Five on Fridays: Halle Stanford and Dorien Davies

Today we’re excited to share our interview with Halle Stanford and Dorien Davies, the executive producers, creators, and writers of Wowsabout!, a new special from Jim Henson Studios that premieres today, May 1, on PBS KIDS. Wowsabout! follows two friends as they explore Sequoia National Park, experiencing moments of awe and wonder at the beauty and interconnectedness of the world around them. (Fun fact— Dorien also is the puppeteer of Roxy, the free-spirited ukelele-playing hedgehog that stars in the show.)

We asked Halle and Dorien the following questions to learn more about their views on awe, storytelling, and infusing joy into the world.

1. What brings you joy in your work?

Halle: Okay, I know this is going to sound corny, but working every day at my company 7 Crow Stories genuinely brings me joy. Like, sing-out-loud-skip-down-the-hallway joy. Fostering a sense of wonder in children and families is what my shows are all about. I am, proudly and unapologetically, a hope punk producer. It is my actual job to make heartfelt, dreamy, imaginative television as cool as it can possibly be. And honestly? It is very hard to have a bad day when you are developing wowsabouts with Roxy & Ronald, adventures about Sea Witches, a family discovering the Pow Wow Trail, and a toad in a tow truck named Toad. I have the best job.

But if we are talking about what made me laugh out loud recently, I give you: Ronald E. Piggington. Our tree-loving pig from Wowsabout!. Ronald makes me laugh every single time I work with him, which is a sentence I get to say as part of my career, and I do not take it for granted.

We were on set just last week, and Ronald was showing off a brand new pair of sunglasses. Wonderful. Except they did not quite fit. I made the casual observation that he looked a little like Arthur the Aardvark, who also famously wears glasses that do not fit his face. Ronald looked me dead in the eye and said, in full Mariah Carey fashion: “I don’t know her.”

The jealousy, dismissal, and the sheer commitment to the bit still make me laugh. There is nothing on this earth quite like the unexpected, unhinged comedy that a puppet can deliver in a live moment, and I will be chasing that feeling for the rest of my career.

Dorien: I am co-creating a kids television special for PBS with The Jim Henson Company about AWE! It takes place in Sequoia National Park and stars a little songwriting hedgehog and a scientific, city pig. My co-creator and writing partner, Halle Standford, and I were reflecting on the uncanny good fortune that has encompassed this production. There have been a lot of obstacles thrown our way in the last year (the defunding of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, the reduction in funding at the National Parks, the government shutdown among others). Remarkably, our show “Wowsabout!,” seems to emerge from these challenges stronger and more agile every time. We have attributed a lot of this dexterity to the show’s subject matter.

Awe is so inspiring and leads to eager collaborations – in a way that I have not been accustomed to in Hollywood. Awe is medicinal.

During filming, our well-seasoned grips and camera crew sometimes had tears in their eyes and openly expressed reverence for the trees and the sky at our location. Our production’s accountant even joined us on location! The entire cast and crew of adult professionals, in childlike wonder, became junior rangers on the last day of shooting. The parks service even brought a few rangers off of furlough to oversee our shoot.

This collective investment from our partners, advisors, crew, studio and public television network was a result of awe at its best. I am so grateful to have been able to dive into this promising happiness science for Wowsabout! and just from what I’ve seen on our show, I’m optimistic about what it can bring to children and their families around the globe.

2. What is a piece of advice or wisdom that you carry with you? Who gave it to you, and in what context?

Halle: “People lead in this world with either fear or love.”

That piece of wisdom came from a dear friend of mine, Andre Blas, and he offered it to me at a moment when I was trying to make sense of a complicated dynamic with someone on a production.

I was genuinely struggling to understand why someone was behaving the way they were, and Andre laid it out simply and clearly. When you lead with love, your work shines. It becomes productive, collaborative, and innovative. It produces the most remarkable results. When you lead with fear, you create roadblocks. It becomes destructive. The work stops being the point.

The more I brought this philosophy into my daily life on set and in the writers room, the more I was able to build a genuinely loving creative culture on each production. If I led with trust, gratitude, collaboration, and passion, my hope was that it would trickle down and take root. And I believe it does. When you watch Wowsabout!, I think you can feel that love up on the screen.

