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
If you’re under 45, it’s hard to remember a time when Andy Richter wasn’t a TV fixture. Rising to prominence in 1993 as part of Late Night With Conan O’Brien, 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.
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 “Dust Bunny” and became a fan favorite on the most recent season of Dancing With the Stars, on which he and partner Emma Slater finished seventh. He’s even podcasting now, with The Three Questions With Andy Richter boasting recent appearances from Edgar Wright, Matt Rogers, and Samin Nosrat.
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’s 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.
Photo: CBS
My youngest daughter, Cornelia, likes to watch scary kids’ 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’s too scary for her. But my daughter says, “If it’s too scary, I’ll just close my eyes. It’s not a big deal.”
Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Probably a year ago, I suggested my youngest daughter watch Gremlins, and both my son and wife said, “No, it’s too scary.” 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.
I think the other types of things I look forward to showing her most are things she may need to watch when she’s a little older, like old Twilight Zones or Alfred Hitchcock movies.
My older daughter and I have enjoyed horror movies both good and shitty together for a long time too. We went to see Weapons on opening day and were both really blown away by how great that was.
Photo: Netflix/Channel 4/Love Prod./Everett Collection
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.
I’m left a little cold by Is It Cake?, though. After a few minutes of that show, I find I no longer really care about whether something is cake. It just doesn’t matter to me.
My daughter’s on this tear where we’ve been listening to Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” continuously to and from school. She knows all the lyrics now, which might not be okay for some people but I’m old enough and I’ve been too long in this parent game to care too much if she’s singing, “Left alone with big fat Fanny.” She has no idea what that means. She just thinks Fanny was a nice woman who liked to play in the nursery.
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. “You’re Welcome” and “Shiny” are both fantastic, though, and Lin-Manuel Miranda is an amazingly talented songwriter.
Photo: Cartoon Network/Everett Collection
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, “What are you laughing at?” and I’ll find they’re impossible to explain to her. It’s not necessarily that they’re inappropriate; it’s more that it’s just hard to explain a very adult joke to her.
Photo: 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection
My older daughter really loved Bob’s Burgers when it came out, and she still does now. It’s such a sweet show. They’re a family of weirdos who love each other, and I think the show does a very good job of showing that. Like, it’s not that they’re normal people because they’ve got lots of odd peculiarities, but they love one another above all else and they’re very accepting of one another’s weirdness.
When my son was little — and this tells you how long ago it was — we’d 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’ Neighborhood because those were his favorite things. Like, they’d go to the crayon factory, or they’d go to the Wonder Bread bakery. They’d dig a hole with a backhoe and plant a tree. He loved that stuff, and actually, now that I think about it, I could watch that stuff all day too.
Photo: New Line Cinema/Everett Collection
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’t 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’t need to think about it any more than that.
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’t know of a lot of other stuff she’s seen me in, though she did come to every taping of Dancing With the Stars.
Photo: Natalie Cass/Bravo via Getty Images
My 24-year-old son and I like to watch shitty reality shows together, like The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City or Selling Sunset.
I don’t exactly know how I got into Housewives, but my older kids said, “If you’re going to watch one series in the franchise, watch this one.” I have a fair amount of Mormon friends, and there’s something about Mormonism that’s really fascinating to me because it’s so new. It’s such a uniquely American, dare I say, “invention” that’s now a legitimate faith a lot of people follow. Like, Ken Jennings is a dear friend of mine and he’s a very devout Mormon, but he’s also a very liberal-minded, forward-thinking, science-believing guy who sees this sort of warts-and-all aspect of his own church.
So anyway, I think there’s something about the combination of the culture clash of reality television and Mormonism that spoke to me, and it’s really fun for me to think about how it’s supposed to be set among “the elite of Salt Lake City.” It’s just something fun to say, like “the elite of Milwaukee.” Nothing against those places, but it’s not where you expect to find snooty rich people who look down their noses at the great unwashed.
