Marcel Winatschek

So Long, Nick Comedy

I watched enough sitcoms on Nick Comedy to fill a few years of evenings—”King of Queens,” Friends, but mostly Mad About You in German dubbing, which came on at hours when nobody else was watching. The channel filled that space after MTV2POP vanished, a mix of solid stuff and throwaway filler, the kind of programming that doesn’t seem to matter until it’s gone. There was something about Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser speaking German at midnight that felt right at the time, the same way late-night TV feels necessary when you’re the only one awake.

Nick Comedy shuts down tomorrow. The channel becomes all SpongeBob and Rocko, which is what any kids’ network would do. And VIVA PLUS is folding into Comedy Central—the whole schedule getting tighter, consolidating, squeezing out the odd corners where old shows could hide.

I keep wondering if the series will surface somewhere else. The show itself isn’t gone, the actors are fine, but a television show is also the time slot it lives in, the channel it broadcasts from. When that dies, part of the show dies with it.