Drake & Josh

On a January night in 2004, Nickelodeon introduced two stepbrothers who shared a bedroom and nothing else. Drake Parker (Drake Bell) was the kind of kid who could talk his way out of a math test; Josh Nichols (Josh Peck) was the kind who studied for it and still got a B-minus. Their parents married, the leases merged, and Drake & Josh turned that collision into one of the network's defining live-action sitcoms.

Dan Schneider created the show, and he built it around a simple engine: Drake's improvisation versus Josh's planning, with a scheme in every act and a hug in the last scene. Miranda Cosgrove played Megan, the little sister who blackmailed both of them with a smile. The show ran four seasons and 57 episodes, from January 11, 2004 to September 16, 2007, and it made teen stars out of Bell and Peck.

The comedy was broad and physical, all stuck hands and ruined dates and elaborate cover-ups, but the warmth was real. Viewers stuck around for the chemistry, and they still do. Two decades later the show pulls in roughly 30,000 English Wikipedia views a month and a steady stream of memes. Not bad for a pair of stepbrothers fighting over a bedroom. [edit]

Drake Parker plays guitar in a band, coasts through school on charm, and has never met a rule he could not charm his way around. Josh Nichols wears a lanyard, works at a movie theater, and keeps a color-coded binder for his color-coded binders. When Drake's mom, Audrey (Nancy Sullivan), marries Josh's dad, Walter (Jonathan Goldstein), a hapless local weatherman, the two boys are forced to share a room. The pilot sets the template: Drake wants to be left alone, Josh wants to be liked, and Megan (Miranda Cosgrove), Drake's younger sister, wants both of them to suffer for her amusement.

Each episode drops the brothers into a problem, usually one they created. A date goes wrong. A school project explodes. A scheme to impress a girl or dodge a punishment snowballs into property damage. The show loves a physical set piece, and the brothers spend a lot of time stuck to things, trapped in things, or running from things. Yvette Nicole Brown's Helen, Josh's boss at the movie theater, and a rotating cast of classmates and rivals fill out the world. The resolution is almost always the same: after the chaos, one brother admits he needs the other, and the family resets.

Season 1, just six episodes, establishes the blended-family premise and the Megan-as-blackmailer dynamic. Season 2 widens the map with school life, part-time jobs, and recurring characters, and the show starts to find its rhythm. Season 3, 17 episodes, pushes the stunts and the romantic subplots harder and marks the show's commercial peak. Season 4, 20 episodes, lets the characters grow up a little, with Drake's music ambitions and Josh's college plans creeping in. The franchise also expanded into TV movies that took the brothers out of the house: Drake & Josh Go Hollywood in 2006 and Merry Christmas, Drake & Josh in 2008. Through all of it, the tone stays TV-G, with lessons about honesty and loyalty tucked inside the slapstick.[edit]