Actors Robert Ri’chard and Meagan Good looked every bit the part of junior executives in smart pinstriped suits as they waited for rookie director Shaquille O’Neal to start shooting a business-meeting scene for the new Nickelodeon series Cousin Skeeter. But like most 16-year-olds, they were soon fidgeting, exchanging whispers and dancing off-camera.
Skeeter premieres tonight in Nick’s expanded block of original prime-time children’s programming. And because it’s so important for any TV series to have compelling, interesting characters, the cable network’s executives put their urban-flavored coming-of-age sitcom in the hands of two attractive and likable youngsters – who also happen to be accomplished actors.
The filmed, single-camera comedy is about shy, adolescent Bobby, his neighbor Nina, and the title puppet, exuberantly voiced by MTV Jams host Bill Bellamy. The Alf-like Skeeter is a big talker who incorrigibly drops names and hatches grandiose schemes guaranteed to get the kids into trouble. Amazingly, the celebrities whose names he drops usually show up, and the schemes always work out for the best.
Bobby allows Skeeter to get him into fixes, Ri’chard explained, but Skeeter always comes through, so that’s cool.
Executive producer Mike Tollin said the show was actually built around Ri’chard, a disarmingly bright junior in one of Los Angeles’ public high schools who first took acting lessons as a way to spend Saturday afternoons.
He was seen in late 1995 at an audition by Tollin and Brian Robbins, heads of kid-friendly Tollin Robbins Productions and creators of the Nick series All That and Kenan & Kel, and the feature spinoff from those two shows, Good Burger. At the time they were seeking a good actor and basketball player for Nickelodeon’s Sports Theater.
Ri’chard, whose father, Andrew, owns a tenant services business, and whose mother, Beverly, is a court reporter, starred in two of the hourlong sports specials. Then he went on to earn a Daytime Emmy for best performance in a children’s special for last year’s two-hour Showtime movie In His Father’s Shoes. He played an adolescent who deals with the death of his father (Louis Gossett Jr.), while gaining a mystical insight into the racial tensions of the older man’s generation.
Robert is a young Denzel Washington in the making; he’s so handsome and so commanding, Tollin said. He’s a genuine, likable boy-next-door type of kid.
Skeeter co-star Good grew up in the Los Angeles area with mother Tyra Doyle, who works as her manager, and father Leon, a police officer. She’s been in commercials and cast in small TV parts since she was 4, but her breakthrough came in last year’s critically acclaimed independent feature Eve’s Bayou, in which she played the spirited adolescent whose affectionate encounter with her father (Samuel L. Jackson) is misinterpreted, precipitating a family tragedy.
Viewers will see quite a different character in Nina.
I wasn’t used to comedy at first, but it’s been fun, the effervescent young actress said. Actually, it wasn’t a hard transition.
The youngster’s screen presence impresses Eve’s writer-director, Kasi Lemmons.
Meagan is so beautiful and fragile … she has a Marilyn Monroe quality] there, Lemmons said. Marilyn was very, very sexy and very beautiful, and so is Meagan. She will be marvelous doing comedy.
Skeeter hasaplenty, with a slapstick sensibility applied by co-creator Phil Beauman, a writer on both the wacky Fox series In Living Color and the politically incorrect 1996 Miramax comedy feature Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.
Moreover, two stand-up comics – rubbery-faced Rondell Sheridan and former model Angela Means – were cast as Bobby’s parents. Series guest stars range from hip-hop artist Usher and rap performers Monica and MC Lyte to long-toothed TV stars Erik Estrada, Ruth Buzzi and Gabe Kaplan.
