Newton and Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie and Harry Houdini, Galileo and Queen Elizabeth I, Pablo Picasso and the Wright Brothers, and Julius Caesar and Bruce Lee, the last of which closed the season.⁷

The framing story follows the young cast producing their own show under the well-meaning but dim network executive Ron. Historical figures appear not only in sketches but backstage, talking with Daly and the cast. Writer and producer Gerry McCann said every sketch and song is drawn from the subjects' stories, using the books as a sturdy basis of historical fact before the comedy takes off from there.³

Guest casting occasionally became part of the joke: in the Amelia Earhart episode, Ellie Kemper performs the narration instead of H. Jon Benjamin because, in the show's fiction, Amelia Earhart did not think Benjamin should narrate her story.³

The book series behind the show

The Who Was? series, the brainchild of Jane O'Connor, Penguin Workshop's vice president and editor-at-large, launched in 2002 with four titles. It became known for cover art depicting historical figures as bobbleheads, and Penguin Workshop later added the spinoff series Where Is? and What Was?, collectively called Who HQ. By the end of 2018 the brand encompassed some 231 titles with more than 35 million copies in print worldwide, and Penguin Random House reported that a Who HQ book was sold somewhere in the world every 11 seconds.¹

The show also fed back into the books: by September 2018, Penguin Random House reported that the thirteen aired episodes had helped propel the Who Was? books to the top of the New York Times children's series bestseller list for the first time.⁶

Reception

Common Sense Media rated the show suitable for ages 7 and up and gave it a Common Sense Selection award, describing it as a fun introduction to historical figures through jokes, skits, silly songs, satire, and caricature-style animation recognizable from the books. Its review noted that beyond basic facts about when and where the subjects lived and what they contributed, the show offers limited factual depth, functioning more as entertainment that can inspire curiosity than as a teaching tool.⁸

Parent and kid reviews on the site were mixed in a consistent way: many praised the show for making historical figures engaging and for encouraging further research, while others criticized historical inaccuracies and crass humor, such as bathroom jokes, as detracting from educational value.⁸ A Pajiba critic reviewed the season positively, writing that it is "great for kids of all ages, and parents might learn a thing or two as well."⁷

Aftermath

Netflix did not order a second season, and the show is listed as canceled after its single 13-episode run.⁵ A companion Who Was? podcast later extended the brand in audio form, playing history games with figures such as Mark Twain.⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026