The second season of Avatar: The Legend of Korra may have arrived yesterday, but today belongs to another Nickelodeon cartoon: Sanjay and Craig, a strange and silly series about a boy and his talking snake that's at the forefront of Nick's new focus on creator-driven animation.
Sanjay and Craig, which returns to the air tomorrow after a brief hiatus, is the brainchild of Jim Dirschberger, Jay Howell, and Andreas Trolf. In a lot of ways, it's also a return to the creator-driven sensibilities that informed Nickelodeon's programming in the '90s, the network's so-called golden age. "We have an emerging generation of creators that actually grew up watching our shows during the ’90s," Russell Hicks, Nickelodeon's president of programming, says. "We have Rugrats fans; The Adventures of Pete & Pete fans; The Ren & Stimpy Show fans, and they are all coming in with that experience but with their own distinctive creative voice and vision."
Sanjay and Craig's co-executive producer agrees. "[When we saw the Sanjay and Craig pilot] we just immediately felt like this could have been on Nickelodeon back in the day of Ren and Stimpy or Rugrats," says Chris Viscardi, who produces the show with Will McRobb. Viscardi would know: in the late '80s and early '90s, he and McRobb created one of the masterpieces of Nickelodeon's first creator-driven era, the surreally brilliant Adventures of Pete and Pete. Viscardi and McRobb aren't the only thing the two shows have in common, either: Both traffic in suburban surrealism, a straight-faced juxtaposition of the ordinary and the bizarre. Both give an unusual amount of air-time and sympathy to the grown-ups in their protagonists' lives. And, most of all, both are, ultimately, about the experience of being a kid.
For Dirschberger, that's the heart of *Sanjay and Craig'*s appeal: "I think there's been a trend on networks that cater to kids about how you can be something greater than you currently are: You can be a rock star, you can live in a hotel, all wish-fulfillment kinds of shows." Sanjay and Craig, says Dirschberger, proclaims the opposite of that: "You can just wake up, go outside, and turn your backyard into something amazing." If it's got a message, he says, it's that "being a kid is okay."
And that message has come through surprisingly clear. For that, Viscardi credits Claudia Spinelli, the Nickelodeon executive in charge of production. "She really lets the show need to be what the show needs to be," Viscardi says. The team still gets occasional broadcast standards and tone notes, but, for the most part, "they allow the creators to do what they think is best."
That minimal interference lets Dirschberger and Howell's distinctive voices remain intact -- even when it means taking risks. Their demo tape had been a rough animated short about a biker gang sharing a single bike, and that absurdism followed them into Sanjay and Craig. "Our show has a real punk rock spirit to it, and it looks really different from anything Nickelodeon has on the air," Howell says.
And audiences are obviously on board: According to statistics provided by Nickelodeon, episodes of Sanjay and Craig are averaging 3 million viewers, posting double-digit gains in the last year. Yesterday, Nickelodeon announced that production had begun for a second season.
Will *Sanjay'*s appeal endure as long as the shows that informed it? Howell is hopeful: "Ultimately, I think people love to see new, creative, fun, wonderously drawn, beautifully art-directed cartoons."
