“Another TV is possible,” is one of many taglines for Blippo+, a channel surfing simulator available on the Playdate, Switch, and PC that’s packed with original programming from an alien planet called Blip. The game hearkens back to a bygone era of broadcast television, a time before the streaming wars when you would have to flip through various channels to find something to watch, or tune in at just the right time to catch your favorite series.
Blippo+’s catalogue is filled with a variety of shows carrying the aesthetic characteristics of basic cable in the 1980s and ‘90s, all created by a wide array of artists across various mediums thanks to the combined efforts of YACHT, Telefantasy Studios, Dustin Mierau and Noble Robot. Whether you’re looking for educational content, news, Solid Gold-style dance routines, a talk show, a soap opera, or anything else really, Blippo+ has a show for you. Its alien programming gives many of the popular streaming services of Earth a run for their money, and is a refreshing way to engage with art in the ways of the past for those of us who have grown into disillusioned luddites due to the state of the current media ecosystem.
While you can’t go wrong with any of the shows beaming in from the other side of The Bend, if you really want to understand what makes Blippo+ special, you should go straight to the cream of the crop of what all us lowly humans from Earth get to tune into.
Let’s start with Clone Trois. If you binge watched The Pitt earlier this year, and are now in need of more medical drama in your life, Clone Trois is the perfect medicine. The hospital soap opera appears on channel 18 of Blippo+, and the entire cast of doctors and nurses working at the show’s Oblivion Memorial Hospital are clones of the same person, played solely by the fictional actor Seemie Simmons (Olive Kimoto). An added layer of philosophical intrigue undergirds all of the typical workplace romance and attempted murder one can usually expect from this genre. How do all these already thorny relationship dynamics become further complicated when everyone is technically the same person? Are clones actually the same to begin with, or are they distinct independent beings? Clone Trois cleverly plays into this premise, with every character’s name being an allusion to their nature as copies: Nurse Echo, Doctor Ditto, etc. One begins to wonder what Planet Blip’s history with and ultimate stance on clones even is as the drama unravels from episode to episode.
Some of Blippo+’s shows are crucial to understand the larger fiction the game builds around the discovery of a cosmic phenomenon known as The Bend. Clone Trois is not one of those shows—and neither is Fetch!, an adorable claymation show on Channel 49. Claymie Stratford’s stop motion shorts visually recall obvious signposts like Gumby and Davey and Goliath, but with a slight surrealism closer to Adult Swim than Art Clokey. It never has the edge Adult Swim is known for, though, remaining playful and wholesome throughout. You could easily see Fetch! shorts running on Sesame Street. In our review we compared Blippo+ to MTV’s inventive bumpers from the ‘80s and ‘90s and the channel’s late-night animation show Liquid Television, and Fetch!’s bite-sized stop motion asides are a big reason why.
We’ll say it: we’re not above celebrity gossip, and we imagine few of us here on Earth truly are as we endlessly scroll through social media, learning about whatever controversial or scandalous thing our most popular humans have done in the last 24 hours thanks to the efforts of various verified accounts and users. Wouldn’t it be nice to partake in all the rumors without any of the weird baggage or discourse that comes with the names we recognize from our home world? That’s what Rubber Report offers, a gossip show that tells you of the whispers and tales happening on Planet Blip, hosted by Neomie Lifto (Chloe Coover) on the TVX network. Our Earthly lack of familiarity with the goings on of this alien society adds to the comedic effect of the program. All of the celebrity names and various locations mush into a funny word soup, while Neomie keeps the expected cadence and sentence structures of any talented gossiper. It creates the same feeling as when people parody the inherent silliness of Star Wars news for those of us lacking context, describing how “grungus” is angry with “the blorbo” or whatever the hell their names are. I laughed out loud the first time I watched Rubber Report in week two of the game’s timeline, and heard the words: “Boing boing, Blippers. It’s Neomie Lifto here with all your bounciest news.” Thank god for Neomi Lifto, and boing boing indeed.
A few familiar faces from the so-called “alt comedy” world pop up throughout Blippo+; Whitmer Thomas co-stars on Confetti Cowboys, and Brent Weinbach is the always sleepy co-host of the (excellent) morning show Wake Up, Universe! Mitra Jouhari—who co-created and co-starred on Adult Swim’s Three Busy Debras, wrote for High Maintenance and Big Mouth, voiced Cleopatra on the Clone High reboot, and recurs on The Bear as Molly (Claire) Gordon’s roommate—has the most prominent role of the lot. As Barbara Lightworker, aka “the Psychic Barbara,” she hosts Psychic Weather on the Time Dilation Network. Jouhari’s effortless union of 900 phone line New Age rambling with the tone and tenor of a weather forecast remains delightful throughout Blippo+’s 10 weeks of programming, and might be the best example of a Blippo+ show that could easily stand alone as its own thing outside of the game’s framework.
If you really want to get the most out of Blippo+, though, you’ll need to focus especially closely on the shows that contribute to its central storyline. Chief among them is State of the State, a nightly news show hosted by Madeline Planet (Kate Adams). It should probably be the first show you watch every week, as it consistently introduces the latest developments in the ongoing saga of The Bend, with regular appearances from Blippian scientists like Dr. Zeph Boing (Kyle Mizono) and Ned Telson (Cosmo Segurson), as well as the enigmatic “Bendonaut” Michael Zero (Martine Syms), who becomes crucial to the story. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a fantastic entry point for one of Blippo+’s key strengths: its amazing collection of fantastical hair styles. It’s the first show in the rotation every week on Channel 2, which is basically as prime time as Blippo+ gets.
Ultimately the most important show to that story, though—and the one that, in our view, most perfectly sums up the entire Blippo+ ethos—is Boredome, MainScreenTV’s teen issues show. It recreates the look and feel of a very specific style of program that was common in the 1980s and ‘90s: the “by teens, for teens” talk show that anybody who grew up watching Nickelodeon’s Livewire or any MTV show shot in front of a studio audience will immediately recognize. As hosted by Birdie Telstar (Josie Jensen), Boredome captures the polarities of lethargic disinterest and all-consuming passion that all teens can uniquely flip between at a moment’s notice, as its initially too-cool-for-school stars gradually start a movement that could shake the very foundation of Blippian existence. Blippo+’s creators might be a few decades removed from teenagerdom, and hell, who knows if teens are still like this (who knows any actual teens in the year 2025?), but they tap into something about the teenage experience that we hope remains to be true.
Clearly this isn’t a comprehensive guide to Blippo+’s 50 shows (plus the text-only Femtofax service), and we wouldn’t recommend that you skip any of them—even the (very) few that don’t really work. Fortunately, Blippo+ forces you to watch at least some of every show, every week, in order to unlock the next week’s worth of programming, so even if something leaves you cold you’ll need to at least tolerate it long enough to get to the next batch of good stuff. And hey, what resembles the TV of the past more than sitting through something you don’t care about until the show you actually like comes on?
