VALUABLE LESSONS - Nicholls + Vickers

Valuable Lessons 43
Everything on TV (and from my very brief forays into movies I’d say this applies
there in Armani-suited spades) aspires to hipness. God forbid you should put last
year’s word-of-the-moment into the mouth of a favorite character. Then, when the
show goes into syndication, the word will be five years out of date instead of four.
Even pointedly un-hip characters – characters whose whole point is
that they aren’t hip – have to have their dialogue peppered with “more
current phrases, please.” Because as we know if people hear a grandfather
on TV say “Great!” instead of “Stylin!” they change channels. This may be
why the characters in kids’ animation have such mad props and be alla time
specifyin’ they skillz up in this piece.
Never mind that hip ages like potatoes. An audience, to hear a movie
or TV exec describe it, is a block of people united in their abhorrence of
anything remotely passé.
I was never hip. No writer I know was hip. Hip people don’t become
writers, they become fashion consultants or drug smugglers. Briefly,
probably, Joe Eszterhas was hip. A writer friend, Lisa Rosenthal, has a
theory: no real comedy writer went to his or her prom. There’s a sly
tautology in there: if you went to your prom does that mean you can’t write?
But you get the sense of it, and I’d say it’s pretty close. The hippest people
on a sitcom staff are the standup comics and they’re the ones who can’t to
save their lives sit down and type out a joke. They’re not writers, they’re
rememberers.
On W.I.T.C.H. the character Blunk, a four-foot-tall green
ungrammatical smuggler from another world whom we’d created for the
series, was not allowed to use any un-hip phrases, the idea being that
children would be more interested in him if he said stuff like “Blunk be da
bomb!”
The opposite of hip or cool is caring; concerned; interested. A
character who is interested in anything, who cares about anything, is not
cool, and therefore not hip. So the only characters who know anything in
TV, who ever have a fact at their fingertips, are dweebs or nerds. Which is
becoming especially problematic at the singular Disney Channel, since the
behavior and dialogue of nerddom are ubiquitous in children’s TV for
humor, but Standards And Practices forbids the use of the N-word. “If you
are going to use this sequence, please also show a maladapted and intelligent
child in a socially positive context.” In other words, show a nerd who,
because he’s accepted by his peers and never laughed at... isn’t a nerd.
The Quest For Hip rides behind the Quest For PC on a very uneasy
horse. The same studio that let us develop two shows, Pelswick and Quads!,