![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/058f2f07ac9b9fd66450a89ad5290a73d2-andy-parenting.rhorizontal.w700.png\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection (Warner Bros., Netflix\/Channel 4\/Love Prod., Walt Disney Studios, Cartoon Network, 20th Century Fox, New Line Cinema), CBS, Michael Montfort\/Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images, Rodin Eckenroth\/WireImage\n <\/p>\n
If you\u2019re under 45, it\u2019s hard to remember a time when Andy Richter wasn\u2019t a TV fixture. Rising to prominence in 1993 as part of Late Night With Conan O\u2019Brien, Richter has seemed an omnipresent affable Everyman ever since, both on the talk-show circuit and in his own work, such as the criminally underrated sitcoms Andy Richter Controls the Universe and Andy Barker, P.I.<\/p>\n
He has hosted game shows; popped up in guest spots and voice roles on shows like Arrested Development, Elsbeth, and The Mighty B!; and even made his way into the competition-reality space. He competed on The Masked Singer in 2024 as \u201cDust Bunny\u201d and became a fan favorite on the most recent season of Dancing With the Stars<\/a>, on which he and partner Emma Slater finished seventh. He\u2019s even podcasting now, with The Three Questions With Andy Richter boasting recent appearances from Edgar Wright, Matt Rogers, and Samin Nosrat.<\/p>\n Along the way, Richter also managed to raise a family. He has two adult children, William and Mercy, with his first wife, Sarah Thyre, and married Jennifer Herrera in 2023 and adopted her daughter, Cornelia, now 5 and a half. Here\u2019s what Richter has watched and listened to with all three of his kids, from Mister Rogers factory tours to The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n Photo: CBS\n <\/p>\n My youngest daughter, Cornelia, likes to watch scary kids\u2019 stuff like Scooby-Doo and Goosebumps. It was the same with my 20-year-old daughter, who was watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? and all these Canadian anthology series that are meant to frighten children. My youngest really likes that stuff, and my wife does not because she says it\u2019s too scary for her. But my daughter says, \u201cIf it\u2019s too scary, I\u2019ll just close my eyes. It\u2019s not a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n Photo: Warner Bros.\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n Probably a year ago, I suggested my youngest daughter watch Gremlins, and both my son and wife said, \u201cNo, it\u2019s too scary.\u201d But just recently, Cornelia watched and then rewatched it, so I think she liked it. I had forgotten how much actual killing there is in that movie. It was like, Oh, right. This is pretty spicy stuff in here.<\/p>\n I think the other types of things I look forward to showing her most are things she may need to watch when she\u2019s a little older, like old Twilight Zones or Alfred Hitchcock movies.<\/p>\n My older daughter and I have enjoyed horror movies both good and shitty together for a long time too. We went to see Weapons<\/a> on opening day and were both really blown away by how great that was.<\/p>\n Photo: Netflix\/Channel 4\/Love Prod.\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n My youngest daughter and I watch The Great British Baking Show together, and since we just went through Halloween, we were watching other Halloween baking shows she likes, too, like where they make gruesome spurting-eyeball cakes and stuff like that.<\/p>\n I\u2019m left a little cold by Is It Cake?<\/a>, though.\u00a0After a few minutes of that show, I find I no longer really care about whether something is cake. It just doesn\u2019t matter to me.<\/p>\n My daughter\u2019s on this tear where we\u2019ve been listening to Queen\u2019s \u201cFat Bottomed Girls\u201d continuously to and from school. She knows all the lyrics now, which might not be okay for some people but I\u2019m old enough and I\u2019ve been too long in this parent game to care too much if she\u2019s singing, \u201cLeft alone with big fat Fanny.\u201d She has no idea what that means. She just thinks Fanny was a nice woman who liked to play in the nursery.<\/p>\n We also went through a phase when we exclusively listened to the Moana soundtrack, which is an excellent soundtrack but not when you listen to it every single day for a month. \u201cYou\u2019re Welcome\u201d and \u201cShiny\u201d are both fantastic, though, and Lin-Manuel Miranda is an amazingly talented songwriter.