Carly Ciarrocchi is an Emmy-nominated performer, writer, musician, and producer. She has spent most of her career in children’s media, hosting TV shows like Sunny Side Up (Sprout), Snug’s House and The Big Fun Crafty Show (Universal Kids), and Weird But True (Disney+). All four shows earned Daytime Emmy nominations. As a producer and writer, she’s worked with Nick Jr., Amazon Kids, PBS Kids, and Sesame Workshop. She’s written music for Sprout/Universal Kids and is a vocalist-songwriter on two Grammy Award-winning children’s albums. Carly hosts multiple kids’ podcasts, including Tinkercast’s Who, When, Wow! Mystery Edition and Pinna’s Hey Story Go! She also serves as cocreator and producer on the latter. Carly is a speaker and emcee, working often with the Lego Foundation and other organizations that advocate for creativity and play. She’s the voice of Southwest Airlines and a Moth Storyslam winner. Whether she’s talking to preschoolers or policymakers, her work invites all ages to create, imagine, explore, fail, connect, bounce, wonder, feel, and play more—together. This conversation took place on January 21, 2025.
Marsha: Can you tell us about what roles you play in children’s media and the different hats you wear?
Carly: My overarching story is that I make kids’ media, and I do that a lot of different ways. Sometimes it’s hosting, sometimes it’s writing, sometimes it’s producing, and sometimes it’s a mix of those jobs. Over the last twelve or thirteen years, I’ve been able to work in television and now, in the last couple of years, podcasts—which has been so fun!
When I was working on the Sunny Side Up show, it was a very broad scope of preschool content—we were hitting a lot of different education buckets. I hosted that show for five years, and the show covered a lot of areas of content, but also different styles; so sometimes we were making a craft, sometimes we were singing songs, sometimes making a recipe. Then, later in my career, working on stuff for older kids, it seems like the focus kind of narrowed.
What changed with the shift to making content for older kids?
Weird But True is a science show for ages eight to twelve. That was a show we shot right before the pandemic for Disney Plus and National Geographic. We wrapped the last week of February 2020. We had done eight months of shooting, and we were all ready to just go home and not do anything for a little bit. So, it ended up being brilliantly timed, because by the time it came out, kids were at home and parents were looking for content that felt educational but was also fun.
Something I loved about Weird But True is that the show explored science topics through crafts, dress-up, and also meeting experts in the field. In every episode, we were exploring a topic. If any explanations were needed, where in another show they might cut to an animated graphic, all of those moments either happened with two-dimensional, handcrafted, hand-puppeteered pieces, or we would dress up in costume and talk about scientists’ discoveries, or we would have interviews with actual experts in the field. I really like projects that come at whatever they’re exploring from multiple angles and from angles that bend into this zone of play and creativity that feels really active and repeatable by kids at home. When stuff gets particularly crafty and playful and exploratory, it feels like it’s modeling how a kid can follow their own curiosity at home.
Weird But True trailer
To me, kids’ questions are often science questions—they’re always asking “why, why, why” just like scientists do—so that idea of following their curiosity really resonates. How does that connect to the podcast work you’re doing now?
I host Don’t Break the Rules, an improv game show for kids, and Hey Story Go!, a storytelling podcast—neither of which are science-related. But Who, When, Wow! Mystery Edition is a podcast that looks at unsolved mysteries throughout history. Curiosity and question-asking is definitely the nugget of that show. It was created by Tinkercast (creators of Wow in the World), and the idea of what “wows” you is a thread running through both shows.
My character, called Carly Q—for “question”—is obsessed with anything related to aliens or the supernatural, and she follows the thread of the unsolved mysteries throughout history. Sometimes that leads to a very clear scientific conclusion, but sometimes it leads to a couple of different conflicting theories where nobody knows what’s going on. So, what do you do? Do you hold the question? Do you formulate your own theory? I think that helps model a certain type of question-asking and curiosity-following that is certainly explicitly in the realm of a detective or someone who is on a mission, but I think it can be applied to so many academic subjects including harder science, too.
Would you say it’s priming them to ask those questions later and giving them a fun route to get there?
Yeah—and Carly Q gets so fired up, which is how I was as a kid about science and mysteries! That feeling of “Oh my gosh! What about this? What could this mean?” and “Did you know that . . .?” Both Weird But True and Who, When, Wow! sit in that sweet spot where the engines of the shows are hosts who are enthusiastic and passionate and able to follow a theory or a question as far as they can. I think that’s a great thing to model for kids.
In my music, my goal is to get kids to have fun with science and think about something new and inspire them to go explore an idea. It sounds like with both of your shows, you’re also trying to get kids excited about science and to explore more?
Exactly. Definitely. In Weird But True, there were so many ways we were able to set kids up with things they could do at home if they were jacked up about an episode. For example, we did a whole episode with citizen scientists and how you can participate in a science experiment from anywhere. I know that kids were able to learn about that offering from our show.
Not only can you follow your curiosity to real people and places, but you can step into these science experiences by embodying and inhabiting the aspects of the scientists that are interesting to you.
We did one episode at the National Dinosaur Monument in Vernal, Utah, where we worked with paleontologists and dug up dinosaurs. I had several parents message me after that, like, “Now I’m supposed to be planning a vacation for my family to Vernal, Utah, because of that episode?!” But because we were rooting every episode in real experts sharing about the topics, there was always an invitation that, if you want to follow this thread further, you certainly can. These places we went to are real. The people we talked to are real. We just supplemented all that real exploration with play exploration too. So, not only can you follow your curiosity to real people and places, but you can step into these science experiences by embodying and inhabiting the aspects of the scientists that are interesting to you, which feels very kid appropriate.
