The Adventures of Pete and Pete and The Mystery of Middle-Grade Noir

How New Year's Pete marries two unlikely genres

As an aspiring writer who dabbles in both genres, the question had been stalking the back alleys of my mind for a while: what would a middle grade noir look like? Would it even be possible? On the face of it, it's an unlikely marriage. Kind of like a rich, beautiful socialite and a private eye twenty years her senior with nothing but his coat and a dingy office to his name. Still, sometimes miracles happen.

Like finding a kids' sitcom that's genuinely intelligent, blazing with heart and holds up magnificently even to beady adult eyes after three decades. The kind of thing that really shows how hollow present-day pop culture has become. To misquote a brilliant poem about the rise and fall of civilizations: “Bright were the television screens then”.¹

Apart from being a beacon of quality, the show in question gave me the final piece of evidence to solve the case. Yes, middle-grade noir is very possible. Turns out it only takes writing as smooth as whiskey and one of the best performances you'll ever see from a child actor. Or, as the inimitable Elizabeth Sandifer said in a different context, “What if everyone involved just decided to be fucking brilliant for (twenty-five) minutes?”²

Then you get New Year's Pete, the finale to season zero of the cult 90s Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete and Pete, APP from here on. (Season zero? We'll get there.)

For the record, I have no nostalgia vested in this show. While I’m old enough to have watched it when it was new, I don’t think it was broadcast in my part of Europe, or at least it passed me by if it was. I first found out it existed a couple years ago, so I should be able to give it an unbiased look.

We're going to take a deeper look at why this episode works so well, and by extension the show itself. To unravel that case, we're going to have to follow up on some other leads on our cork board: children's fiction, noir and what makes it tick, child acting, character actors vs generalists, voice in writing and more. So get comfortable, put your hunting caps on, and I hope you're looking happily deranged as we travel back to more pastel-colored times.

What is this thing, anyway, and what’s a suburban romance?

While I'd rather not spend too much time recapping before getting to the analysis, I'd be remiss if I didn't briefly go over the basics. APP is an absurdist middle-grade suburban romance dramedy that aired on Nickelodeon from 1989 to 1996. It's also both so 90s it hurts and timeless. The show began as a series one-minute vignettes played between commercials. This led to a succession of five specials, followed by two and a half seasons of 13 episodes each. While they were later lumped in with season one, these specials can be seen as a 'season zero' in their own right. New Year's Pete is the fifth and final one of these.

One part of the above mouthful stands out: suburban romance? That's my pet name for this subgenre, which I haven't seen discussed that much as a whole. Could be I haven't looked in the right places, though. Anyway, I'm using romance' in the medieval knightly sense here, not the boy meets girl one. In more modern terms, these stories occupy the middle point between (sub-)urban fantasy and magical realism.

They have a whiff of subversive strangeness about them, the kind of whimsy that's been bleached out of the modern 'Tolkien as run through Gary Gygax's blender' fantasy genre. It's such a sad paradox to me that the one genre hat needs a sense of awe, wonder and surprise more than anything is the most standardized and predictable one we have, but that's a rant for another time.

Instead APP gives us a world of mind-controlling bowling balls, preternatural underwear inspectors, off-kilter superheroes and spooky phones ringing for 27 years. To put It more succinctly: it's about re-enchanting the most disenchanted places on Earth.

While the suburban romance subgenre has managed to dodge the codification that makes its bigger brother urban fantasy so formulaic and trite, it lacks the high literary pretensions of magical realism. These stories tend to be populist and focused on telling a fun story, but at their best, they can rise to middle-brow. That’s fine by me. Middle-brow is my ideal anyway. Maybe that’s just another way to say “populist entertainment with a brain, a heart and actual good craftsmanship”, which is rarer than it should be.

James Howard Kunstler, who I like to call the fire and brimstone preacher of the deep-green set, memorably called American suburbia the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. Whether he was right or not, I think it's safe to say the dream had dimmed a bit by the time the 80s and 90s rolled around.

The suburban romance is a firm rejection of Kunstlerian grumpiness. It sets out to make suburbia beautiful, wielding its pastel brush. Wonder and adventure can be had, even here. Right on your doorstep. That is to say, like most (all?) romances, it's a fundamentally optimistic genre. Maybe it's not a coincidence most of the examples I can think of are 90s contemporaries of APP, from a less cynical time: Earthbound, Goof Troop, Parappa the Rapper, Costume Quest.³

Funny, strange, beautiful and sad

The premise for the show doesn't sound like much when summed up in a sentence: APP centers on two brothers living in the New Jersey suburbs with their typical sitcom family, Pete Wrigley (Michael Maronna) and Pete Wrigley (Danny Tamberelli), who get into all kinds of wacky hijinks and learn life lessons along the way.⁴ As you do in these kinds of shows. What makes this boilerplate stuff so special?

