Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection (Warner Bros., Disney+), Jason Mendez/Getty Images, CBS, Nintendo, Courtesy of retailer, Meta, Toei Animation, Netflix, Mark Rober via YouTube, CBS
It’s a little wild to think about how Neil Patrick Harris’s 14-year-old twins, Gideon and Harper, are almost as old as he was when he first broke through on network TV. Cast as Doogie Howser, M.D., when he was just 15, Harris has been a fixture in American television ever since, winning laughs as How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson and hosting everything from the Tony Awards to Saturday Night Live.
His talents extend elsewhere, as well. He’s such a good magician that he’s won awards for it, even serving as the president of the board of directors for Hollywood’s prestigious Magic Castle. He’s written multiple books and produced television shows, and he can hold a tune: He’s a theater regular, playing everyone from Mark in a national tour of Rent to Lee Harvey Oswald in Assassins. He even got in early on the whole “internet video” trend back in 2008 as the star of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a three-part series that proved independent creators could bypass the studio system and still find an audience (and revenue) online.
His latest endeavor, the “shiny floor” game show What’s in the Box, is now streaming on Netflix and finds Harris working as part genie, part ringmaster, offering eight pairs of contestants the chance to win what the series says are “life-changing prizes.” It’s also perfectly family-friendly entertainment, which led us to wonder what Harris watches, plays, and listens to when he’s home with his kids and husband, David Burtka.
Photo: CBS
My son Gideon and I have a standing date to watch Survivor. That’s kind of our thing. I have been a big fan since season one, and thankfully, Gideon likes it as well. We’re about three episodes behind at all times, which is good because we can fast-forward through the commercials, but we have lots of opinions.
Gideon is really good at coming up with ideas for new challenges or ideas for hidden advantages or idols, and we happen to be friendly with Jeff Probst because we used to do game nights with him when we lived in Los Angeles. So we’ll often make videos of ourselves watching the show and then send the video to Probst with our opinions about the show, and then he will send us a long text or voice memo back without spoilers.
So we love Survivor, and I hope that one day Gideon gets to be on the show.
Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
I’m a big horror fan, and Harper, our daughter, has always liked horror movies. When she was far too young, like 6, 7, 8 years old, she would ask anyone what the scariest movie they ever saw was, and then she would want to watch it, and we would not let her watch it because that’s not appropriate in my book.
That said, a few years ago, she watched The Shining, which I think is the greatest horror film and one of the best movies ever made, period. She was weirded out by it, less from jump scares than from the chilling editing and the kind of mind-melting, drone-ish landscape of a Kubrick film. But since then, she’s been on a big psychological-thriller kick, watching stuff like Silence of the Lambs, Pan’s Labyrinth, and even Pulp Fiction. She likes a good movie that messes with your mind.
Photo: Nintendo
My son is a big gamer, so we do play games together. As a family, we’ll play Super Mario Party Jamboree, which is great fun. It’s also a great leveler for the family, because the kids are remarkably good at video games — not unexpectedly, given their ages — and it makes David and I both feel fairly inept because they literally play circles around us.
I love the mini-games, because they’re three minutes long and if you didn’t love it, that’s fine. You can play another one. And if you loved it, you can replay it.
Photo: courtesy of retailer
Emily Jillette, wife of Penn and great friend of mine, recently introduced Harper and me to Codenames, which is this amazing card game where you put down all of these cards that have words on them and try to get your team to say some of those words. You’ll have three words, and you’ll have to look at all the cards around your words and say, “I can only say one word to make the other players figure out what my three words are.” So you might hear a word like “cooking,” and then you can look at all these disparate words and think, “Oh, well, cooking probably will be ‘oven,’ but it could also be ‘NASCAR,’ because maybe he means, like, cooking like you’re going super fast.” You have to be clever with your wordplay, and that’s been fun.
We showed the kids magic probably too early in life, because I could do magic and little, little kids, like 1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds, are super amazed when something vanishes from your hand. It’s also a really good way to get them to stop obsessing about a thing that you’re holding, because if you can just make it disappear, then it’s just gone. But I think they’ve seen enough magic that they’re a little numb to it now. They know how a lot of the tricks work because they’ve seen the explanations. They have too many reference points. But I love magic. Good magic will always be just the greatest.
Photo: Disney+/Everett Collection
When we’re going on trips, we love to listen to a good Broadway musical. They know all the words to Hamilton. They know all the words to Six. We’re big Dear Evan Hansen fans.
We wanted them to see theater from an early age, and the first show we took them to was The Lion King. The kids were very young, and I looked over right as Act One was ending and David, Harper, and Gideon were all asleep in the row next to me. So we saw half of The Lion King that time, but they’ve since seen maybe 25 shows.
David and I both think that experiential entertainment is experiential education, like they’re one in the same. And so when you’re watching something on a screen, it’s great, but when you’re able to be in an actual environment with other people watching something live onstage, it has more impact. We’ve gotten to see all kinds of great shows that they loved.
Photo: Meta
I’m big into Meta Quest headsets, which I think are great for everyone, and there’s a game I found that we like called Acron: Attack of the Squirrels.
Everyone who’s playing has the app on their phone and then one person, who is defending the tree filled with acorns, has the headset on so you can see the little game-playing world that you’re in. It happens in rounds and, if you’re in the headset, you have these big tree arms. If you’re playing on your device, you get to pick which squirrel you are, and it’s sort of like “capture the flag.” You’re trying to burrow or make little ladders to get to the tree, get the acorn, and come back to your flag. If you’re the tree, you can throw things and try and knock them off or pick them up and hurl them.
We’ve had countless hours of family fun and virtual abuse playing that game together.
For the holidays, we love Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, which is a staple. There’s something so quintessential about it, with the one-liners and the songs. It’s kind of the perfect holiday fodder.
I’m a big DIY guy and I spend a lot of time aspiring to make better puppets. I’ve tried to get the kids to love the Muppets more, and I feel that eventually they will, but I was maybe too hard-core with the Muppet Show DVDs in the car instead of Paw Patrol or whatever. They didn’t really love the deadpan comedy at the time, but I think they’re coming around to it.
Photo: Toei Animation
Gideon is big, big into anime right now, so I’ll sit and watch One Piece or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure with him.
I just can’t believe how many episodes there are in these shows. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Jujutsu Kaisen have, like, 1,000 episodes, which is wild. We started watching the live-action One Piece on Netflix, too, which is great, but I’m worried about how those kids are going to keep aging and if they’re going to have to digitally change that.
Photo: Mark Rober via YouTube
Mark Rober is a YouTube DIY guy. He explains physics and how things work. He has a big online presence and he has these boxes called CrunchLabs that come once a month, and you get to put a thing together with his help. There have been little catapults with targets, almost like a mousetrap where you drop something on it and then it shoots something out. So you’d make three of them, and you’d drop a ball on one and it would shoot another ball to another target and hit that target, and then that would shoot something to a third target. You can film yourself doing them and post them online, too, which is really cute. I’m all for entertainment that also teaches things, especially with kids at this age.