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september
/ october 2005:
Toon
In
Meet the 25-year-old whose
cartoons are crushing Leno and Letterman in the ratings.
By Steven I. Weiss
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t’s hard to see doing a story on Nick Wiedenfeld
as anything but a job interview. After all, it was when
Wiedenfeld, the head of development at the Cartoon Network’s
Adult Swim, wrote a story about the network for Esquire
magazine that he was offered his job by then-interview-subject,
now-boss Mike Lazo.
“I came down here to interview Lazo,” he says, noting that his profile of the network’s late night programming at the time “was kind of a novelty ... now there are a lot of people who want to do stories.”
And why not? Adult Swim is the wildly-popular, night-time schedule at the Atlanta-based Cartoon Network, part of Turner Broadcasting. Seen in more than 88 million homes across America, the network airs the alternative element from 11 PM to 6 AM, and regularly tops the ratings in all of its time slots. Perhaps most impressive, it has actually beaten Leno and Letterman in the coveted 18-24 demographic.
Wiedenfeld, a 25-year-old native of Washington, D.C., has now been in Atlanta for a year, living in Little Five Points with his younger brother. A fish out of water in the entertainment industry, Wiedenfeld says of the show, “I treat it like a magazine,” adding “I find people who do work that I like.” His inexperience isn’t that much of a problem at the notoriously low-budget but edgy network, where pretense is at a minimum. “You learn some of the vocabulary, and you try to bulls**t as much as you can ... it feels like you’re working at a warehouse, like in a loft in New York.”
“I’m not particularly Jewish,” he says, though his change of location has made him more aware of his tribe membership: “The only time you think about it is when you move down here, in the writing world, especially in comedy [in New York], everyone is Jewish. Here, everyone’s southern, and not Jewish.” Acquaintances joke that he’s “the token Jew” and serves as an “answer to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, which is all Jews.”
It can occasionally be a problem, Wiedenfeld says: “you forget that everybody’s not Jewish, but a lot of my jokes are kind of Jewish jokes.”
While in Atlanta, he says, he’s been particularly enthused by the music scene, in particular “Krunk and the Southern Rock scene.”
“There’s a history here that you don’t get anywhere else,” he says of the music, and he says it’s something that applies to the Jewish community, as well: “I’ve got to see all these amazing old temples. It’s like when you go to Prague or something.”
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