On the micro scale, the boring answer is that it's simply very well written and performed on a line by line level. On more of a macro scale, it has a few things going for it that were rare enough back when it aired and might as well be moon rocks when it comes to pop entertainment for kids today. It's intelligent, it's real, it's not afraid to be sincere and it has buckets of personality. Part of that last one is that it's written with a clear voice, which is also a crucial ingredient in noir. More on this later. To quote Sandifer again, from a post where she actually was talking about this show, I think the following sums it up very well: “APP was much better and more interesting than it had to be.” How many modern shows, kids' or otherwise, can claim that?

Funny, strange, beautiful and sad. These were Viscardi and McRobb's founding principles for the show, and ideally each episode should hit all four. To a surprising extent, they do. It's a very potent combination, and if it makes you think of Earthbound (and Mother 3) you're not alone.

'Funny' is pretty straightforward. Overanalysis decades after the fact aside, this thing is a sitcom for preteens airing on Nickelodeon, so if it's not funny on a consistent basis it's simply not doing its job. Sure, some of the humor is what you'd expect. Slapstick, yelling, gross-out gags, clueless adults getting their comeuppance. This is especially true for the third and final season, where the show gets more childish just as the characters are getting older. Even very early on, though, there's a lot of smarter humor that also works for adults. Much of it relies on two simple but effective tricks: sheer clever absurdity, or presenting something wildly exaggerated with a straight face.

There's obviously a lot of overlap between strange and funny, but sometimes the absurdism can be an end in itself too. There's something satisfying in seeing a clever mind come up with an elegant concept even if it's not meant to make us laugh. People like to say ideas are cheap and execution is all that matters in fiction, but I don't agree. There's so much fiction built on boring ideas out there, and a great concept can do more than you think. This again an especially big problem in fantasy and sci-fi, which are really literatures of ideas, but ironically tend to have the most hackneyed and trite ideas of them all.

Anyway, the torchbearer for strangeness in APP is Artie, the self-proclaimed Strongest Man in the World (Toby Huss). He’s the clear fan favorite, and for once it's not the writing.⁵ Artie is a terrible character on paper: a guy in a red pajamas who prances around, yelling and doing random stuff while hamming it up for the camera.

“Out of my way, gatekeep-y!”

The fact that it works is mostly down to Huss' extremely charismatic and idiosyncratic performance. Artie is immensely endearing, and he manages to come across as vulnerable while also being the most powerful character in the show's universe. His strangeness and erratic behavior isn't just randomness for randomness' sake. It's a way to show he's fundamentally out of touch with the world, and that he’s the one adult who can see the world like the kids do.

‘Beautiful’ is an interesting one. Think about the implications here. How many kid-coms set out to make something beautiful? I'd imagine beauty didn't even flicker across the minds of the people who wrote the average episode of, say, Sam and Cat or Hunter Street. Aspiring to beauty also means you have an aesthetic philosophy, to risk straying into pretentious territory. You're making value judgments about art and holding yourself to a higher standard. And maybe most importantly: it keeps your show real and kills irony stone dead. It’s tempting to say that irony is the antithesis of beauty. That might be taking it too far, but I do want to say they often pull in opposite directions, or rather, that beauty almost requires a willingness to be sincere.

APP is always very sincere. It's transparently heartfelt and sentimental, without layers of irony to protect it. This does mean it flirts with cheese sometimes, and the very totally radical 90s slang doesn’t help. But it also allows for those beautiful and poignant moments.

Then there's 'sad'. Out of the four, this is the note the show fails to hit most often. This is partly a simple matter of genre and scope. A kid-com isn't a very natural arena for sadness, especially not one with a world as absurd as APP.

Maybe having this as one of the four goals was a bit misguided with hindsight. The show can do 'wistful' when it really wants to, which might be a better idea anyway. Actual dramatic sadness is out of reach, though. And it's not just a genre issue. To get into why they never really did reach that fourth goal, we need to talk about...

