Hulu’s animated series The Bravest Knight, starring a two-dad family, has just dropped the rest of its second season, which includes a new nonbinary character played by Asia Kate Dillon. Watch a clip here in which they share their pronouns, and read what the creator says about the season!
The Show and the Season
The animated series—the first children’s television series on a mainstream network to star a family with same-sex parents—is based on Daniel Errico’s picture book, The Bravest Knight Who Ever Lived. In the book, a young pumpkin farmer named Cedric becomes a knight and marries the prince of his dreams. The television series shows Sir Cedric and Prince Andrew now with a daughter, Nia, who is training to be a knight herself. In each episode, Cedric shares stories with her about how he transformed from a “not-yet knight” to a full-fledged one, conveying gentle life lessons, all wrapped in a layer of smart humor and fun.
The second season has overarching plotlines about Nia preparing for a big tournament and Young Cedric searching for a dragon, while individual episodes include themes about working together, dealing with failure, caring for the environment, not treating all formerly incarcerated people as villains, what makes a good leader, and even what happens when one loses to people in power who don’t deserve to be.
Errico, now the show’s head writer and executive producer, told me:
I’m excited for viewers to see some fun fairytale adventures and new representation in the final episodes of Season Two. And I’m also excited for them to see Nia and Cedric learn hard lessons that they hadn’t faced before. We end Season Two in a much different place than Season One, and I hope it helps remind people that a knight’s path can’t be stopped by ogres, or golems, or even dragons, as long as they stay true to themselves and their journey.
A New Nonbinary Character
One new episode, “Cedric & Pirate Cove,” also introduces guest star Asia Kate Dillon (Orange Is the New Black; Billions) as the seafaring Admiral Akers. Akers at one point gently corrects another character who had assumed the wrong pronouns for them. “I don’t go by ‘he;’ I go by they,” Akers says. “Some are ‘he’ and some are ‘she,’ but neither one will do for me,” they quip.
The storyline then quickly moves on. I like that the show doesn’t make a Big Deal of the pronoun lesson or of Akers’s nonbinary identity, but simply models appropriate usage and behavior in the context of an everyday social interaction. Just as the show isn’t “about” having same-sex parents, but nevertheless offers important representation, as Errico told me in a 2019 interview, it takes the same approach for nonbinary people. Watch the scene here:
Other guest stars this season include queer actors Alan Cumming, Jane Lynch, Margaret Cho, Emily Hampshire, Cynthia Nixon, Ali Stroker, and Nina West. The rest of the cast is comprised of both queer actors and allies: regulars T.R. Knight (Sir Cedric); Wilson Cruz (Sir Cedric’s husband Prince Andrew), Millie Davis (Nia, Cedric and Andrew’s daughter), Desmond Sivan (Young Cedric), Bobby Moynihan (Grunt), Teri Polo (Saylor), Steven Weber (Head Knight), and Margaret Cho (Cho). It is produced by Big Bad Boo Studios and directed by Shabnam Rezaei.
Themes for Resilience
I very much appreciate that the show seems to sense what many of its viewers’ families may be feeling at the current moment of U.S. history, and tries to give children tools for understanding and resilience. The episode “Cedric & Mayor Hobble,” for example, involves an unqualified but charismatic character running for reelection as mayor of one of the kingdom’s towns, and claiming to be “the best mayor in the entire kingdom.” His supporters adore him and heckle his opponent. The analogy seems obvious, at least for adults—though the point doesn’t seem merely to poke fun at a public figure, but rather to convey a lesson about the importance of electing qualified leaders.
Perhaps even more importantly, the final episode of the season tells parallel tales of failure and loss, both personal and kingdom-wide. Nia’s papa, Sir Cedric, advises her, “If you can remember who you are, even in defeat, then nothing can stop you.” And her dad, Prince Andrew, reminds her that after a defeat, “It’s what you do next that matters. So the question is: What are we going to do now?” The show smartly stays away from offering an exact analogy to our country’s recent stumbles; the lesson is broadly applicable to a variety of failures big and small. But for adults trying to explain to children how they feel about the state of our country right now, and why it is important not to give up, it may offer some jumping-off points for discussion.
All of the above may make the show sound more serious than it is, so let me stress that it is also a simply delightful and entertaining series, simultaneously warm-hearted, funny, and full of adventure (and burp jokes). I wish it had been around when my now-grown son was younger—and I hope that the clear set-up for Season Three means we’ll be seeing more of it in the future.