SpongeBob's Patrick Star is getting his own spin-off talk show
UPDATE 3/4 @ 11:02 a.m.: This ship is officially setting sail. “Nickelodeon is diving deeper into Bikini Bottom to give fans a look at our lovable young adult Patrick Star and his entire family with a sitcom only he could imagine up,” Ramsey Naito, the president of Nickelodeon Animation, says in a statement released to The A.V. Club. “This second original spinoff allows us to expand our reach, tell new stories and connect with our audience around the world who continue to love these characters.”
As described by Nickelodeon, “The Patrick Star Show follows a younger Patrick Star living at home with his family, where he hosts his own show for the neighborhood from his television-turned-bedroom. His little sister, Squidina, works behind the scenes to make sure Patrick’s show is always running smoothly, while his parents, Bunny and Cecil and his grandpa, GrandPat, each support Patrick in their own hilariously absurd ways. The Star family’s unpredictable adventures often inform, integrate, and sometimes even interfere with Patrick’s TV show, but one thing is for sure: his bizarre life always makes for great television!”
It’s not the bitter, misanthropic Squidward series we all truly want, but another SpongeBob Squarepants character is getting their own dedicated spin-off. We heard about the prequel series Kamp Koral back at the end of July, with the soon-to-be-rebranded CBS All Access announcing it for some point in 2021, but now Deadline says that Bill Fagerbakke’s Patrick Star will be getting his own solo show as well on Nickelodeon. The network hasn’t confirmed any of this, but Deadline sources say the project—The Patrick Star Show—will be a behind-the-scenes comedy about Patrick hosting a late-night talk show “in the vein of The Larry Sanders Show and Comedy Bang! Bang!” (we would’ve mentioned Space Ghost Coast To Coast, but that’s not quite as mainstream as Comedy Bang! Bang! apparently).
The show will also apparently involve Patrick spending time with his family, who have appeared in at least one SpongeBob Squarepants episode, and some other characters from the main show are “expected to make occasional appearances.” Fingers-crossed for Fred, a.k.a. the guy who always hurts his leg, or the dearly departed Smitty WerbenJagerManJensen (he was number one, after all).
Details beyond that are pretty slim, but Deadline does say that voiceover recordings have already begun (one of the benefits of making a cartoon during a pandemic). We know Kamp Koral is going to be CG rather than traditional animation, so it’ll be interesting to see if this stays closer to the regular SpongeBob aesthetic to maintain some kind of continuity with the original show. That leaves us with an important question: Who the hell would give Patrick his own talk show? To answer that question ourselves, we have a theory: The main show is very concerned about what its characters do for a living, with the very first episode being based around SpongeBob going in for a job interview, but we’ve never really seen Patrick have a regular job. What if he’s been hosting late-night talk show this whole time and nobody thought to bring it up because Patrick’s a celebrity and they wanted to respect his privacy? At the risk of assigning too much importance to SpongeBob canon, that would be… fascinating.