Danny Tamberelli and the power of character actors

Tamberelli was cast first out of the three main kids, at only seven years old, and it's clear they soon realized what they had in him. In many ways APP is his show more than anything. One of the reasons APP is so much better than most child-oriented media is that these characters are allowed to be more like real kids. They're not these hollow-eyed, sanitized cute dolls that plague a lot of fiction. Instead they have a lot of that roughness and awkwardness real kids have, and this especially applies to Little Pete. He could easily have been another obnoxious 90s attitude character. Hell, he even has the hat.⁶ What saves him is a good balance of edge with sincerity, that fact that he has ideals and higher virtues rather than being a brat for the sake of it, and of course Tamberelli's performance.

I'll go as far as to say Tamberelli is one of the most impressive child actors I've seen. Carrying something like New Years Pete would be challenging even for an adult actor, but this kid nails it age ten. There's one drawback here, though. That splendor comes at the cost of versatility. Or: Tamberelli is a character actor through and through. He's very good at what he does, but he can't do serious, dramatic scenes to save his life. This kid is no Haley Joel Osment, to put it that way. The scene where Artie leaves the show at the end of season two is the clearest example of this. When the chips are down and Tamberelli has to carry the emotional climax all on his own, he’s utterly unconvincing, and the whole thing falls flat.

Most other times they need to do a sad scene involving Little Pete, they take advantage of Big Pete’s narration to shift the emotional load onto him instead. This usually works well. Since he breaks the usual PoV rules and has access to Little Pete’s thoughts and feelings too (well, sort of), he can provide that while also framing the situation in his own way. And since Maronna is more of a regular generalist actor, he can carry a dramatic scene just fine. In fact, they also do this during the “Artie leaves” segment, where he sums up Artie and Little Pete’s relationship over a mini-clip show montage. Not coincidentally, this bit is much more effective than Tamberelli’s part.

I can easily forgive Tamberelli this one weakness, though. It’s not even that big a detriment, considering the type of show APPis. And who else could pull off something as contradictory as a world-weary yet idealistic ten-year-old? To dig into why his performance in New Year’s Pete is so impressive, we have to talk about noir.

The soul of noir

Most people associate noir with detectives. To my mind that’s the wrong way of looking at it. Noir doesn’t have anything to do with solving crimes in and of itself, not really, even if it started there. I’d rather say it’s a sensibility. A specific way of approaching the world, and yourself. Let’s be old-fashioned about it and say at all the way down, it’s about honor. The gritty criminal underworld of 1940s California makes for an ideal testing ground for this philosophy of personal honor, but it could just as easily be a spaceship, or 1440s Tenochtitlan, or a medieval fantasy setting, or a middle school for that matter. Or indeed, the New Jersey suburbs at New Year’s.

Noir is all about choosing to be an idealist in spite of yourself, in a corrupted and broken world that only seems to reward idealism with scorn and pain. It’s about staying true to your principles no matter what the world throws at you. It’s about not being able to bring yourself to be the thug when it really matters. It’s about valuing the truth for its own sake, truth over profit, even at a high personal cost. Importantly, this extends to ugly truths about yourself. That is, noir characters tend to be self-deprecating if not self-loathing, and the fact that they’re the most honorable person in the story is a fine dramatic irony. It’s about sheer cussed pig-headed stubbornness...which it so happens is also a perfect summary of Little Pete’s character.

We can see some obvious problems in translating this to middle-grade fiction right off the bat. A noir character who’s innocent is a contradiction in terms. They’re all world-weary and beaten down in one way or another. How often do you see a world-weary eleven year old? Rather than hardening into a rough but lovable detective, those few unfortunate enough to experience so much hardship so early would probably just break and end up too traumatized to make for good protagonists instead. They don’t have the life experience to transmute all this into a steely sense of honor.

Even worse, how would you get the average child actor to convincingly portray one? Especially when most of their limited professional experience tends to select for cuteness and vulnerability rather than Philip Marlowe. This is where Tamberelli shines again. He never did cute or vulnerable anyway (at least not after the first few specials). Instead he tends to act tough and principled. Marlowe would be proud.

Another problem is that most middle-grade protagonists don’t tend to live in worlds that are corrupted and broken. At least not in the same way Marlowe’s Los Angeles is. Sure, some of them have to deal with Voldemort-style evilly evil dark overlords with evil sauce. These worlds still tend to be fundamentally manichean, so even if bad things can theoretically happen in them, they run on a clear morality. Besides, most of the really bad stuff tends to be consigned to the backstory. But either way, noir isn’t so much about the heinousness of the acts themselves, but how cynicism leads to countless small acts of evil that poisons society. Or just our old friend the banality of evil again, I guess. This is too bitter a pill for most middle-grade, so it’s another awkward fit.

