Nickelodeon, Can We Please Get A 'Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide' Reboot?
In a year defined by several old-school Nickelodeon reboots, ranging from the impending iCarly revival to the uncomfortably smooth Rugrats comeback, and even a revisiting of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which will hopefully be better than M. Night Shyamalan's 2010 big-screen butchering of the beloved series, all of our favorite childhood classics are getting prepped and primed to appear as nostalgia bait for Paramount+ – except for one.
Much to the chagrin of all of us 20-somethings desperately searching for some sort of guidance in navigating all the fun, mainly tax and plumbing related, nuances of being a grown-up, a young adult iteration of Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide will not be hitting the small screen any time soon, apparently despite the best efforts of Ned Bigby himself, actor Devon Werkheiser.
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Centered around the middle school experiences of three teens, Bigby and his two best friends, the loveable nerd, Simon Nelson-Cook -- a.k.a. Cookie -- and Jennifer “Moze” Mosely," Ned's Declassified provided its viewers with important lessons of teen-hood, giving tips on picture day – “Pick a pose, not your nose!” -- how frequently to wash your gym clothes (every week, at a bare minimum), and the dangers of encountering a wild Timmy Toot-Toot. However valuable life lessons shouldn't be merely confined to within the walls of the fictitious James K. Polk Middle School, a concept Werkheiser says he attempted to pitch to network execs.
“For the last two years of my life, bringing the Ned’s Declassified Adulthood Survival Guide reboot to life has been a huge goal of mine,” Werkheiser explained in a recent TikTok addressing the show's future, which has since garnered more than 2.5 million views. “Imagine, Ned, Moze, and Cookie getting out of college, struggling through their 20s, bringing you tips on taxes, online dating, self-care, roommates, budgeting, all of it. I wanted it for you, I wanted it for me, and I thought it would be amazing to make a self-help sitcom for a generation that could use a friend."
Although the actor he says he was able to rally Daniel Curtis Lee, who played cookie, Lindsey Shaw, who played Mose, as well as the show's original creator and producers, there was one obstacle in their way – the IP rights to the show itself.
“We didn't own the rights to Ned's Declassified so we pitched it to Nickelodeon and AwesomenessTV who do own the rights to it," he recalled. Despite the network's insistence on resurrecting basically every other show that appeared on their airwaves in the 2000s, they evidently couldn't get behind the team's idea. "They passed on it and they won't let us take it to sell it somewhere else. So for now, the reboot's dead, and um, I'm really sad,” Werkheiser continued. “Thanks for being fans.”
So folks, although Ned, Cookie, and Moze may not be re-emerging as the true heroes of the zoomer/millennial generations, advising us on how to get a loan or change a tire, we can still relive the original show's glory days -- on a frame-by-frame basis on Facebook. As the page's 75,000 followers love pointing out, you can't spell “declassified” without “ass.”
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