Has it already been 10 seasons? With enough episodes in the can to last through 2027, the best-friend creators of the streaming hit have a bright future all planned out.
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| Behind the scenes on Gabby’s Dollhouse with star Laila Lockhart Kraner. Spencer Pazer/Courtesy of Subject |
Like most people above the age of 6, Jennifer Twomey and Traci Paige Johnson were both flummoxed and fascinated by the sudden popularity of unboxing videos in the mid 2010s. The two best friends — who met while working on Nickelodeon’s megahit Blue’s Clues, which Johnson created in 1996 — couldn’t make sense of it. Clips of kids like Ryan Kaji (Ryan's Mystery Playdate) unwrapping toys seemed to exploit a primordial glitch in toddlers’ developing brains. Where others might have seen the seeds of the threat that social media and user-generated content would pose to traditional kids programming, Paige and Johnson saw an opportunity. Rather than lament or fight the trend, they decided to co-opt it.
“We knew there was something there,” Twomey told The Hollywood Reporter. “But we wanted to take it to the next level. So we started thinking — instead of unboxing a toy or a product, what if we unbox a story?”
Thus was born Gabby’s Dollhouse, the DreamWorks Animation show that premiered on Netflix at the height the pandemic, in January 2021, and has remained the streamer’s top original kids show. Each episode begins with Gabby — played by the irrepressibly bubbly Laila Lockhart Kraner — in her pink and purple bedroom, opening up a tiny gift-wrapped box that shrinks her, Alice in Wonderland-style, and sends her into her dollhouse in animated form to share adventures and solve puzzles with wacky cartoon cats.
Gabby’s Dollhouse shares some DNA with Johnson and Paige’s previous collaboration, the live-action/animation hybrid Blue’s Clues as well as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. What sets Gabby’s Dollhouse apart is its emphasis on what psychologist Carol Dweck, a strong influence for Twomey and Johnson, calls the “growth mind-set,” an outlook that rewards effort over results. Gabby and her feline friends like to say they “fail fantastically,” and celebrate their mistakes as a stepping stone to success. “We wanted to create a character that really modeled that mind-set,” says Teri Weiss, Executive Vice President (EVP) TV development at DreamWorks. “That element of, ‘I haven’t figured it out yet.’ “
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| Carlita, Mercat, Cakey Cat, Pillow Cat, Kitty Fairy, FJ Catnip, Catrat, Baby Box, Gabby and Pandy on Gabby’s Dollhouse. |
While the uplifting central theme of the show is far from the naked consumerism at the heart of the unboxing phenomenon that inspired it, Gabby has launched a sprawling commercial empire of its own, including partnerships with Lego, Puma, H&M, Crayola and Scholastic. More than 2 million dollhouses have been sold, making it the top preschool toy for the past two years, according to retail tracker Circana. Its brand ecosystem extends to a global stage show, attractions at NBCUniversal theme parks and a deal with Republic Records (another THR Kids Power List honoree) for the show’s original music, which has seen more than 280 million streams across all platforms.
Capping off Gabby’s campaign for cultural dominance is an upcoming feature film, which shot in Vancouver this summer and is scheduled for a September 2025 release.
The 10th season (each season is six episodes) of Gabby’s Dollhouse hit Netflix on Aug. 5, and there are enough episodes in the can to last through 2027. The last of Netflix’s 100-episode order was filmed on its set at Brooklyn’s Windmill Studios in May. After the shoot wrapped, Lockhart gave a heartfelt speech that left the series’ crew in tears.
“We were all sobbing,” recalls Alden Ford, the director of Gabby’s live-action sequences. “It felt like a natural ending point and a big milestone. And it also was just seeing Laila get older, and seeing her slowly and subtly change in the way she approaches the character. This 15-year-old kid who’s, like, so much wiser than all of us.” (Lockhart Kraner turned 16 the following month.)
Filming wasn’t quite over. Ford, Lockhart Kraner and the crew were back on set the next week to film a series of YouTube shorts featuring Gabby doing crafts and solving problems with various celebrities. As she mixed yellow and blue to make green with Nicky Hilton, Lockhart Kraner never let her smile fade between takes. She was riffing, making the best of the unpredictable, laughing off her guest’s occasional mistakes, failing fantastically.
Her relentlessly positive attitude and improvisatory skill — and her expressive eyebrows — are the qualities that won over Johnson and Twomey during the nationwide audition process and convinced them that they had “hit the jackpot,” in Johnson’s words. “She just spoke to us, and we love that she relates to all girls of all ethnicities,” Johnson adds of Lockhart Kraner, who is biracial. “Everybody would see themselves in Gabby.”
Lockhart Kraner, whose previous acting experience consisted of bit parts in a few shows including a recurring role on Black-ish, welcomes the break in filming as she enters junior year at her Boston-area high school. Ironically, she never engaged in the phenomenon that spawned Gabby’s Dollhouse. “I didn’t personally watch unboxings because at that time, I stopped using YouTube,” she says. To this day, she exercises healthy digital discipline. “I have social media, but I’m not the type to post a lot or, like, be an influencer.”
Johnson and Twomey see a future for Gabby well after the 100th episode has been released, by which point Lockhart Kraner will be in college. “The audience is growing up with Laila, and Laila’s growing up with the audience,” says Johnson. “We want to take advantage of that connection and keep it going. And we still have a lot of stories to tell.”
This story first appeared in the August 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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