New Year’s Pete

This finally brings us to the actual episode we’re here to discuss: New Year’s Pete. First off, here it is in all its glory if you’d like to watch along (crappy video quality, I know, but still):

What strikes me about this one is how much of a risk they were taking here. Instead of playing it safe, they went for a concept that makes it harder for itself in every possible way, requiring a sharp script to avoid falling into farce, and a literal ten year old to succeed at an extremely demanding acting challenge throughout the whole episode. Unlike the rest of the show, this one was exactly as good and interesting as it had to be to work at all, which was ‘very’.

There’s a reason noir is one of the most parodied genres around. It trades in a mix of toughness and sincerity that can easily end up either too edgy or too corny, and it’s easy to take it up just one notch too many and make the whole thing laughable. Well, that and Chandler’s very distinctive writing style, plus all that delicious 40s slang that comes across as silly today. APP does have some leeway here, since it’s a comedy. Still, it’s not a farce, and keeping a script like this on the right side of the line is a delicate balancing act.

APP started as a series of one-minute vignettes, and the mindset behind this clearly carries over into the first run of full-length specials. As such, New’s Year’s Pete barely has a conventional plot. It’s more a series of sketches loosely connected around a central idea, which is: what’s the point of New Year’s resolutions, anyway? Or one layer of nuance down: is it possible to decide to improve yourself as an act of will? How do you break out of the iron cage of inertia and habit? Don’t get me wrong, I’m having some fun here by phrasing it in these grand terms. All of this is firmly in the subtext, and there’s definitely an element of me reading a lot into it. At the same time, it is there. Alternatively, in line with the noir discussion above, we could say the theme of the episode is “ideals”, along with “being honest with yourself”. Or more specifically, in its concluding note: it’s okay to let go of cynicism.

So before we get into the nitty-gritty, here’s the premise in brief: As the end of the year approaches, Little Pete decides to make his first New Year’s resolution. All the adults in his life make a big deal of it, even if it he doesn’t really get it, so clearly it’s important. He also quickly learns all the adults in his life are hypocrites who never get around to actually changing any of their bad habits, sowing the seeds of his disillusionment.

As usual, he’d rather to big or go home. Or to paraphrase his words from the episode: “If you’re going to change things, change something that matters: the world.” We then follow him through a full year as he tries to change the world, as he goes through optimism, defeat and finally acceptance of the world as it is on the next New Year’s Eve.

A monologue to make Marlowe proud

I’ll spare you too much extensive recapping of the episode. Again, the whole thing is right there on YouTube if you want to follow along, and it’s only 25 minutes. I do want to go into a bit of detail with the intro sequence, since it’s one of the best bits and shows off a lot of the qualities of the episode. For starters, it’s already being more complicated than it had to in a good way, by telling the story out of order. We start near the end, before going back one year after the credits. Not too ornate by adult standards, but they’re already giving the kids more credit than they had to, which is neat.

The first thing we see is Little Pete being rude to an old guy, dishing out one of his trademark weird, censor-dodging insults, before he gives us the actual hook: “what’s so special about New Year’s, anyway?”. This whole monologue is just glorious. The lines are genuinely funny on their own. When you get a cynical ten year old deadpanning stuff like “by now, fourteen thousand cocktail wieners into their lives, they should have figured it out: New Year’s Eve is a joke”, it’s all the better.

Pictured: Don Wrigley, enjoying his fourteen thousand and first cocktail wiener

Not to belabor the point too much, but let’s stop here and appreciate one more time how good this delivery is, for a kid barely into the double digits. For an apples to apples comparison, take a look at this sample of the old middle-grade point and click adventure EcoQuest. It’s from the same time, stars a child actor of the same age, and they’re both low-ish budget productions by small crews with a charming homemade feel. Both have smarter writers than the usual children’s fare⁷, and both actors are doing this as voiceover.

Now, try to imagine the EcoQuest kid delivering the New Year’s Pete pre-credits narration. Or indeed, carrying any of the other scenes Tamberelli anchors in this episode. He has a much simpler job, and he can barely scrape by doing that. It would have been a trainwreck beyond belief, and completely sunk the whole episode. The fact that Tamberelli understood exactly what the script was going for and pitched it at the right mixture of exaggerated and genuinely bitter really speaks to his skill (and good direction).

While the EcoQuest kid has to hit one note and whiffs half the time, Tamberelli has to juggle three or four nuances and nails all of them. This is the power of a character actor. Sure, he’s not as good as someone like Haley Joel Osment, Macaulay Culkin or for that matter Mike Maronna on the whole, but when he gets to play to his strengths, he really shines.

