Between nostalgia-hungry Milllennials and the YouTube-obsessed kids of the late 2010s, All That’s potential digital fanbase is as big as, or even bigger than, the audience it is likely to find on linear television. Not for nothing did the official All That YouTube channel start churning out slick, nostalgia-fueled content three years before the revival’s official premiere. As a nostalgia vehicle, All That is a kind of Platonic ideal: Its live-action sketch format a perfect fit both for today’s sketch-friendly internet video landscape, and for the original cast members to make cameo appearances that are splashy enough to draw in the original’s grown-up fans-whether they have kids in the revival’s target demographic or not. If you’re a grown-up 90s kid shocked you were able to sing along with every single word of that theme song despite not having heard it for decades, well, that level of sense-memory recall is half the revival’s point. Taken together, though, the argument turns generational: What does it take in 2019 to make kids (and their parents) laugh, and how can linear networks possibly compete with the ever-innovating behemoth of digital/social media? And while All That and Just Roll With It take diametrically different approaches when answering each of these questions, the fact that at the end of the day both Nickelodeon and Disney saw new spins on live-action, intergenerational comedy as the best place to start is notable. Taken alone, each live-action comedy series makes a fun, energetic argument for the kind of summer vibe its home network is going for: Nickelodeon is diverse, broad and nostalgic Disney is diverse, boundary-pushing and silly. This fact makes June’s near back-to-back debuts of Nickelodeon’s All That and Disney Channel’s Just Roll With It especially compelling. Jam it in your eyeballs experience, it’s still the kids’ networks hitting all the home runs. Summer TV isn’t limited to the kids’ space, of course-one side effect of the Post-Peak TV era has been the explosion of summer programming at the more mainstream level-but for a true here’s a whole technicolor summer, Not just television, in general, but the summer event television that kid-centric channels like Disney and Nickelodeon throw all their energy into making glimmer just for you. When you’re a kid, one of the best things about summer break is the television.
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