THE Jonas Brothers’ new tween-age series is dancing to a different beat – laid down by HBO’s quirky “Flight of the Conchords.
Honest.
Details of the superstar band’s new, scripted half-hour series, called “JONAS,” which begins in May, are starting to come out.
But, because the band became one of the biggest things in show business since the TV series was first proposed last year, it’s a far cry from what fans had been told to expect.
In the new series, brothers Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas play fictionalized versions of themselves (using Lucas as their last name instead), balancing school and family with being teenage superstar musicians in a band called JONAS, inspired by the name of the street they live on.
The Lucas brothers attend Horace Mantis Academy – with best friend and stylist Stella Malone (Chelsea Staub) and No. 1 fan Macy Misa (Nicole Anderson) – engaging in hijinks like re-creating destroyed home movies, judging a beauty pageant and meeting the Queen of England.
The series was originally conceived as a “Get Smart“-meets-“Naked Gun” spy series, with the Jonas Brothers playing junior undercover spooks, under the guise of an up-and-coming rock band.
When the original pilot was shot in the summer of 2007, the plot idea seemed like a good way to handle the band’s status as virtual unknowns.
“We were really proud of it.” says Adam Bonnett, senior vice president of original programming at the Disney Channel, a little sadly. “But then the Jonas Brothers just blew up,” .
Thanks to a new record, a tour with Miley Cyrus and the hit Disney TV flick “Camp Rock,” the Jonas Brothers “turned into this pop culture phenomenon,” he says.
“When it came time to shoot the series, it didn’t feel right to do a show where we saw them as spies. Having them play an up-and-coming rock band when they are the biggest musical artists around right now didn’t feel honest.”
The network decided “the best thing to do was to draw from what was happening to them in their real life.” So the show was completely remade before production on 21 episodes began last fall.
Deciding to call the series “JONAS” – instead of making something up a la “Hannah Montana” – didn’t take a lot of thought. “We wanted something in the title that was going to get people’s attention,” Bonnett says.
The idea of making the new show like “Flight of the Conchords” – not to mention “The Monkees” – is clear when the Lucas brothers break into eccentric musical numbers that the Jonas Brothers wrote expressly for the series (including one tune named “Scandinavian Girl,” written after the boys realized that they had a huge, real-life fan base there).
Writing new songs gave the trio a lot of input in the series.
“It was very collaborative with the Jonas Brothers from Day One,” Bonnett says. “Since the musical numbers are part of the storytelling, the writers had to work hand-in-hand with the boys to make sure that the songs fit the story or the video sequences that we would end up shooting.”
The series also stars John Ducey as dad Tom, Rebecca Creskoff (“Quintuplets“) as mom Sandy and the Jonas Brothers’ real-life bodyguard Big Rob Feggans as head of security, called The Big Man.
Their real-life little brother Frankie Jonas plays sibling Frankie Lucas.