This is even more impressive because Tamberelli has done nothing comparable to this so far in the show. He’s always been an important presence, but also more of a supporting role. The older kids had many more lines, and Maronna provided a throughline with his narration, as mentioned. Basing the whole episode around Little Pete was already a risk, and then they went for this crazy ambitious noir premise on top of that. Sometimes it pays not to play it safe, but this could easily have flamed out if everyone involved hadn’t been at the top of their game here.

Gushing about Tamberelli aside, let’s look at a few other clever things this opening does. For one, it presents Little Pete as alone against the world. That’s another very classic noir vibe. The whole intro shows him isolated on the outside, looking in, while the adults are safe and warm inside gobbling up their cocktail wieners. It’s funny, sure, but that’s also a very harsh place for a ten year old to be in. Although we don’t know it yet, it underlines his bitterness at this point. He’s failed in all his efforts, and now he slips into that deliciously noir self-loathing that’s both so honest and hurting so bad underneath the bravado: “A pathetic blowhole, pedaling his guts out on a cruddy Stingray bike.”

On one level, this is absurd in every way. Up to and including the ridiculous fake swear that still somehow feels like an actual swear. On another level, though? This genuinely works as noir. Exaggerated and forced to fit a kid-com frame where your worst problem is a crappy bike and a few disappointments rather than being a penniless alcoholic on the streets of LA, sure, but the soul is there just the same.

An interesting side note here is that many APP episodes have a touch of noir, but it’s rarely as pure as here. Every other episode is narrated by Big Pete, who sometimes plays with exaggerated noir-style observations, but he’s a much more grounded and balanced character than his brother. We all know Big Pete isn’t a put-upon outsider, not really. Every teenager feels that way sometimes, but he doesn’t reach the depths of genuine bitterness and incredulousness at a corrupt world we see from Little Pete in this one.

It should be added that the cinematography and music deserve their part of the credit here too. A whole essay could be written on the music of the series, but in brief, the bespoke soundtrack by Mark Mulcahy’s Polaris⁸ is another thing that makes the show feel so much more real than the smooth plastic pop used in most kid-coms. Noir thrives on atmosphere, and the music here does a lot of the heavy lifting to give it that brooding, poignant feel.

And again, it’s a testament to both Tamberelli and the writers’ skills that his failure feels so genuine here. To an adult eye it’s very small-fry stakes, but to a preteen, it’s a nasty dose of the real world, a very bitter brush with limits: “I tried, what happened? I lost everything. My brother, my superhero, and my dream. I wanted to change the world, but the only thing I ended up changing was my underpants.” Silly? You bet, but I can still buy the sting of his failure here. He really is a lost and broken kid, all alone in the world, at least in this moment. In characteristic style, though, he chooses to react with anger and defiance rather than vulnerability.

This sequence also goes for one of the oldest tricks in the middle-grade book: presenting adults as being wrong and kids as knowing better. I don’t mind, though. I think it’s important for any good work in this genre to show that it’s on the kids’ side when it comes down to it, rather than being a vehicle for adults to preach at them. Besides, it’s not like there’s any shortage of flawed adults out there.

A wise kid showing them the error of their ways might be a cliché, but it’s also a very attractive trope in mythic terms, as long as it doesn’t go too saccharine. For this to work, the adults have to be flawed rather than caricatures. That is, the story has to allow them to be fully human. APP brushes up against this line at times, especially with the typical bumbling sitcom dad Don (Hardy Rawls), but in this episode I think it passes. Especially since it doesn’t shy away from presenting Little Pete himself as flawed too.

Having hit rock bottom, Pete shoves his bike away as he screams his rage into the chilly suburban night, then glowers at the camera while the darkness gathers around him. Cue credits sequence.

Changing the world

When the story resumes, we cut to one year earlier. Little Pete has resolved he’s going to change the world. Naturally, this means he has to get his hands on a Riley Retro-fired Jetpack. The only problem is that one of these bad boys will set him back close to $500 (plus postage)⁹, and so the rest of the episode is centered around his various wacky schemes to get his hands on the money.

I’ll admit this is kind of disappointing. For one thing, it’s not an especially noir premise. I’d rather have seen the writers lean into the noir angle they set up so well in the intro, rather than use a generic plot engine that could have gone in any old episode. It also has some unfortunate implications if you overthink it: are lofty ideals like changing the world just a matter of amassing a bunch of money in practice? The episode never goes into a full-on moral around greed and materialism, though. It’s simply the most expedient plot device they had to hand, nothing more.

