'Pete & Pete' a brilliant paradox

We had it lucky growing up. The kid shows we had were truly great, like "The Tick" and "Pinky and the Brain." But before an invulnerable idiot in blue spandex foiled a chair-faced madman's plan to deface the moon, and before two albino lab mice tried to take over the world, there were two red-headed brothers with the same name whose epic suburban adventures became the stuff of cult legend.\n"The Adventures of Pete & Pete" blended together the anxiety, awe and adventurousness of "The Wonder Years," the over-the-top dramatics of Baz Luhrman (before he was even famous) and added in a dash of random crudeness from "You Can't Do That On Television" -- this was a Nickelodeon show after all.\nThere are plenty of people who just don't get it. "Pete & Pete" was melodramatic, but light-hearted; mundane but extraordinary; familiar but bizarre; geeky but cool; childish but insightful. And if the preceding sentence doesn't make sense, you can see why the show can be difficult to understand. But if you can grasp these ideas all at the same time, "Pete & Pete" provides compelling explorations of individuality, love, self-acceptance and brotherhood.\nDespite a few very weak episodes, season two had some of the show's best. In one of them, little Pete (Danny Tamborelli) gets grounded through the Fourth of July. Inspired by the American virtue of freedom, he uses a Statue of Liberty paperweight to dig an escape tunnel under his front yard.\nBig Pete (Michael Maronna), in another episode, faces one of those challenges of growing up familiar to many of us: to find out whether his long-time best friend, Ellen (Alison Fanelli) is just a friend, or romantic soulmate. Not content to explore a cliché at face value, the episode juxtaposes it against little Pete's scheme to become a riboflavin-saturated time traveler when the clock falls back an hour at the end of daylight savings time. In the end, the show wraps these chaotic, nonsensical themes together in a way that celebrates honesty, second-chances and just going with the flow when good things happen, even if you don't understand them.\nIt's difficult to describe this show to someone who doesn't get it. But I think the words of big Pete describe it best: for those of us who do get it, "The Adventures of Pete & Pete" offers us "a way of looking at the world... making everything in it a little bit stranger, and a little bit better"