Getting in a Good Headspace With How Are We Today?

There’s an old saying that you should never meet your heroes. Well, anyone who tells you that should get better heroes. That’s why Tyler Coe wasn’t disappointed when he met a star who meant so much to him when he was growing up – LeVar Burton.

Back in the late 2010s, when Coe was a producer and host at Austin online studio Rooster Teeth, one of his coworkers happened to be Burton’s daughter. So, one day Coe actually got to meet the Reading Rainbow legend. Coe recalled, “Just even shaking his hand, you get the vibe. He’s just the coolest, most humble, nicest guy and he’s not about himself.”

While he’s quick to stress that he would in no way compare himself to Burton, Coe’s trying to do some real good in the world with his newest project. How Are We Today? is his new show for PBS, an old-school kids show with friends and fantasy and a talking beaver – and, most importantly, real discussions about mental health.

How Are We Today? is rooted in the same kind of compassion that inspired shows like Reading Rainbow and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, but also in Coe’s frustration with how TV often represents mental health. Having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at a young age, he’d become disappointed in how even supposedly helpful programming is often doling out unhelpful advice, or making people feel like failures for not handling things better. If those negative emotions sound antithetical to a show like this, Coe suggests listening to what Fred Rogers said about his own show. “He said he created what he did because of hatred. He hated what he saw on television, he hated the onscreen aggression specifically geared to children, and I think that pretty much everybody can agree that when it comes to social media and what is given to us and young kids, teenagers, especially when it comes to mental health is incredibly dangerous.”

When he first conceived of How Are We Today? the idea was for a show that would help explain to people what being diagnosed with something like bipolar disorder really means. Coe said, “It’s very hard to get out the words, how we feel, how we live, how we see.” That’s why each episode has a little mini-dramatization in the middle in a different style – sort of like the trip to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe – showing “just what it looks like to me, or to somebody with panic attacks.”

The original idea was for a fully animated show, and Coe had moved to Los Angeles to develop it. Then, as is common in so many artists’ stories, Covid happened “and the show went away. The production team I was working with, that’s gone. So I found myself back home in Georgetown, Texas, just sort of ruminating.”

Those ruminations led to him pondering what people wanted and needed right now, and he found himself looking back to his childhood. “I was a child of the Nineties,” he said, “and I missed the shows that raised me.” He understood that the need for How Are We Today? was still there, he just needed to change the format. “What if we create almost a Sesame Street-type world – same cadence, same type of idea, but it’s all mental health, and all the characters deal with these mental health conditions and we can show you visually what it’s like.”

That mix of sensitivity, joy, and determination to do better is why Coe calls TV legends like Rogers, Burton, Steve Burns, and Bill Nye “the real spirit behind the show.” Oh, and add Seinfeld to that list. If that sounds like a strange left turn, to Coe it makes sense. Another major inspiration for the show was sitcoms like New Girl, Spin City, Frasier, and most especially the show about nothing, which helped prove that a single-location series could work. “Just about every episode was a sealed bottle episode,” he said. “Ninety percent of the show takes place in the kitchen of Jerry’s apartment.”

And, of course, like all great sitcoms from The Simpsons to Friends, How Are We Today? needed a big, comfy coach for the cast to meet, talk, and sprawl across. This being a mini-budget show made independently by friends, it was actually borrowed from the show’s director of photography, who had the comfy leather four-seater in storage. “We piecemealed a lot of the set together,” Coe said. “We had people bring in their own personal items and knickknacks – I have stuff from my grandparents on the show.”

Relocating to Austin had meant that Coe was able to reconnect with his community here to find people who would help with the show. That included three colleagues from his Rooster Teeth days who would become his co-stars on How Are We Today? – Barbara Dunkelman (RWBY) Mariel Salcedo (On the Spot, Free Play), and Elyse Willems (Funhaus, Arizona Circle). However, the cast wasn’t quite complete.

First, Coe really wanted to have a mental health professional on the cast, so they could combine “the convalescent stories” of the cast “with the medical experience of a clinical behavioral psychologist.” However, that character had to fit into the fun, gentle world of the show, and not make it feel like it was grinding to a halt for the science bit. Enter Doctor Erin, aka Erin Newins, a licensed clinical psychologist. Coe was introduced by a mutual friend and realized immediately that Erin was what the show needed. He said, “If anyone is a Fred Rogers on the show, or a fairy godmother, it’s Erin. She is the real deal.”

Then there was the final member of the cast: the beaver, puppeteered by Williams. Coe just really wanted that kind of puppet character from the shows he loved growing up, “to really add a level of levity and give a nod to the audience that, ‘Yeah, guys, you know we’re just messing around. Yeah, it’s cheesy, I understand that it’s a little cringe, but that’s the area where growth exists.’”

Fun and gentleness, entertainment and education, those combinations are what makes How Are We Today? feel like a classic PBS show. “People say to me, ‘This is going to be great. I can watch this with my kids, I can watch this with my partner,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, you can, but also they can watch it, in their safe space, where they want to and on their time.’ That’s why it’s important that the show be on PBS – that it’s free to everyone and can go everywhere.”

Yet Coe is still a little shocked that this series he made with friends on a shoestring budget is on the airwaves. Moreover, it’s not just in Austin: How Are We Today? has been picked up by 20 stations, from New Mexico to New York, from the Pacific Coast to the Florida Everglades, and he called every affiliate that signed up “encouraging that we’re on the right path.” Yet the station that has touched him more than any other is the most remote and the smallest affiliate in the country: WTJX, serving the U.S. Virgin Islands. “I remember when the stations relations people told me about that, I got emotional because that’s what the show is about – switching these tiny little things around, changing these phrases to make you realize the bigger picture or at least see through the trees. The idea that paradise would want a mental health show speaks to that. We have these preconceived notions that you’re OK because you’re over here, and that’s not the case, and that’s what we’re trying to do – we’re trying to reach everybody.”

How Are We Today? airs on KLRU in Austin. For more information, including a full list of local affiliates, visit howarewetoday.com.

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