<\/p>\n Photo: Cartoon Network\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n There are some things that carry over between my kids, like the show The Amazing World of Gumball, which is a very funny, sort of elevated show that they all enjoy or enjoyed and that I enjoy too. Although when I laugh at jokes on that show, my youngest daughter will say, \u201cWhat are you laughing at?\u201d and I\u2019ll find they\u2019re impossible to explain to her. It\u2019s not necessarily that they\u2019re inappropriate; it\u2019s more that it\u2019s just hard to explain a very adult joke to her.<\/p>\n Photo: 20th Century Fox\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n My older daughter really loved Bob\u2019s Burgers<\/a> when it came out, and she still does now. It\u2019s such a sweet show. They\u2019re a family of weirdos who love each other, and I think the show does a very good job of showing that. Like, it\u2019s not that they\u2019re normal people because they\u2019ve got lots of odd peculiarities, but they love one another above all else and they\u2019re very accepting of one another\u2019s weirdness.<\/p>\n When my son was little \u2014 and this tells you how long ago it was \u2014 we\u2019d buy him VHS tapes and DVDs of construction vehicles moving dirt or different trains rolling around. He was thrilled with that stuff. We even lovingly made a supercut VHS tape of all the factory-demonstration remote pieces from Mister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood because those were his favorite things.\u00a0Like, they\u2019d go to the crayon factory, or they\u2019d go to the Wonder Bread bakery. They\u2019d dig a hole with a backhoe and plant a tree.\u00a0He loved that stuff, and actually, now that I think about it, I could watch that stuff all day too.<\/p>\n Photo: New Line Cinema\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n With my older kids, they knew that, in Madagascar, I was the voice of Mort. They knew I did cartoon voices and that was my job, but it still was a real world to them onscreen. They didn\u2019t look at it as, These are motion pictures, and people record voices over them. To them, they were watching a live-action show and they could somehow just accept that my voice was one of the voices, and they didn\u2019t need to think about it any more than that.<\/p>\n But last Thanksgiving, we were visiting relatives in Illinois, and my youngest daughter was in the basement with the kids watching Elf, and she came running up to inform me that I was in the movie, like it would be news to me. She was pretty excited about that. I don\u2019t know of a lot of other stuff she\u2019s seen me in, though she did come to every taping of Dancing With the Stars.<\/p>\n Photo: Natalie Cass\/Bravo via Getty Images\n <\/p>\n My 24-year-old son and I like to watch shitty reality shows together, like The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City<\/a> or Selling Sunset<\/a>.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t exactly know how I got into Housewives, but my older kids said, \u201cIf you\u2019re going to watch one series in the franchise, watch this one.\u201d I have a fair amount of Mormon friends, and there\u2019s something about Mormonism that\u2019s really fascinating to me because it\u2019s so new. It\u2019s such a uniquely American, dare I say, \u201cinvention\u201d that\u2019s now a legitimate faith a lot of people follow. Like, Ken Jennings is a dear friend of mine and he\u2019s a very devout Mormon, but he\u2019s also a very liberal-minded, forward-thinking, science-believing guy who sees this sort of warts-and-all aspect of his own church.<\/p>\n So anyway, I think there\u2019s something about the combination of the culture clash of reality television and Mormonism that spoke to me, and it\u2019s really fun for me to think about how it\u2019s supposed to be set among \u201cthe elite of Salt Lake City.\u201d It\u2019s just something fun to say, like \u201cthe elite of Milwaukee.\u201d Nothing against those places, but it\u2019s not where you expect to find snooty rich people who look down their noses at the great unwashed.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/b81ab7a41956ac7e3e10b780dda6b2ef44-scoobydoo.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/aaa82002bb8f327e464d0fa7ef9d9d11c8-gremlins-film.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/fbe6502f344136df85710da9c3dd1320c9-bakeoff.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/05ed74800b4edd27c3152cc5f7784303d2-worldofgumball.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/f6b1184ba2c7812ae388451d4b131c8d21-bobsburgers.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/0317c3731565001dce6f8fce3ab473c985-elfmovie.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/93cc434a9c1dce66fc58ad262911e19389-rhoslc.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n