Drake & Josh

Divorce and dead parents are a common theme in children’s programming. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like growing up in a happy and healthy household with loving parents and seeing how all kids on TV have parents who hate each other or cancer in their DNA. The kids would feel like there’s nothing on television that reflects their perfect lifestyle. Drake and Josh was no different. This was a show about a less than perfect family.

Drake is thin, handsome, and always gets the girls. Josh is fat, Jewish looking, and never gets any action. When the series started they were about 16 years old. Their parents either married dead people or were divorced. I’m not sure. Does it really matter? When my parents got divorced they insisted the other was dead to them anyway.

Stealing a page out of The Brady Bunch, the two families move in together. Drake also has a younger sister named Megan played by Miranda Cosgrove of iCarly fame. You know, she’s that girl who looks like a half-Japanese ghost horse person. Megan is a real bitch and is always screwing over her brother and step-brother. She’ll go into their bedroom and do things like break things they love. I thought it was weird that they were 16 and still sharing a bedroom. Their house was pretty large and clearly has a spare room somewhere. I think Drake just wanted to have the chance to make-out with as many girls in the same room as his fat step-brother while Josh would blubber into another quarter of ice cream.

(Look how pretty Drake is. He gets all the girls)

As the series progressed Josh began to lose weight. It was never mentioned, but he would occasionally be seen wearing a headband as if to say he had just come back from the gym. I think an episode where they acknowledged his weight loss would have been important. It could have gotten an entire generation to get up off the couch and change the channel because nobody likes seeing a positive message on a kid’s show.

(Stealing another page from The Brady Bunch, Josh pulled a Robert Reed and got AIDS)

The Drake and Josh creators managed to make this show a bit realistic. Drake had such perfectly lousy hair that would make any high school girl go wild and in the show it did. I’m not sure if they were setting out to send some message about how gross society finds fat people but they did. Everything in Josh’s life was worse than Drake’s. Josh had to work at the movie theater after school and on weekends while Drake would come to the theater with hot chicks all the time. I suspect even the parents liked Drake more because movies are expensive and without a job Drake would have no other way to pay for them. I have a theory that Josh’s father would take half his paycheck then hand it off to Drake to take out some chicks.

I felt bad for Josh even after he got thin and in shape. He had already practically pledged his allegiance to Mindy Crenshaw who looked like a perfect Jewish American Princess and I’m not even sure if that’s a compliment or incredibly insult.

The actor also probably had the worst career following the show. Yeah, he lowered his risk of hypertension but Drake is in the unnecessary remake of Red Dawn while Miranda Cosgrove has her own hit TV show about a hit web-show. I’m not saying Josh should have kept the weight on. I’m simply observing that he could have been the next John Belushi. Instead he’ll probably be known closer as Jim Belushi, the less talented brother, even though he’s not really brothers with Drake but you get the point.

Advertisement