And the gift of this framework is that it works in reverse, too. Now, when someone creates confusion, mistrust, or misunderstanding, I can almost immediately recognize what is actually happening. They are leading with fear. And once I see that, the more useful question becomes: what are they afraid of? Are they afraid they won’t get the recognition they deserve? Are they afraid they are not up to the task? Are they afraid of being seen? Of not making enough money?

Whatever the fear, there is usually a pathway back to understanding through love. Offering up a transparent and healing forum to discuss, usually helps. Not always. But most of the time. And even when we cannot change someone, we can still choose to meet them with compassion, or gently help them find a new path.

Fear and love. Best advice ever given to me with love.

Dorien: One of my favorite professors in college, at Mount Holyoke, was a woman named Penny Gill. She taught a year-long, intimate, interdisciplinary class called “Pasts and Presences,” where we studied The Magic Flute, The Book of Genesis, Maus, The Odyssey – it was expansive for me and remains one of my most impactful educational experiences. She taught me how to write and how to follow my interests.

I was a pretty high strung college kid, ambitious, anxious, and far too concerned with my grades. She knew my type and with love in her eyes, said to me once, “Dorien, you can hold more pebbles in an open hand than with a tight fist… you just have to be okay with a few of them falling through your fingers.” I learned later that this is a philosophy often used in Buddhist teachings, but at the time, it was totally uncharted to me and usurping. I had never fathomed that letting go of control could yield abundance. That’s not what we are taught is a recipe for success. And so, her permission to fail sometimes was liberating.

I’ve reminded myself of this phrase throughout my adult life. It’s helped me see a wider view, give a little grace to my mistakes during time here on earth. It has helped me manage the endless rejection of Hollywood, the care of my aging parents, and quell the perfectionism that came knocking while raising my child. Permission to let some ‘pebbles’ fall has become my recipe for bravery and a kinder way to prioritize my efforts.

3. What new research in the world of prosocial education are you excited about these days?

Halle: Right now I’m doing a lot of reading and thinking in two areas of the SEL landscape that I find particularly compelling and exciting. Both are getting my creative juices flowing!

The first is what I’m calling Experiential Engagement. (Should I publish a paper on this?) It centers on the growing body of evidence that kids need structured offline experiences to rebuild emotional regulation and social skills. Experiences like karaoke, cotillion, escape rooms, bowling leagues (my 11-year-old cousin just joined one, and I am taking notes), Scouts, and of course, wowsabouts! Developmental science supports the idea that communal, screen-free experiences build skills that passive media consumption cannot. And I genuinely believe there is a whole wave of unscripted series for kids and families waiting to be built around this framework.

The second area, which researchers are beginning to call “SEL for Career Readiness,” centers on creating a foundation of “soft skills” for children. Empathy, social-emotional collaboration, community awareness, problem solving, conflict resolution, positive work ethic, leadership, and emotional regulation, not as nice-to-haves, but as core developmental goals. Research indicates that intentionally fostering these skills boosts academic performance by 11% and measurably improves mental well-being. These soft skills are what allow children to navigate social complexity, reduce conflict, and arrive at adulthood genuinely prepared. Soft skills are what it’s all about for me right now.

And here is the through line I keep returning to: as we move toward an AI-enabled world, the skills that will matter most are the ones that make us irreducibly human. Collaboration. Communication. Self-belief. The ability to sit with another person and work something out. To make something with a team that everyone can be proud of. I am actively developing series with this curriculum embedded at the core, including Towed by Toad by Jashar Awan, and I could not be more energized by where this work is heading.

4. What is something in the world that leaves you with a sense of awe or wonder?

Dorien: My community! I am so lucky to have a network of layered friendships and associations that brings me awe through collective effervescence, moral beauty and through challenging me with big ideas. My neighbors in our small incorporated city, in the heart of Los Angeles, are often transplants so our friends have chosen each other as family. We are very lucky to live in a city with a small but enthusiastic public school system that has brought us all together.

Public schools are one of the greatest community builders I think. My daughter is about to turn 13 and her school friends and their families have absolutely changed where I see my place in the world. We go camping together, celebrate holidays together, share resources, hold book clubs, care for each other’s children, show up when someone is sick. We carpool, volunteer and advocate for schools and advocate for local politics together. We are supported and we in turn provide support.

