Nickelodeon’s All That Revival and Disney’s Just Roll With It Prove the (Funny) Kids are Alright
Both the nostalgia-fueled reboot and the innovative sitcom spiked with improv will make your summer brighter.
Photo Courtesy of Disney Channel/Ed Herrera
When you’re a kid, one of the best things about summer break is the television. Not just television, in general, but the summer event television that kid-centric channels like Disney and Nickelodeon throw all their energy into making glimmer just for you. Summer TV isn’t limited to the kids’ space, of course—one side effect of the Post-Peak TV era has been the explosion of summer programming at the more mainstream level—but for a true here’s a whole technicolor summer,
jam it in your eyeballs experience, it’s still the kids’ networks hitting all the home runs.
This fact makes June’s near back-to-back debuts of Nickelodeon’s All That and Disney Channel’s Just Roll With It especially compelling. Taken alone, each live-action comedy series makes a fun, energetic argument for the kind of summer vibe its home network is going for: Nickelodeon is diverse, broad and nostalgic; Disney is diverse, boundary-pushing and silly. Taken together, though, the argument turns generational: What does it take in 2019 to make kids (and their parents) laugh, and how can linear networks possibly compete with the ever-innovating behemoth of digital/social media? And while All That and Just Roll With It take diametrically different approaches when answering each of these questions, the fact that at the end of the day both Nickelodeon and Disney saw new spins on live-action, intergenerational comedy as the best place to start is notable.
If you aren’t a kid, or if you don’t spend a lot of time either around kids and/or watching kids television, odds are good that if either of these shows was already on your summer radar, it’s All That. Rebooted by Nickelodeon 25 years after it first premiered with the blessing (and producorial aid) of multiple original cast members, the half-hour Saturday Night Live-adjacent sketch show is the perfect vehicle not only to showcase both a diverse cast of kids and today’s biggest pop stars, but also for Millennial nostalgia. This is a fact All That isn’t even a tiny bit shy leaning into, featuring as it does original cast members Kel Mitchell, Lori Beth Denberg and Josh Server throughout the reboot’s pilot, and leaving TLC’s flawless original theme song untouched. (Save, of course, for the addition of Kenan Thompson—easily the original’s most comedically famous alum—as announcer.)
If you’re a grown-up 90s kid shocked you were able to sing along with every single word of that theme song despite not having heard it for decades, well, that level of sense-memory recall is half the revival’s point. As a nostalgia vehicle, All That is a kind of Platonic ideal: Its live-action sketch format a perfect fit both for today’s sketch-friendly internet video landscape, and for the original cast members to make cameo appearances that are splashy enough to draw in the original’s grown-up fans—whether they have kids in the revival’s target demographic or not. Not for nothing did the official All That YouTube channel start churning out slick, nostalgia-fueled content three years before the revival’s official premiere. Between nostalgia-hungry Milllennials and the YouTube-obsessed kids of the late 2010s, All That’s potential digital fanbase is as big as, or even bigger than, the audience it is likely to find on linear television.
(Anecdotal case in point: A twelve-year-old of my acquaintance, when asked if she’d caught the premiere on Nick over the weekend, exclaimed frustratedly that NO, she had NOT, even though she really wanted to, after the Good Burger sketch that had been posted to YouTube the day before the premiere aired had proved so funny. As of publication, that sketch, featuring the episode’s musical guests, the Jonas Brothers, had 1.1 M views, while the full episode, also posted to YouTube, was hovering around 864k. Saturday night’s linear premiere? 695,000 viewers.)