This also leads to some scenes that are wildly out of character for Little Pete. When he gushes about flying everywhere as a kid superhero, “saving God’s creatures”, it’s like something out of a completely different and much lamer show. When did pint-sized gangster Pete start caring about stuff like this, or talking like he’s in a show for little kids in the 50s? Yes, he does have a heart and a conscience, but he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve like this. He always acts out of principle, and partly out of selfishness, not out of any desire to be a generic do-gooder. On top of all this, it’s also plain nonsensical as a way to change the world, even by the standards of APP.

Anyway, the middle part of the episode honestly isn’t that interesting. It’s a series of disconnected comedy acts where Pete teams up with his brother and then with Artie to earn the money. This is already getting long enough, so I think we can gloss over most of it.

I do want to pause and consider the end of the Artie segment. From our vantage point thirty years later, this episode is still early in the series. At the time it was made, though, they had no idea if Nickelodeon would order any more. In other words, this could be taken as their vision for a possible series finale. The reason I bring this up is that after a long chain of Hilarity Ensues(TM), Artie becomes a famous bowling star and seemingly leaves town for good.

And while Big Pete is still around, the story hints that he might commit to a serious relationship with his revolving door love interest, girl next door Ellen Hickle (Alison Fanelli), leaving much less time to hang out with his kid brother. In other words, Little Pete might be on to something when he talks about losing both his brother and his superhero in the opening narration. It’s kind of a bleak note to end the whole show on, and it’s interesting to compare Artie’s low-key exit here to the much more sentimental version they do when he leaves “for real” at the end of season two.¹⁰

The penny drops

It’s already fall, and Little Pete still hasn’t found any way to earn the money. He butts heads with crossing guard Frank (James Lally), and their grudging respect for each other leads Frank to hire Pete as his deputy. This part has another great noir moment. Having finally outwitted Frank after a long standoff, Pete is about to go on his way when he realizes how lonely the man truly is. He gets the classic choice between his conscience and the easy way out, then chooses the former by making an effort to befriend Frank.

The parallels between them are obvious, but it’s still effective. Of course Pete would run into the one guy in Welsville who’s as stubborn as himself. They’re both self-imposed outcasts, bordering on the fanatical in their dedication to their principles. In other words, Frank is also an appropriately noir-ish character.

On a side note, the magical stop sign is another lovely suburban fantasy touch. Does it actually have magical powers, or are the people of Wellsville just that law-abiding? As usual, the show plays it with a very straight face to good effect. Little Pete swearing his oath on it like it’s a sacred emblem is a great detail here.

Pete’s good intentions don’t last long, though. He succumbs to temptation and abuses his new position to extort money from hapless pedestrians for his jetpack fund. Frank finds out and fires him, but Pete now has the money, at the cost of a budding friendship. He orders the jetpack, tears open the packaging, and finds himself the proud owner of…

...a leafblower. Needless to say, he does not take this well. It’s left ambiguous whether he actually could have bought a jetpack or if he imagined the whole thing, but either way his dreams of changing the world are over. This leads into one of the best shots of the entire show. A dejected Little Pete walks away from the camera down a tunnel of autumn trees, scattering leaves in a desultory way with his leafblower, while the wistful harmonica part from Polaris’ Everywhere plays.

…but in the end, you’re just a feeb.

Note how they’re using this iconic scene as a way to work around Tamberelli’s weaknesses again. All of his acting here is physical and undemanding, and we don’t see his face much. The leading actor is effectively sidelined, so the music, the cinematography and a high concept idea can provide the appropriate atmosphere of sadness. We do get some narration, but it leans more into the cynical and angry side, which fits both Little Pete’s character and the actor himself.

And again, to their credit, it worked very well. Why wouldn’t it? They had the privilege of using directors and musicians who’d already made their mark outside the insular world of kid-coms, more than capable of taking up the slack when Tamberelli would have faltered.¹¹

The leafblower scene is also delightful because it works on multiple levels and finds such a good balance of tone. On the surface it’s sad. Little Pete has just suffered a crushing defeat, after all. It’s also gently comedic in its exaggeration, poking fun at Little Pete’s self-pity without feeling like it’s mocking him for feeling the way he does. It winks at the audience, who know what he’s suffered isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

On top of this, it sneakily teaches the young audience a lesson without getting in their face about it. Sometimes life will hand you a big hand-grenade of a letdown to explode in your face, and all you can do is bear it with dignity. Indulging in a little self-pity is understandable, but then you move on.