I think that possibly, I have been searching for this sense of belonging for the majority of my life. A “belonging place,” is a turn of phrase that I love and that holds great value to my family. This community that I am a part of, has transformed a big lonely city into a “belonging place.” It has opened my mind to what it means to be a part of a larger collective outside of my nuclear family. I am a little part of a big world. To quote our show, Wowsabout!, “It makes me feel so small, in the greatest way of all.”

5. How do we make systemic change to include prosocial education in all aspects of the education system?

Dorien: I am not a classroom educator, I work in kids media. My bread and butter is entertaining (and educating) for TV, so this may sound profoundly hypocritical (we contain multitudes). But, I believe one impactful way to increase prosocial behaviors in school kids across the nation would be to remove phones and limit website access on laptops, bell to bell (for kids without IEPs).

I am discouraged to see how much of education is being done on school sanctioned laptops that come with unfettered youtube shorts access. It’s disappointing how much time during passing periods, lunch and recess, kids spend in the void of their personal devices.

I’ve recently learned that public school cell phone bans are un-enforceable without a Yondr bag or something that physically locks phones away without a signal. With these bags, kids put their phones away when they walk into school and release their devices at the end of the day. (They provide no temptation, no distraction.) Private schools have them more often now. But they cost about $20 per student and in a large underfunded public school district, that price is cost prohibitive. So when most understaffed public schools put phone bans in place (as we are seeing more and more) there is no enforcement.

Teachers are often very good about keeping devices in check in their classrooms, but during the passing periods, meals and recess (the times when kids are supposed to form bonds, learn empathy, accountability and have fun together), there is often very little supervision. This is when the phones come out leading to less human interaction, eye contact, and socialization. And the data is also clear that just having a phone in proximity to a student during testing lowers test scores.

I think that if there is one profound thing that foundations or our government could provide to improve children’s quality of life right now, it would be to supply “Yondr” bags to public schools and advocate for bell to bell phone free schools, removing youtube from school-issued laptops and promoting kid’s interaction without these distractions.

BONUS QUESTION! What are you currently reading?

Halle: Okay, first, I am obsessed with Substack. I write a weekly newsletter called Little Producer on the Prairie all about my creative musings in this wild and wonderful work of ours. Please come find me there!

And because Substack is basically my happy place, I’ve also joined a J.R.R. Tolkien reading group on there. This year we’re doing a slow read of Tales from the Perilous Realm, a collection of Tolkien’s non-Middle Earth writing, and y’all, I am blown away.

The piece I cannot stop thinking about is his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” It is a delicious read. It was originally a university lecture he delivered in 1939, and Tolkien himself later confessed that the research and writing of it changed his storytelling forever. It’s my 2026 magical discovery! Tolkien, figuring out his own philosophy of fantasy, right before he dove into his masterpiece!

In the essay, he writes about how a fantasy author is a “sub-creator,” someone who builds a Secondary World with its own internal logic, its own truth. And the magic happens when the reader steps inside that world and believes it, because it plays by its own rules.

Here’s the thing. I have spent my career doing exactly this. I was one of the architects who helped build the World of Thra for Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and creating that internal logic, those rules of the realm, has always been central to how I work. Reading Tolkien discover this idea, before he’d even written Lord of the Rings, was genuinely thrilling for me. I finally understood why that instinct is so deep in my bones.

He also talks about fantasy serving three essential functions: recovery, escape, and consolation. And he coins the most wonderful word, eucatastrophe. It comes from the Greek “eu,” meaning good, attached to “catastrophe.” The good catastrophe. The unexpected, joyful, earned happy ending that fills you with a profound rush of joy. Lord of the Rings has, in my opinion, the greatest eucatastrophe ever written, and I will absolutely be using this word and this idea for the rest of my storytelling life.

Thank you for letting me fully geek out on Tolkien. You’ll always find me on a wowsabout in the Shire.

Dorien: I live in a big city, which makes it unusual that a lot of my reading is about nature. I am reading two books right now, “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalistic Ruins.” It’s an ethnography about the people who have relied on the matsutake mushroom and its uncanny ability to thrive in the wake of human destruction.

I’m also reading “The Overstory.” It seems that I am the last one to read this. It comes so highly recommended and thus far I love it. It’s a series of intimately interwoven essays about people and their relationships with trees. It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one who is talking to trees.

We want to thank Halle Stanford and Dorien Davies for their joyful and thought-provoking participation in our “5 on Fridays” series!