Picture Credit: Netflix / Getty Images
The boundless world of Gabby’s Dollhouse is about to release its 14th season on September 14th, something which puts it among the longer-running Netflix series. The interactive show, a hybrid of live-action and animation, is hosted by Gabby (played by Laila Lockhart Kraner) as she unboxes various stories, transporting viewers to some new imaginary realm. But changes are on their way, as the recent movie revealed that Gabby actually has a younger sister, who will soon be co-hosting with her.
Creators Traci Paige Johnson and Jennifer Twomey, both of whom had worked on the beloved series Blue’s Clues (Johnson was a co-creator), spoke to What’s on Netflix about how this new addition to the cast brings new life to the series, as well as their ideas about keeping a preschool audience engaged.
Now that the series is hitting its 14th season with the benefit of hindsight, how do you feel looking back on all you’ve done so far?
Traci Paige Johnson: We are just so excited. I mean, we were always excited about playing in the dollhouse, and now that the world is as excited to play in the dollhouse as we are, that all of our stories and songs and crafts and everything that we’ve had fun creating has just been embraced by the world and continues to be, it’s just been mind-blowing. And very gratifying to see it in the world, all the fan extension which happens with all their posts and crafts: everybody likes to share the crafts or recipes that they’re doing, and you just see that [Gabby’s Dollhouse] has a life of its own.
Jennifer Twomey: It’s been such a whirlwind since we first premiered, and seeing how much kids have fallen in love with the characters – as Traci said, it’s so gratifying to see what we worked on, nose to the grindstone every day, out in the world. We did a Gabby’s live show this past year, and Traci and I went to the premiere show in L.A., and just seeing all the kids dressed up as their favorite Gabby Cat and screaming out onto the stage, we just had tears in our eyes.
Johnson: You know, the whole growth mindset is the curriculum of the show: of celebrating mistakes, failing fantastically and being a creative problem solver, we’re infusing that into kids all over the world, and kind of creating this generation that will hopefully make the world a better place.
Gabby’s Dollhouse S14. (L to R) Laila Lockhart Kraner as Gabby Girl, Logan Bailey as Pandy Paws and Eduardo Franco as Daniel James “DJ” Catnip in Gabby’s Dollhouse S14. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Speaking of learning, I wonder if there were any early challenges which smoothed out over the course of producing it.
Johnson: I think it was more the entirety of having to figure this out because it was a live-action animation mix in at DreamWorks, who had only done animation before. We premiered during the pandemic, so all of that happening and having to balance how to make all those channels work like that was definitely a big challenge. But I’m trying to think, I don’t know if there’s an actual mistake…
It doesn’t have to be a mistake, per se, more like a logistical problem, especially because as you said, you work in multiple mediums.
Twomey: The curriculum of the show is embracing challenges and realizing that you know you learn from things not going as planned, we figure out we have to take a different path than we thought we were going to take, and we obviously infuse that into every episode of the show.
But I feel like as a creative team on the show, we’re always doing that in meetings! Whether it’s something nuts and bolts like “this is going to cost too much” or “we can’t animate this”, we’ll try to think, “okay, how can we get this across in a simpler way?”
And what’s wonderful is that everyone on our team—you know, from our co-executive producer to our head of storyboard to our head of animation—we’re always working together to kind of figure out what’s the goal. When we know the goal, how can we make that happen with the tools we have in our belt? I feel like I’ve grown a lot where I’ll be open to new ideas, trying something different. It may not be what you had in your head, but in the end, it can be even better than what you had in your head. So I think that growth mindset spirit is a huge part of the show itself and the making of the show.
Johnson: We always love to quote what Pillow Cat says: “Just roll with it!” Take things as they come, meet it where it is.
Speaking of growth, recently the movie revealed that Gabby has a little sister, Doozie (played by Celestina Harris), and I was hoping you could talk a bit about how this – and the addition of her dog companion – changes the dynamic of the show.
Johnson: We were brainstorming episodes for the series, and there was an episode where we thought “wouldn’t it be funny if a dog came into the dollhouse with the cats?” And then that kind of became bigger. It turned into sisterhood, and Gabby having a little sister, since that’s such a big part of preschoolers’ lives. Plus we’ve done so much with cats, that it was fun to experiment with the dog energy, and what was so fun about Doozie is that her little sister energy is kind of like a puppy energy to juxtapose Gabby’s kind of cool cat energy.
Twomey: One of the things we’re excited about with the introduction of Gabby’s little sister Doozie is that it adds another layer of the world. And the name was inspired by my daughter, whose name is Gabby. Her nickname when she was little was Doozie. She’s our good luck charm, and I love the name because it means something that happens once in a lifetime. And I always just loved the name. And I know that to some, you know, it can apply to something like “that storm was a doozy”, but here it doesn’t have a negative connotation, it’s positive, unique, once in a lifetime. And I feel like we really try to infuse that into the character of Doozie, that she’s really creative and does things her own way.
Gabby’s Dollhouse S14. (L to R) Celestina Harris as Doozie Girl and Laila Lockhart Kraner as Gabby Girl in Gabby’s Dollhouse S14. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Considering that you have a live action cat to wrangle sometimes, does that mean the opposite will also be true for the dog?
Twomey: We shall see…
We’re excited, because you don’t get to see Gabby’s family or parents since the show takes place in her imagination. Really, it’s a playdate with the home viewer who is watching the show: she invites them into her room, and she’s working on something, and then they get a delivery, and whatever they unbox is sort of the catalyst for that episode and takes it into the dollhouse.
