Taylor's Attic

Most children’s shows begin with a tidy premise.

Everyone “gets it.” Even the subtext is obvious and the stories are clear cut: a helpful dog; a curious kid; a classroom that somehow stays clean. Taylor’s Attic began with something much less tidy: a grown man, married, with a house and responsibilities, who nevertheless spent an unreasonable amount of time upstairs with a collection of talking imaginary friends who refused to stay in their boxes.

The attic was not a metaphor, at least not at first. It was a set. (A really nice set - the set won a regional Emmy Award!)

But it was the only room in the house where the rules were bent.

Downstairs, life proceeded in ordinary ways. Viewers didn’t see the mundane, day-to-day life going on in the real world. Because that was not the story.

The story took place upstairs. Paco, a pig, was trying to convince himself that lightning was not personal. Stella, the news reporter/cat, was filing reports on playground injustice. And Romeo, my inner child, was rehearsing lines he would never quite finish.

I would climb the stairs, close the door after I entered, and whatever would happen the rest of the day downstairs could wait.

The premise was simple enough to explain to a station manager while at the same time complicated enough to keep interesting. I played a version of myself - a guy who had a wife, a life, and a perfectly good living room - yet kept finding reasons to head to the attic.

The friends up there were not imaginary in the clinical sense. They were puppets, built and voiced and reciting lines that had been written for them.

But the longer we worked, the more they behaved like the real companions of childhood: they were loyal, opinionated, and completely uninterested in adult schedules. Dusty, Rocco, Sumo, Juliette, Dr. Dish, the mice - they all had jobs.

Their job was to make the attic feel occupied even when the cameras stopped.

Each episode tried to smuggle a small lesson inside the noise. Paco facing a storm (get the subtext?). Stella learning that not every story needs a villain. Someone discovering that asking for help is not the same as giving up.

The lessons were never announced with a freeze-frame and a moral. They arrived the way they sometimes do in real life - after hearing a song, or after an argument, maybe after someone almost fell through a hole in the floor.

The theme song itself was about procrastination. “I will do it when I get around to it” was less a slogan than our operating system.

The attic was always one repair away from being finished.

That unfinished quality was the point.

What I did not fully appreciate while we were making the show was how much of it was an argument with myself.

I was married. I was working. The attic was, on paper, a children’s program. In practice it was a place where a middle-aged comedy performer could still invent friends who expected nothing more complicated than the next scene.

The wife existed, but she was downstairs and off-camera, a gentle reminder that the attic had a door, portal back to reality.

The show never pretended the door was locked. It just kept finding reasons to stay on the other side of it a little longer.

That tension is what made the show feel true even when the plots were silly. Children understand the pull of a private room. Adults understand the guilt that arrives when the private room starts to feel more necessary than the rest of the house.

Taylor’s Attic lived in the narrow space between those two facts. The characters never asked me to choose. They simply kept talking until I sat down again.

The series ended the way most local children’s shows eventually do. The DVDs still exist. A Christmas episode surfaces now and then. The puppets moved on to other stages, other rooms, lost to contractual obligations and ownership “rights.”

What remains is the memory of a place that was never fully organized and never fully abandoned. An attic is not supposed to be the main room of the house. It is supposed to hold the things you are not quite ready to throw away and the things you are not quite finished with. For a few seasons, that was enough premise to build a show around.

I still climb stairs. I still close doors behind me when the work requires concentration. The difference now is that the friends who used to wait in the attic have learned to travel.

They fit in cases. They appear in videos and on stages and, occasionally, in the middle of a set when a joke needs a second voice. The attic itself is gone, or at least the television version of it is.

What stayed is the habit of treating imagination as a room you can still enter, even after you promised to come downstairs.

TAYLOR’S ATTIC was a children’s TV program that lasted three seasons. The set was amazing, the puppeteers were better-than-the-game and the writer, sound designer, and director all deserved a better “lead” than myself. The show can still be found with a deep dive into cyberspace.

Thanks for reading!

Taylor

Please listen to the podcast I am part of: Stories Unlimited on Apple Podcast and Spotify Podcast. I am available for personal videos on CAMEO. I am still touring the planet in search of an audience. I am easy to find on social media.

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