Diary

Jonathan Greenberg,

       I just received the latest in what has become a series of phone calls from reporters writing articles on Rugrats. For those of you without small children, Rugrats is a cartoon on Nickelodeon about the adventures (“zany madcap antics”) of a group of infants who, when no adults are present, talk to each other. I worked on Rugrats for three seasons, helping to write and rewrite over a hundred episodes of the show.
       When the show began, people had hardly heard of Nickelodeon, and those who did know about Rugrats recognized it only as the program that followed Ren & Stimpy–a cartoon now mainly of interest to computer geeks and writers of crossword puzzles (“2-D chihuahua, 3 letters”). It wasn’t until several years after we had closed up shop in the badly lit, badly carpeted work area that served as an office for three writers and an assistant that I could even mention the show without a long explanation.
       But slowly the T-shirts and pajamas and cereal box promotions appeared. The popularity of the show grew at a painstaking pace, but years later, it has spawned not only a forthcoming feature film (which I had nothing to do with, so don’t consider this a plug), but also that most grotesque of mass culture phenomena, a live stage show. Actors (admittedly, desperate ones) actually don Tommy and Chuckie costumes, like mascots at a college football game, and sweat their way through what must be a sort of unwitting parody of cartoon dialogue, which, by the way, already sounds a bit stale to my jaded ear.
       (Nickelodeon will kill me if they read this.)
       So now I’m getting asked what constitutes a wholesome children’s TV show. It takes all my willpower to resist the urge to masquerade as an expert on child psychology. Nowadays we’re so desperate for neatly packaged moral wisdom–though I suppose we’ve always been so–that we consider writers for a competently scripted, gun-free kids’ show to be repositories of “values.” (To be fair: The reporter I just spoke to seemed pretty free of such notions.)
       And once you’re asked for wisdom, it’s difficult not to produce it. Even right now it’s hard for me not to start dispensing advice on raising children: Always listen; don’t talk down; respect their needs; etc., etc. Bear in mind, I DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN. I’ve been married three weeks. When I wrote Rugrats I was a snot-nosed kid right out of college. Why would any self-respecting parent want to know what I think about teaching values to children?
       Endnote: In case you need further evidence that something weird is happening in our Bill Bennett-ridden culture, Nickelodeon ran an ad in the New York Times yesterday plugging, under the guise of education, an hourlong special “for parents and children” about how to talk to your kids about impeachment, fellatio, and the proper uses of tobacco products. (Now Nickelodeon’s really going to kill me.)