Nickelodeon grew up and blew up in 1996 - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

TMC · 08-09-2016, 08:04 PM

http://www.avclub.com/article/nickel...ew-1996-240472

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“It was just a normal Saturday, like the 51 other Saturdays that year.” So begins the 13th episode of the third season of The Adventures Of Pete And Pete, aptly titled “Saturday.” Like the other 38 half-hour episodes of Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi’s suburban fantasia, it’s a mundane setup that takes approximately 30 seconds to get surreal. There’s a ninja on the loose, a bunny suit figures prominently in the proceedings, and the eldest of the show’s titular Petes has his hair cut by future Oscar winner J.K. Simmons. Extraordinary circumstances anywhere else, but just the typical start to another typical weekend in Wellsville, U.S.A.

But December 28, 1995, was far from a typical day for The Adventures Of Pete And Pete. “Saturday” was the final new episode of a series that had aired on Nickelodeon, in one form or another, since 1989. It wasn’t written to be a series finale, but it certainly has the wistfulness of one. There’s a layer of snow on the ground, and the skies are gray throughout. The characters all come together to save the day in the end, but to that point, they’re all on their own separate adventures. It’s almost like they’re preparing to move on to the next stages in their lives, just as Nickelodeon would in the year that followed.

As Viscardi told The A.V. Club in 2012:

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[T]hat was the time when Nickelodeon started to make the shift into making a lot more straight-down-the-middle, mainstream programs. Ren & Stimpy was gone. It was the beginning of the Dan Schneider era. Nothing against Dan’s shows, but they’re definitely more mainstream, right-down-the-middle, very funny in their own ways, but very, very different than what we were trying to do. You could kind of see the writing on the wall that that was the direction the network wanted to take their programming.

In 1996, Rocko’s Modern Life and Are You Afraid Of The Dark? followed the Wrigleys and friends into rerun land. (Are You Afraid Of The Dark? returned in 1999, because anthology shows, like childhood fears, are eternal.) They were among the last that would’ve looked familiar to regular Nick viewers of the late ’80s and early ’90s, a heyday of original comedies, game shows, and cartoons that made Nickelodeon the premier cable destination for children’s programming. The fundamental weirdness that set the network’s shows apart from grown-up fare was receding into the background.

These shows shared some behind-the-scenes overlaps—for example, McRobb and Clarissa Explains It All creator Mitchell Kriegman served as story editors for the network’s slate of animated programs, a.k.a. Nicktoons—but they were united by intangibles: subject matter, aesthetic, and tone. Nickelodeon sympathized with its target audience, telling its stories from a childhood perspective. It was brash and playful and unafraid of what adults considered “rude.” Of course, this image of irreverence and experimentalism resulted from years of cultivation by (gasp!) adults with full-time jobs, who were given a tremendous amount of creative leeway by network president Geraldine Laybourne and her lieutenants. The system didn’t always work out: When Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi started blowing deadlines and pushing the content of his series in more extreme directions, the bosses stepped in and fired him. The controversy was high-profile evidence that for all the fun and games, Nickelodeon still had a brand to protect.