Tweens rule! Well, they may be too young to actually run the country, but they’re an economic force to be reckoned with. While baby boomers are still playing their LPs and teenagers are furiously downloading digital music when they’re not texting each other — OMG! POS! — tweens are the only ones still buying CDs, bless their hearts. They made the soundtrack of High School Musical the top-selling album of 2006.
If you’re not familiar with High School Musical, you must not be spending much time around tweens. The made-for-TV movie premiered on the Disney Channel in January 2006 and has since become virtually an entire business segment within The Walt Disney Company. There’s been all sorts of merchandise tied to the HSM franchise, a sequel this year that drew 17.2 million viewers for its initial airing, and theater productions of the musical all over the country. (My daughter, now 12, and I saw the staging put on this summer by Zach Scott Theater in Austin; it’s coming back soon for a month-long run.)
HSM is just the most visible property among the original entertainment shown on the Disney Channel. The cable outlet has been building a massive audience of youngsters with such sitcoms as Lizzie McGuire, That’s So Raven, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, and its newest hit, Hannah Montana.
Viacom’s Nickelodeon Networks unit is Disney’s biggest competitor for the tween market. Its made-for-TV and theatrical releases haven’t yielded a hit on the scale of HSM, but it’s contending strongly in the sitcom segment with such fare as Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide and Unfabulous. Going head to head with the House of Mouse’s Hannah Montana (the story of a teenage girl who leads a double life as a pop-music star) is Nickelodeon’s new show, iCarly.
Like many such shows, iCarly is about apparently ordinary kids who quickly stand out for a particular talent or propensity. It’s the latest creation of Nickelodeon’s resident auteur, Dan Schneider, who also gave birth to such “Nick” staples as All That, Kenan & Kel, The Amanda Show, Drake & Josh, and Zoey 101.
The sitch of this sitcom is that BFFs Carly and Sam are inspired to start a weekly Webcast with the help of Carly’s adoring and nerdy neighbor, Freddie. The girls’ nemesis at school is Miss Briggs, a sadistic teacher (played by Mindy Sterling, best known as Frau Farbissina in the Austin Powers movies). The genius of iCarly could be its real Web site, iCarly.com, where kids can upload their own short videos that may be played on an episode. Whether or not the show helps generate any memorable Web videos, it just might succeed on its own due to star Miranda Cosgrove, previously featured as the creepily omnipotent little sister on Drake & Josh. I won’t say she’s the next Hilary Duff; she has the potential to be even bigger than Ms. Duff.
Where the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon differ is in commercials. Regular TV commercials for breakfast cereal, candy, and toys run rampant on Nick, while the Disney Channel saves its commercial breaks for its own promos and discreet sponsorship announcements like those on PBS. The Sept. 8 premiere of iCarly had, no exaggeration, 10 straight minutes of commercials and network promos right in the middle of the first episode. This must have been the kind of “creativity” and “freedom” the networks envisioned when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (or, as they call it at network headquarters, the We Can Show as Many Damn Commercials as We Please Act, which, of course, led to the founding of TiVo).
Disney and Viacom — they are coming for your children! Resistance is futile.
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