Adam Roberts suggests that Teletubbies constitutes an example of radical utopian fiction. In this reading, the Teletubbies are an advanced culture which has eliminated all need to work, worry, or struggle in any way, and regressed into a childlike state.

Roberts positions the Teletubbies as the endpoint of the science-fictional idea of ******** based on infantilisation – a more extreme version of the future humans in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and the Eloi in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (who are mentally childlike, but still physically and sexually adult). Following Sigmund Freud's insight that adult pleasure must mediate id and super-ego – gratification and anxiety – the only way to attain a completely stress-free life is to surrender the super-ego, including ***. It follows that the broadcasts shown on the Teletubbies' in-set televisions are historical documentaries suggesting infantile existence as the paradigm, with the baby in the sun likely being the society's central machine intelligence.

Roberts concludes:

"In other words, the toddler-oriented aspect of the show can be read not in clumsily production-intention terms (‘the show is designed to appeal to toddlers’), but as a commentary upon the necessary infantilisation implicit in any utopian fantasy. It poses a question: to achieve a total happiness for all on the planet, once technology has removed the practical barriers, how far along the road towards infantile consciousness will it be necessary to travel? Will we become like the citizens of Huxley’s Brave New World? Or more infantile, like Wells’s Eloi? Or will we go the whole hog, and subsume our angst-ridden adult consciousnesses completely in the bright colours and satisfying repetitions of Teletubbyland? The enduring appeal of the Teletubbies to adults suggests, perhaps, this latter"