Are both shows over, or is there going to be more of either show?
There was just the one season with thirteen episodes of Weird But True, which you can still watch on Disney+, but it stands up to time since the technology will be up-to-date and relevant for a while. Same with Who, When, Wow!, where we were exploring mysteries of the past with as many up-to-date theories or conclusions as possible, and there are two seasons of that show that are out wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Do you have plans to do more science-related content or have anything along those lines coming down the pike?
I have one TV project in development that’s in the maker space, which will involve kids creating and building. It’s a tough media landscape right now due to the changing ways families are experiencing their content and their media, which is why I have more podcasts than TV projects.
What are some of your favorite topics you’ve covered or favorite moments or times when you felt you were really sharing something cool or you just learned something cool?
Well, we shot a scuba diving-themed episode of Weird But True, which was an astonishing experience for me. I don’t want to say I’m afraid of the water, but I was certainly not a person that felt like I needed to snorkel. To me the ocean is so massive and unknown that I’ve not felt like I needed to be in it. Halfway through shooting the season they came to me and said that for the final episode they wanted to do a scuba diving show and that everyone else on the cast and crew was scuba certified except me.
So, they said the only way we can do the episode is a) if you agree to it, and b) if you’re willing to get certified. In my soul I was thinking, I am unwilling! but I said yes. The experience of learning how to scuba dive was harrowing and challenging, and my anxiety was through the roof. But I learned everything I needed to learn, and we shot the episode in Hawai’i, which is an amazing place to do something that terrifies you. My co-host Charlie said to me that once we get down there and you see the things you can only see on this planet underwater, you’re not going to think about how worried you are about breathing out of a metal tube on your back. And he was right. That was a life-altering experience. Once you have an experience with something like that, you care about it, and you want to protect it. May we find that for ourselves, and for families with kids, specifically when it comes to the planet. May we protect this space we have while we have it.
Do you ever get feedback from kids who are excited about topics they’ve heard about on the show?
Yes! Especially for Who, When, Wow!, sometimes kids will say, “Hey will you do an episode about this mystery or that mystery?” which is low-key very helpful, because in our forty episodes so far, we’ve now done a lot of the more well-known mysteries like the Bermuda Triangle, Amelia Earhart, and the Loch Ness Monster. Of course, we’ll never run out of mysteries, but when a kid comes up because they, too, are a mystery enthusiast, that’s my whole dream for the show—finding an audience of kids who are as obsessed with that stuff as I was as a kid. So, getting real ideas from kids about which mysteries they find compelling is great.
They retain the specifics so well. With Weird But True, which was fact based, we always used to say the facts that you’re learning are like a party for your mind. Then you get to share them with people and give them a party for their mind!
I think with kids, they just need a little spark and then they take it from there. It sounds like you’re igniting the sparks in a lot of different ways. I also think about that idea of how kids are like sponges picking up all the fact and details, so I’m really careful in my songwriting to fact check, be accurate, and choose my words. Do you feel a need to be careful about what you’re saying and how you’re saying it, so kids are not misled?
My favorite thing about writing song lyrics is finding the simplest and most fun way to communicate something.
Totally. I think the training of the Sunny Side Up show honed the skill of using essential language. I wrote a lot of original songs for that show, and since the segments were short and they were for preschoolers, I couldn’t get a lot of words in. My favorite thing about writing song lyrics is finding the simplest and most fun way to communicate something. So, you want it to be simple, you want it to be scaffolded. I want my words to be sticky. I think that has served me in my projects for older kids, that early training in how to be deliberate with language. You can be hilarious and silly, but it’s really important to me that the things I communicate are clear and tangible.
I think that’s a great approach. Are there any other messages you want to share? What’s the big picture? For me, I think about creating the next generation of scientists and inspiring kids to explore and think about what they will become. Do you think about that with your work, too?
In everything I do, I hope to empower kids to follow their specific and personal curiosity and enthusiasm wherever it takes them. Knowing that the journey can be winding and circular, and that that’s such a gift of the human experience to be able to sink your teeth into anything that lights you up. I hope, in the things that I do, I offer or create the conditions for kids and families to have an experience of exploration and curiosity that is completely free and liberated. May you explore with no hesitations and no boundaries. Thinking of all that we have available to us right now with the internet and AI and the living world around us—may we harness all those things to explore beyond the limits of our imaginations.
Well, that’s brilliant and beautiful. I feel like that’s the goal for many of us who work in this area of kids’ media and kids’ music, and for me science specifically. It’s about letting them be curious and teaching them to explore and have fun with it. I also think a lot about the trend of people who are anti-science and anti-facts, and making sure that our next generation appreciates facts and fact-finding and how to find answers. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Thank God we do what we do; otherwise, I don’t know where I would put my energy. The squad is assembling. May we empower this generation to feel like they can look for the facts. Understand what’s real and not real, and what’s true and not true. And may they be free to be exactly who they are in whatever ways that expression that comes through. I wonder how all our work will shift and change, but I’m hopeful that there are so many people that are making beautiful, intelligent media for kids that we can offer a life raft if, and when, things get hard.