Letting go of cynicism

This brings us full circle back to the intro. Little Pete has now become the suburban equivalent of a hardened gumshoe walking the mean streets of LA. His cynicism is complete, his self-loathing total. A pathetic blowhole, indeed. Who in their right mind would want to celebrate New Year’s, anyway, he wonders. Then he remembers a certain other pathetic blowhole who’s made it his life to stand around outside all day every day, which doesn’t lend itself to celebrating holidays. Pete rushes down the hill after his bike, frantic to reach Frank before the clock hits midnight.

The crossing guard is skeptical at first, but he accepts Pete’s apology and holiday well-wishes when he realizes the kid is sincere. They discuss resolutions as the year turns over. Since this is a children’s show, the adult Frank is shown to be stuck in his rut, repeating the same failed resolution from last year. On his part, Pete has learned. He knows he can’t change the world. Instead of making a resolution, he decides to wait and see. Instead of being rigid, he’ll figure it out as he goes. And of course, he knows it doesn’t really matter. He has his friend back, as a result of learning two lessons.

The first is a bog-standard “own up to your mistakes” moral. Sure, whatever. It’s an evergreen, so it’s not fair to call it a cliché, but it’s been done better many times. Including other episodes of this very show, like the first special, The Valentine’s Day Massacre. Plus, we all know Little Pete would have done it again any time he felt he had to. He’ll never be Lawful Good, and we love him all the more for it. Tamberelli’s lack of aptitude for all things cute and vulnerable also comes back to bite here. It’s telling that the apology is quickly glossed over so we can get back to deadpan comedy, which he’s much better at.

No, the actual important lesson here is something quite different. New Year’s Pete has answered my question: yes, middle-grade noir is very possible. Surprisingly. Still, APP is empathically not a noir story. When Little Pete has his epiphany, Philip Marlowe falls away like the Californian mist when noon rolls in. And what does his epiphany consist of, specifically? That it’s okay to let go of cynicism.

In the beginning, I said that a noir character can’t be innocent. I also said that APP is a very sincere show. The ending here hinges on Little Pete being sincere, but that’s not where the fatal disconnect lies. Noir can absolutely be sincere in its own way. After all, it’s a fundamentally idealistic genre, just set in an ugly world. You might go so far as to say every noir protagonist’s downfall is his or her sincerity, which is also his or her shining heart of mythical strength. No, the one thing noir can never dispense with is the cynicism, and here the noir genre and APP irrevocably part ways.

A noir protagonist could easily have been in a situation where he or she was about to leave Frank in the lurch, then decided that would be too much of a sin to live with. Taking a literal or metaphorical bullet for justice is part of the job description, even if that might involve burying the surface-level truth.

Pete going back to cheer Frank up isn’t a matter of sticking to his principles. It doesn’t put him at risk or cost him anything. That’s the whole point: you should choose friendship and decency, just for the sake of it. He sets his disillusionment aside and decides to trust that the world and the adults might not be so bad after all. A noir protagonist knows better. The world will do nothing but beat you down, and all you can do is insist on doing the right thing in the face of it. Even more so when it comes with a high cost and gains you little.

Noir is sincere about principles, but it’s rarely this sincere about emotions. There’s always that cynicism, and a sense of biting irony to paper over it. The end to this episode, on the other hand, is totally irony-free. Note that that doesn’t mean it’s all sugary. The story ends on a note of cautious optimism, but also a sense of acceptance. Whatever comes will come. Still, it’s okay not to be cynical, to believe in second chances and that people can change and improve themselves. A valuable lesson back in the early 90s, and probably even more relevant now.

It’s always so jarring to see Litte Pete without his hat.

Summary

New Year’s Pete is a brilliant episode of a brilliant show. It’s well written, scored, performed and directed. Even the filler segments are often genuinely funny, and as always, Artie steals the show whenever he gets a chance. This would have been a worthy series finale, and it makes me wonder why they never let Tamberelli fully take on the narrator role again.¹² As good as Maronna is with it, I think we should have at least one or two Little Pete episodes per season.

This episode is also notable for giving us our best glimpse into Little Pete’s mind. Between his comedic role and the youth of his actor, so far it’s been a little hard to tell what he’s actually thinking most of the time. Later episodes also tend to present him as a tad more one-note, or maybe that’s just a side effect of his brother always being the PoV. Still, I’m inclined to be uncharitable and say his character always was a bit inconsistent, other than the stubbornness. This episode presents him as both more caring and more mature than we usually see, and I think this extended dive adds a lot to his character. Again, I really think it was a big missed opportunity not to do a few more episodes narrated by Little Pete when the show was renewed.

