The Naked Brothers Band

The Nickelodeon series The Naked Brothers Band (NBB) may seem like just another tween-targeted show with a lot of music, but it’s not. It’s a mock documentary that follows the antics of brothers Nat and Alex, and their bandmates as they deal with sibling rivalries, friendships, budding romances, making music and going on tour. All of this enveloped in a zany sense of humor that can be read at different levels and is apparent in the dialogue, the sets and props, the whole gritty look of the show. As creator/writer/director/executive producer and mom Polly Draper (also a professional actress who starred in the series thirtysomething, as well as in Broadway plays) explains, adults get the mock part and kids love it as a documentary. NBB is also not a typical tween music-oriented sitcom because Nat and Alex write all of their own songs, which are arranged by their father, Michael Wolff, a professional jazz musician who also stars in the show as the boys’ father. (The beloved family dog, ET, also stars.)
TV Kids visited the NBB set to interview Polly, Michael, the boys (and ET).

TV KIDS: Where did the idea for the show come from? Nat and Alex have been musically inclined for a long time, haven’t they?
POLLY: From birth…
MICHAEL: Pre-birth, really. I would play music when she was pregnant and hold the [headset]—
POLLY: On my stomach. But they got it from Michael because he’s a genius. Nat saw him playing gigs as soon as he could walk. He was about nine months old. He would get up on the stage and feel the thunder and start banging on the piano. And Alex did the same thing with his drums. Every time Michael had a gig, Alex would walk up on stage and the poor drummer would [have to move out of the way]. We let them keep that fantasy going and they started getting really great. They got out of the bathtub one night and said, “We’re the Naked Brothers Band.” They started a band with several of the kids who are in the show today. It was Thomas and David and Nat and Alex. They were starting to get gigs all over New York. It was after September 11.
NAT: I thought it was really cool to write music. Even before I had a band, that’s what I wanted to do.
MICHAEL: We’d walk down the street and he’d sing new words to songs we had heard. It was amazing and they were really good words.

TV KIDS: With your background as professional performers, when did you figure out they might have the disposition to carry a series?
MICHAEL: We haven’t found that yet! [Laughs] POLLY: I just thought it would be a fun idea to do a family movie with a little camera. One day, Nat decided he wanted to do a sitcom. He was in sixth grade with his class.
NAT: Sixth grade?
POLLY: What did I say?
NAT: You said sixth, I was in second grade.
MICHAEL: She’s not very good with numbers!
POLLY: You were 6 years old and I was the cameraman on it and I sensed the thing they responded to most was when I pretended that they were famous sitcom stars and I would interview them. So I thought this could be really funny—to do a mock documentary of their band as if they were huge like the Beatles. And so my brother, who is a venture capitalist, said, That is a really good idea and I’ll put in money to make a movie. I put his daughter in the movie and his two sons and him and made Michael the goofy father. I thought he might be quite goofy looking!
ALEX: He is sometimes.

TV KIDS: So you started with the movie and then it went into the series.
POLLY: It wasn’t planned to be a series, it was just planned to be a fun family project and then a movie. I just put my friends in it, my family in it. I got famous stars because the boys were supposed to be so famous that I thought, Oh, I’ll have them in scenes with famous people because that will sell the fact that the band is famous. What happened was that when they recorded Nat’s songs, they turned out to be so good that it was less mock and more doc. The adults were laughing at the mock part and the kids were thinking it was the real thing and loving the doc.

TV KIDS: The show is scripted but it doesn’t look it.
POLLY: But it’s very wild! It’s all very haphazard.
NAT: One of the great things is the way she writes the show. She hangs around us so much. My friends come to our house all the time, so she really knows the way we speak.
POLLY: But that doesn’t give you enough credit because you guys really make the lines work and that’s not easy to do.
ALEX: ET just farted on me!

TV KIDS: On the set, how do you get them to do what you want?
POLLY: They don’t! Never! I can’t get them to do anything!
ALEX: We listen to everything she says!
POLLY: This year they’ve been better than they ever have been at listening, because they’re just beaten down by people constantly saying, Do it again, do it again.
NAT: It’s not that we enjoy [misbehaving]. In the first season I was a little bit nervous about the whole thing. I wasn’t really into acting. And in the second season I started figuring it all out: how to do it quickly but also get a lot of emotion in. And this year we’ve all come to a point where we can do it quickly but also really make it seem like we know what we’re doing. I think that’s the only reason she says we’re better behaved. I don’t think we’re any better behaved; it’s just that we are better as actors.
ALEX: Mom, stop putting us down, we’re so much better this year, you’re making us seem like we’re—
MICHAEL: You know what, you were always amazing. Alex was six and Nat was nine when we made the movie and they were unbelievable. We made the movie on a shoestring. It was on location and in our apartment and they pulled it off.
POLLY: It was hard, especially for them.
MICHAEL: Sometimes their teachers says, It’s nice that they have this series, but we don’t really approve. And I say, Look, my kids work ten times harder than regular kids. They go to school. They do their homework. They have to learn all their lines. They work so hard during the day. They have to write all the music during the year and record it. And then they have to learn it and play it live.