We wade through Netflix to find the best streaming series for your kids

In a continuing effort to get my kids to cook (and eat non-beige food) more, we watch a lot of cooking shows, with MasterChef Junior being a big hit, for obvious reasons. But only one cooking show has made us laugh so hard it even brought my husband to tears: Nailed It! The show brings together amateur, admittedly non-expert cooks and gives them impossible baking tasks, usually involving copious amounts of fondant and Rembrandt-worthy art skill. Any non-professional chef would fail, but some of the efforts are so bad, you wind up cheering for the ones that are even halfway decent, and at least mildly resemble the jungle or castle the bakers were supposed to create. Host Nicole Byer and head judge Jacques Torres are nothing but kind to the competitors as they struggle with these Herculean tasks.While the competition part is engaging for kids, it also teaches them a very important lesson: Failure isn’t always a complete disaster; often, it can be very, very funny. The show features adult people unafraid to undergo almost-certain failure in front of a wide audience, and the vast majority of them are pretty good-natured about it. (Even one of the most prickly contestants, an ex-cop, eventually just gives up and goes to hang out with the judges.) That valuable underlying moral alone makes the six episodes of Nailed It! a hilarious must-watch; our kids can hardly wait for season two. [Gwen Ihnat]

If there’s a show I’m going to have my son watch when it’s summertime, I’m going to pick one that at least emphasizes going outside and enjoying the weather. (I live in Chicago so we only get about two months of sun.) And that’s why Netflix’s Spirit Riding Free is the perfect show. Apparently it’s a spin-off of the 2002 animated film Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron, which starred the voice talents of Matt Damon, but I wouldn’t know. I never saw the film, and I don’t need to to enjoy this wonderful series. It takes place in the frontier times and focuses on Lucky Prescott—a tween girl from the city who moves with her dad to a small remote town in the middle of nowhere. While there she befriends locals Pru and Abigail while also forming a bond with Spirit, the aforementioned horse. If there’s one problem I have with the show, the title is Spirit, when really the show is about Lucky and her friends.Either way, the show is pretty great. For one, it’s probably the only animated show my son watches that has three female characters as the lead, showing him that girls can be just as funny, stubborn, adventurous, and silly as boys. Plus, each episode involves some outdoor excursion for the whole town. They’re in the middle of nowhere; they’ve got to go outside. From finding gold in them there hills to attempting to win a horse race, everything these girls do involves being outside and active—an ideal inspiration for summertime. Lucky for us, season five has just been released. [Eric Munn]

I’m not familiar with the considerable 1980s history (both game and TV show) behind Voltron: Legendary Defender, but as with Spirit, you really don’t have to be to enjoy the series. Five teens discover the giant robot/spaceship Voltron (made up of five separate robot lions), and become tasked with using it to defend the universe against the evil emperor Zarkon. As our own Oliver Sava put it in , “viewers who want to see the anime-inspired aesthetic of Korra and Avatar applied to a futuristic sci-fi series will be drawn to the evocative design work and dynamic storyboarding.” The action sequences are spectacular even in an earth-bound land chase, but the stakes rise considerably as the kids reach space and meet up with Princess Allura and Coran (voiced by a absurdly funny Rhys Darby), who aid them on their galaxy-saving quest. The futuristic graphics bring to mind everything from Tron to Speed Racer, and the zingy dialogue makes the series entertaining even when the teens aren’t involved in an intergalactic battle, but just learning how to bond and create a team that can win their destination showdown. [Gwen Ihnat]

It’s easy for stuff to get lost in Netflix’s content firehose. For instance, the service announced True And The Rainbow Kingdom way back in July of 2015, but the show only arrived, with little fanfare, last year. Helping the show stick was its prime real estate in Netflix Kids’ genius/dangerous search bar, where images of characters from shows appear so little ones who can’t read can still find what they like. My 5-year-old daughter, who loves cats so much she insists she is a cat, was immediately hooked by the image of True holding her cat/sidekick, Bartleby. I struggle to explain the to people: True is a little girl who lives in the Rainbow Kingdom, where she uses wishes from a wishing tree to solve problems or something. But my wife and I love that it basically looks like Super Mario World or Katamari, a blazingly colorful, delightfully cartoonish world that could double for cutscenes in a video game. (Credit for the look goes to the art collaborative and animation house Guru Studio, home of the popular Paw Patrol.) Luckily the show is also sweet and fun, the right mixture of whimsy, silliness, and messaging (without beating viewers over the head with life lessons). Only 10 episodes have come out so far, but here’s hoping more arrive soon—with a video game adaptation. [Kyle Ryan]