Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: August 11, 1991
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Rugrats, “Tommy’s First Birthday” (Season 1, Episode 1) [Stream on Hulu] / Doug, “Doug Bags a Neematoad” (Season 1, Episode 1) [Stream on Hulu]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: It’s always a bit of a gamble anytime a TV network greenlights any show. Even the best, most sure-thing of shows aren’t guaranteed success. And they’re certainly not guaranteed network-defining success. So now imagine how much skill, luck, and good timing it must take for two shows to become network-defining hits at the same time. That’s why things like Friends and ER debuting in the same fall for NBC or Desperate Housewives and Lost in the same pilot season for ABC have reached the level of legend in the business. But even in those cases, those networks didn’t have the good fortune of having both shows debut on the same day.
Such were the good fortunes of Nickelodeon when they debuted Doug and Rugrats back-to-back as the very first Nicktoons. Ask anybody who was in the target age range at the time, and they’ll tell you that Rugrats and Doug were landmark shows in kid programming in the ’90s. Suddenly, Nickelodeon was defining its network brand with its own original animated series.
Doug begins in typically oddball fashion, with the Funnie family moving to Bluffington, and Doug struggling to fit in among his new surroundings. In typical pilot style, we meet all of the major characters — best-friend Skeeter, bully Roger, and of course dream girl Patty Mayonaise — and then jump into a very Doug story about the legend of a strange toad. You can see why Doug held a charm for audiences, but honestly, the pilot pales in comparison to the first episode of Rugrats, which even now in 2017 seems like the perfect kids’ programming. The show explores two worlds at once, with the babies’ parents getting the initial intro before we’re taken down into the kids-only world of the babies, who get fixated on typically childish things like the thought that eating dog food will make them dogs. It remains an utterly charming show that rightly holds a place as one of Nickelodeon’s all-time best.