Another key to the episode and show’s success is voice. These days I’m finding myself more and more wanting fiction that feels distinct, told in its own unique way. Voice is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Call it flair. Style. The soul bleeding through the words. Even without the chatbots and the language models, there’s so much generic, dry biscuit whitebread fiction around, and it drives me nuts. Couple this with the abundance of tired ideas I complained about earlier, and you get a lot of...well, it’s not even fair to call it ‘crap’. A lot of maddeningly adequate, indistinguishable stuff. A solid three on the dice. In other words, ‘content’. I’ve always found this word a little unsettling when used to describe artistic media, kind of like how inmates of the industrial West are demoted to ‘consumers’ rather than ‘people’ or ‘citizens’. Still, that’s a rant for another time.

APP has a very distinct combination of McRobb and Viscardi’s signature voice and the mixture of weirdness and sincerity. It’s not afraid of morals and cheese, but it’s so lovable we can’t help but love it back. If there ever was a cult show to deserve its high standing, it’s this one. And most importantly, it dares us to let go of cynicism. Maybe that’s the highest purpose of all good children’s fiction.

1. Here’s the original at John Michael Greer’s old blog. It’s pretty spine-tingling stuff: https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/bright-were-halls-then.html

2. https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/this-nightmare-would-have-ended-heaven-sent As for Sandifer herself, for those of a less left-aligned bent I’d like to clarify that I often disagree with her shrill tone and moralism, her intense love affair with post-modernism and much of her politics. Still, sometimes it’s healthy to read people you disagree with, and as a fan of absurd overanalysis of nerd culture, it doesn’t get much more over the top than the Eruditorium, haha

3. Really, much of Tim Schafer’s work in general has a lot of the same feel as APP. Especially Psychonauts, even if those games aren’t strictly suburban romances. Still, the humor and whimsy are similar, to the point where I wonder if he was part of the show’s large periphery demographic of college students

4. And yes, the show never addresses why they have the same name in-universe. As part of its brilliant schtick of playing the absurd with a straight face, the brothers are only ever referred to as “Pete” by the other characters. In fact, the potential misunderstanding is only mined for a plot point once in season three, after seasonal rot had set in anyway

5. I’m pretty sure most of what he does was ad-libbed, and in fact the whole character started as a bit Huss put on when he was goofing around with his girlfriend, which makes it even better

6. At least he wears it the right way round

7. The writer in question on EcoQuest being Jane Jensen, later known for Gabriel Knight and…uh, a long string of commercial and critical failures, plus being the butt of countless “cat hair moustache” puzzle jokes after GK3. Still, she brings something interesting and distinct to video games, and the original GK is very good (and deserves a write-up of its own, but much has already been said about it over the years). And to be fair, I actually like a lot of the thinking behind EcoQuest, it’s just that the acting leaves a lot to be desired. Oh, and for those who’ve played the original GK1: can you image swapping the EQ and GK narrators around? Just thinking about it makes me giggle every time, haha

8. Which is actually another band called Miracle Legion, who swapped some of the members around and took on a new name specifically to be the in-house band of APP. Per McRobb and Viscardi, one of Miracle Legion’s earlier songs, “The Backyard”, inspired much of the feel of APP

9. To be precise, $456.98, which would come out to $1.021 in 2024 dollars

10. This is pretty much where the show jumped the shark, or if that’s too dramatic, where the gentle but clear drop in quality set in. Apparently Huss had some medical issue that interfered with him remembering lines, but in any case his departure was a huge loss for the show, one it never really recovered from. On top of that, the Nickelodeon big-wigs started scrutinizing the show and interfering more during the final season

11. While she didn’t helm this particular episode, many of the earlier ones and the original shorts were directed by Katherine Dieckman, who’s responsible for much of the visual style of APP. She also started the trend of celebrity guest stars on the show by inviting singers she’d directed music videos for

12. He sort of gets to be the narrator in the season three episode Crisis in the Love Zone, but it’s much more limited than here, and also split with another character, so I don’t really count it. Plus, Crisis is a much weaker episode than New Year’s Pete in general, so it’s not as interesting. If they wanted to let him narrate a season three episode, it should probably have been either Splashdown or the Christmas one. The latter would also have been a more natural series finale than Saturday in my opinion, but now I’m digressing inside a digression, haha