I Love You, You Hate Me

The documentary does an admirable job of capturing those early days without a wink or sneer. ... I Love You, You Hate Me expertly marshals different pop-culture voices to explain how the anti-Barney sentiment bubbled up so easily. ... In the end the show makes a surprisingly persuasive case that maybe the Barney backlash of 30 years ago was the canary in the coal mine — that it served as an early warning of what a culture steeped in irony and conditioned to react caustically to everything on a screen could become.

When we look back through the filter of “I Love You, You Hate Me,” it seems ludicrous that a mildly irritating children’s TV program could inspire such vitriol from adults in certain quarters.

"I Love You, You Hate Me" does make the anti-Barney sentiments seem nothing short of infantile. ... The haters get to atone in episode 2 of the documentary, but the point is made rather strongly that Barney was so easy and gratifying to hate he might have opened the floodgates of loathing that infect the current political atmosphere. The people who were behind "Barney & Friends" or appeared on it as part of the kid cast all have their stories, some reassuring and some sad.

In its second episode, “I Love You, You Hate Me” explores how some of the kids featured on “Barney” rebelled (pretty typical child-actors-growing up stuff) and then it gets into the thorny question of Patrick Leach’s crime and whether “Barney” and its impact on his family contributed to Patrick Leach’s criminal act. Up to that point, this “Barney” doc is fun and even thoughtful, but then it starts to feel needlessly exploitative.

While the project captures a very specific moment in time, it runs out of insight before its time is up.

I Love You, You Hate Me doesn’t want to be simply a hollow celebration of ’90s nostalgia, which I truly respect, but it doesn’t quite have the intellectual ammunition to make its more ambitious points convincingly. ... There’s a gap between irrational hatred and meaningful critique that I Love You, You Hate Me is unprepared to deal with.