Like many YouTube creators, Rachel Accurso and her husband and collaborator Aron Accurso had no intention of turning their videos into a career.
Rachel had been a teacher, but became a stay-at-home mom after their son was born. Aron, a trained musician and composer, had a day job (a night job?) at the Broadway production of Aladdin.
In 2019, Rachel began posting videos to YouTube under the channel name Songs for Littles, creating something of an alter ego, Ms. Rachel. The rest, they say, is history.
Ms. Rachel has become one of the most powerful people creating educational entertainment programming for preschoolers, with more than 17.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and the second season of her show on Netflix was the biggest kids launch in that platform’s history.
“One of the funny things is we wouldn’t have predicted that we together had some skills that would be really helpful to create a kids show,” Rachel says in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “It kind of just happened.”
As it happens, both Rachel and Aron have musical theater backgrounds (Aron made a career out of it), and they say that the experience has helped them significantly in turning Ms. Rachel into the success that it has become.
“Rachel and I both did the BMI workshop [the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop], which is songwriting for musical theater. We were both Dramatist Guild fellows, which is another program for writing theater specifically,” Aron Accurso says. “But a lot of that experience has helped us with how to tell a story and about pacing and that sort of thing. And usually, once we have all the pieces, our ideas for the episode, I’ll use note cards to map out what goes where and try to figure out what we’re missing.”
At a time when PBS is imperiled thanks to a funding rescission, Ms. Rachel has emerged as an educationally focused alternative. In fact, the pair were inspired by PBS programming that would resonate with any millennial: Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers chief among them, with Fred Rogers’ philosophy particularly top-of-mind (Rachel says she frequently recommends the PBS app to parents, “as you can walk away and know you have something that’s backed by research and really high quality”).
“You have to put a lot of care into into media, because it really affects kids,” Aron says.
“The ‘why’ behind the company is, ‘Is this helpful for kids?’ So it’s pretty easy to make decisions,” Rachel adds. “I think also we’re kind of big kids, especially me.
“When I was working with kids, all my time, 20 years, working with kids in person, I tried things out on them too, and I was like, ‘Oh, they all like pretending to sleep. They like pretending to eat. They like pretending to have a magic wand, and turn you into a frog, and then you start saying ribbit, they a lot of times delight in sort of similar things.’ That experience with the kids is something that would be really hard to replicate unless you you had all that time with the kids.”
But music is at the heart of Ms. Rachel, and many parents may not appreciate the thought and care that goes into the songs, with detail and production values that few other children’s shows (even those on traditional TV) could match.
“I do love the music from my childhood, from those shows, and wanted to emulate that,” Aron says, noting that he will occasionally bring some of his Broadway musician colleagues into the studio to record. “It’s something that I love, creating the highest quality music that we can for the children, because I do think they appreciate it, and the parents appreciate it. And so I want to bring my A-game to our show, and we really like writing songs. Sometimes I write a song, or sometimes Rachel and I will write a song together, and it was something we did before the show, and we love bringing those original tunes to the show.”
Adds Rachel: “I love that Aron brings real instruments as well, like a horn section, to toddler music. I think it’s really cool to expose kids to those real instruments and arrangements, he puts so much excellence and care [into it], I think it might be the Broadway background,I remember watching the Broadway shows when he was working on Broadway and thinking about how, it’s the highest level, and it’s wonderful to watch people at that that high level of expertise. Aron’s really the musical genius behind the show, and he also is really wonderful with creating the scripts with me and editing. He kind of wears a lot of hats.”
Indeed, Aron says that the first videos on the Ms. Rachel channel he edited himself in iMovie, before eventually moving to Final Cut Pro. Now, they have a studio, with editors that work for them, though the couple remain closely involved in every video and edit.
“I think we do know we have something that’s that’s working,” Rachel says, her enthusiasm bubbling over. “I can’t fake being genuine. I just, I love children so much.”
Aron added that they operate under “the same guiding light” that they have had since starting the channel.
“What’s best for the kids, that guides all of our decisions,” he says.
