‘This kid magically appears at the house, but where are his parents?!’
Weve got to think of something else.
The other thing we started doing was mixing up the characters, Germain points out.
Credit: Nickelodeon
Angelica and Chuckie are opposites, so what we if throw them together?
The show struck up almost a babySeinfeldsitcom dynamic, borne from Klasky-Csupo and Germains history withThe Simpsons.
I remember thinking, Why cant there be good programming for children the way theres good programming for adults?
Why are we talking down to kids?
I remember, I knew.
So we started writing for us when we were kids.
So we thought, lets do Chuckies dad but we decided not to do a mom.
We just didnt want an extra character there.
Why would there not be a mom?
By the second or third season, we were saying, What actually happened to Chuckies mom?
Logically, there were only two possibilities: Divorce, or death.
We talked to Arlene, we talked to Nickelodeon, and we said, Lets do that shes divorced.
And they said, No, no, we dont want to touch divorce.
Thats too heavy a subject, we dont want to go there.
So we said, Okay…so…you know… that means…Chuckies mom…is dead?
And they go,No!
No!We definitely dont want to talk aboutthat, thats scary!
Children dont want to see that.
We mention that she exists but we dont tell you what happened to her.
We even made a joke out of it in one episode.
But we werent allowed to go into the subject.
(The episode, Mothers Day, aired in 1997 featuring Kim Cattrall as Chuckies mother, Melinda.)
Thats something I regret.
In a similar vein, Germain feels the same compunction about one of the shows holiday episodes.
Im Jewish and theyre my own grandparents!).
Thats not a very interesting holiday.
If were going to do the Jewish equivalent of Christmas, we should do the story of Passover.
So we proposed that to Nickelodeon and they said go for it.
And in the story of Passover, you might kind of tell it any way you want.
But years later, they did the Hanukkah episode!
I thought they lost the spirit of it, he admits.
I dont know if we could really do that, but thats what I would like to see.
I think its possible.
