IDEA CONCEPT: A sequel concept for Drake & Josh (May & Grace)
With all this trend of nostalgic sequels, retcons, and “children of…”-style series, I couldn’t help but mull over a really random idea that I just have. A sequel of Drake & Josh starring their daughters.
I even gave it a name, created Pinterest boards, and worked out a ton of details. The premise is this: Mayday Parker, Drake’s daughter, and Grace Nichols, Josh’s daughter, going on wild adventures together while dealing with adolescence, the crazy situations their parents get into, and the chaos that ensues when everyone tries to help each other and ends up making everything worse.
The story behind Mayday Parker:
To everyone’s surprise, Drake ended up falling genuinely in love with someone from his band (a bassist, keyboardist, or backup singer, but someone from his band). They got married in a whirlwind ceremony in Las Vegas and had Mayday, but May’s mother died in a very bizarre accident during a concert. Since then, Drake threw himself completely into music: Tours, recordings, publicity... He practically left May in the care of her uncle Josh and aunt Mindy starting when she was 5. Now, after nearly a decade away, Drake has decided to take a break from his career to spend time with his teenage daughter. The problem is that he continues to treat her as if she were a little girl, clumsily trying to make up for all the early childhood time he missed, and their coexistence becomes suffocating. Mayday truly admires her father, but she harbors a deep resentment toward him that she masks with her attitude as a rebellious and indifferent teenager.
The story behind Grace Nichols:
Grace is the daughter of Josh and Mindy, and in many ways she seems like a modern-day princess because she is polite, responsible, very sensitive, an excellent student, and weirdly happy spending time with her parents, more than you would expect from a teenager. She grew up alongside Mayday; in fact, they share a room at the Nichols’ house, which became a second home for May. Although they are cousins, they are more like sisters who have been best friends since they were in diapers. But as they entered adolescence, Mayday turned rebellious and troublesome, while Grace became more of a perfectionist. Even so, Grace never drifted away; on the contrary, she made it her personal mission to steer her cousin back onto the right path. Mayday, meanwhile, discovered just how much fun it is to drag Grace into her troubles.
The series would be called something like May & Grace and would play on that contrast:
May is fire, impulsiveness, pure musical talent, and a desire to break the rules; Grace is calm water, an obsession with order, and an inner fear of failure. May wants to be a musician like her father because she admires him deeply, though she would never admit it for the sake of her reputation, and she’d rather pretend she’s competing against him or hates him than show him admiration.
Grace has everything it takes to be a success, but deep down she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her future and suffers from anxiety attacks over her fear of not being perfect.
Adventures arise when their parents try to help and things blow up, or when the girls get into trouble and their awkward attempts to resolve it lead to the classic sitcom-style entanglements we remember from the original series, where in the end nothing gets resolved or everything gets resolved unexpectedly and at the last minute (and possibly with aunt Megan’s help).
Josh is now the overprotective, loving, and supportive uncle who never lets go of his “girls,” and Mindy is the voice of reason who can’t help but get swept up in her husband’s crazy situations.
Drake, as a widowed father and eternal teenager trapped in an adult’s body, tries to be the “cool dad” but ends up competing with May for control of the stage of life.
On one of those few occasions when Josh and Drake agreed on something regarding May, they decided to enroll both girls in an private school. Drake, who already had the money to pay for it, wanted Mayday to receive the best education possible, with teachers far better than the ones he had (Mostly because May inherited traits similar to his own, such as attention deficit and hyperactivity), and Josh and Mindy weren’t going to pass up the opportunity to give Grace every academic advantage.
What neither of them knew until much later is that Mrs. Hayfer, against all odds, now teaches in the very same high school division of that institution, so they run into her again when the girls move from elementary school to the next level. Hayfer has transferred her irrational hatred from Drake to Mayday, but the difference is that May is extremely defensive and argumentative, like if she knows she’s right, she stands her ground until she proves it, which gets her into trouble and detention… and often drags Grace into those absurd academic problems.