So it’s really important to have that one-on-one relationship, and because of that we hadn’t seen or heard much about Gabby’s family. When we started thinking about this dog idea, we came up with her sister Doozie, and thought, “well, Gabby loves cats and Doozie loves dogs.” When we shot the episodes with Doozie on set, it was just so cool to be in that live action set and have another human being on the screen with Gabby, and the two of them together have such great chemistry.
Johnson: With their sisterhood we also get to explore the whole question of “can cats and dogs be friends?” And the answer is yes, they can. There’s a great song that we love: “The Meow Meow, Bow Wow Family,” we’ve been having a blast exploring all the differences between cats and dogs and the energy, just having fun with it.
I understand that it influences things like the interactive element that’s been a part of the show. But I wondered if aiming for a kind of preschool niche affected the aesthetics of the show. How do you kind of design for that specifically?
Johnson: Jen and I learned so much working on Blue’s Clues, of the power of a live-action person talking to the camera, and how it engages you and it just sucks you in.
So building Gabby’s Dollhouse, we have that real person in live action in the very beginning, and then go through the whole unboxing phenomenon. We love the idea, because our youngest [children] had the YouTube generation of the unboxing videos, and so we’re like, “what if you could unbox a story instead of just a product?” And then the boxes that we get every episode, they come down the delivery slide, they’re all handmade and themed to that episode, and then the miniature that we take out is handmade, themed to the episode. So we kind of reinvented it in our own way, and we’ve stuck with that. But it’s different every episode, so it’s kind of depending on what the episode is about, or what the miniature is, the unboxing changes, and we’ve done things where we unbox animation. You know, one of the characters will come out of the box. So we do always try to vary it up and keep things new and fresh.
So we took that to the preschool audience, creating the narrative, talking to the camera to engage the kids and involve them in the story. When you ask them a question, it’s making them think and follow along with you. We just know preschoolers so well, we know the ‘tricks of the trade’ of what excites them and what stories and characters excite them.
Twomey: Yeah, Traci and I have worked in preschool television for our whole careers, so we know the audience, but they can always surprise you. But in the design and the look of the show, we wanted something that was unique that didn’t look like anything else out there, and the idea of the cats just it kept on giving.
We started cat-ifying everything. There’s a kitty fridge, our bread has kitty ears. I think the detail paid to that, kids really appreciate and that set the show apart.
Johnson: I think the mixed media is really special with kids too, creating that wish fulfillment where you could look down in your room and you see a little animated character or you see something go by. I think just feels really different and sets us apart from the other preschool fare out there.
Gabby’s Dollhouse S14. (L to R) Donovan Patton as CatRat, Eduardo Franco as Daniel James “DJ” Catnip, Logan Bailey as Pandy Paws and Laila Lockhart Kraner as Gabby Girl in Gabby’s Dollhouse S14. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
To sound a little cynical for a second: a lot of people lament shrinking attention spans in children, and I wondered if this is something which crossed your mind when thinking about how to keep your audience engaged?
Johnson: We’re one of the only shows that’s still out there that does a 24-minute narrative show: everything is usually 11 minutes or even shorter, and YouTube’s even shorter still. But we keep that attention span for a whole half hour.
Twomey: And that was really important to us. When we first started talking about the show, the trend was really going to 11 minutes. But, because we had done Blue’s Clues, we knew that kids could sustain attention if the story was good and they were engaged in the characters, and we knew that we could tell great stories for the full 24 minutes.
So that’s what we did, and kids love it. The whole idea of Gabby’s Dollhouse is that it’s a play date, so you watch the show, you’re on a play date with Gabby and Pandy [Paws], and you go into the dollhouse, and what’s nice about the show is while there are formal features that happen in every episode, the show is not formulaic. You can go anywhere in the show: different rooms, be with different characters, and each episode is different.
And the 24 minutes gives us the time to tell a great narrative, but also have playtime. You know, we can sit and make a craft together and sing a song, and there’s time to actually play with the home viewer, and I think that’s really struck a chord with kids too.
Johnson: And I think parents also appreciate the whole “view-and-do,” where you’re inspired by the show, but once you turn it off, you can make those crafts, or you’re inspired to, you know, make those recipes out, play the games on the show.
What other ways do you feel you can sustain a show such as this and keep things feeling fresh? I suppose talking about keeping things bespoke episode to episode was a major theme of what you were saying.
Johnson: I think it’s about keeping that heart, with the entire production feeling so bespoke and part of the family. But I also think it’s that DreamWorks does an amazing job with the always-on content, that’s what you’re seeing on YouTube, in-between episodes: expanding the crafts, expanding the stories, expanding the fan interaction, just keeping that going. They supplement and complement the show so much, which I think is very necessary in today’s world of, you know, sustaining a show, especially for preschool.
Twomey: The nature of the show is that once we go into the dollhouse, you can go anywhere. There’s no limit to where you can go, there’s endless possibilities of where to take the series. And we feel like with the addition of Doozie, we’re getting a chance to explore new relationships, new characters, we’re really excited.
Johnson: Yeah, just like a child’s imagination: endless.
Gabby’s Dollhouse S14. (L to R) Laila Lockhart Kraner as Gabby Girl, Logan Bailey as Pandy Paws, Eduardo Franco as Daniel James “DJ” Catnip, Donovan Patton as CatRat, Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez as Puggie Paws and Celestina Harris as Doozie Girl in Gabby’s Dollhouse S14. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
