The former Nickelodeon host and actor looks back fondly at his time with the channel
Credit: Nickelodeon
NEED TO KNOW
- Mike O’Malley first joined Nickelodeon in 1991 as the host of Get the Picture
- From 1991 to 1995, O’Malley hosted GUTS, a competition show that had three players competing in Olympic-style sporting events
- Over three decades later, O’Malley tells PEOPLE about why he’s so grateful to have come up in that environment and why he still holds it dear
Mike O’Malley is grateful for where he got his start.
Before he was an actor known for roles on Yes, Dear and Glee, O’Malley was a host of Nickelodeon’s Get the Picture, a trivia show centered around guessing a hidden picture on a video wall, as well as the Olympic-style sporting competition shows GUTS and Global GUTS during the channel’s game show-heavy early-1990s programming.
In a catch-up with PEOPLE, O’Malley talks about getting involved with the network as his introduction to the industry. He explains, “Nickelodeon wasn’t as well known at the time. The brand was kind of a mix of You Can’t Do That on Television and Nick-at-Nite was around at that point. I wasn’t watching Nickelodeon because I was in high school and college at that point, but I did take the job. I thought, ‘This will be great.’ ”
Credit: Nickelodeon
Getting to interact with the contestants on the shows — many less than a decade younger than him — gave O’Malley the feeling of being a camp counselor. “I certainly wasn’t ready to be a dad. I wasn’t that far off of having been a kid myself. So I kind of liked that. It’s like the cool teacher, the cool coach. That’s what I was trying to be,” he shares.
The channel’s ethos was focused on centering kids, with O’Malley recalling how the leadership of TV executive Geraldine Laybourne, who rose from programming manager to running the channel, set the tone.
“It was run by this woman, Geraldine Laybourne, who’s an amazing leader, an amazing president. And she was an educator. One of the things that Nickelodeon was about in those days was you couldn’t say ‘fun,’ ” he recalls, explaining, “You couldn’t say, ‘This is going to be fun,’ because that’s what adults say. They really drummed into you that this is a place where kids are in charge. So I thought it was really interesting because this is how we went about our work.”
Credit: Vivien Killilea/Getty
Appealing to the feeling of understanding more of the world but still having limitations was intrinsic to the opportunities it wanted to present viewers with in its programming. “When you’re a kid, you’re just living your life. You’ve got opinions, you’ve got interests, you have no power. You have to go wherever people tell you,” he says.
“And the most fun that you have is when you’re hanging out with your friends. Also, the most danger you have is when you’re hanging out with your friends. But I think that ethos was really, really important. You had people who really, really cared about making programming that kids would like,” O’Malley continues.
When O’Malley began to explore experiences outside of the network, he recalls continuing to feel the support. “I had aspirations to be an actor. I was doing commercials and trying to get acting going on. I had written a couple of plays. Nickelodeon was extremely supportive in writing those plays,” he says.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
“My first play — this is like in ‘94 — it got published by Samuel French. It was called Three Years from 30. Then I wrote another one in ‘96 that was also published by Samuel French,” he remembers.
“Gerry Laybourne and the guy who ran the station, Albie Hecht, they were really amazing people who were very much supportive of me as a young person who wanted to act and write. They introduced me to everybody. When I had my own plays, they would buy out the theater for a night. Granted, it’s a hundred seats and the tickets were 15 bucks, but it was that gesture,” he continues.
Credit: Julian Hamilton/FilmMagic
It’s for that reason that O’Malley never shies away from his roots, even when people “think they’re heckling me about it.”
“They think I don’t want to remember it, and that’s not the case at all. I’m really, really proud of it. I’m really, really proud of GUTS. I’m really, really proud of what it meant to kids at that time,” he says.
“I wish they still made shows like that. The viewers were kids who wanted to see kids do stuff. It’s like how they’ll watch pro sports on television, but then they’ll be out in the yard trying to be those guys. They don’t want to just watch. They want to do. So yeah, it was a great time in my life. And if they want to reboot it, I’m ready,” O’Malley concludes.
Read the full article here
