If there’s one lesson that the last few years of ursine pop culture dominance have made clear, it’s this: Don’t fuck with Paddington Bear. Paul King’s two films about everybody’s favorite bumbling Peruvian ex-pat have made nearly half-a-billion at the box office, while bringing in clamoring, near-unanimous praise from critics. (2017's Paddington 2 still holds the record as the highest-rated film in Rotten Tomatoes history.) Now, he’s extending his all-powerful, marmalade-covered paw into the world of television, too, with Nickelodeon announcing that there’s a CG-animated Paddington TV series in the works.
This isn’t going to be some cheap-ass Corduroy knock-off shit, either; per Variety, franchise star Ben Whishaw will be back to voice Big Paddy B himself. (Michael Hordern voiced him—and everybody else—in the stop-motion TV version from the 1970s.) Meanwhile, the show itself will be aimed toward pre-school audiences, further indoctrinating them into a world where cheerfulness is mandatory, and the citrus preserves flow like extremely sticky wine.