Nick Cannon (Patrick McMullan)

One day in 2009, Nick Cannon, the rapper and former child performer best known for portraying the likes of “Latanya” the diva-ish convenience store clerk on early-2000s Nickelodeon shows All That and The Nick Cannon Show, as well as for having married Mariah Carey once the acting and music work dried up, arrived at the Viacom offices in Times Square with plan to recapture the adolescent demo that had been his audience. “I walked into the office with a bunch of stacks of paper, and a portfolio, and said, ‘I think I can take the network to another level,’” he recalled, “and, as crazy as it sounds, they should put the network in my hands.’”

Mr. Cannon was soon hired as chairman of what would become TeenNick (a Nickelodeon spin-off that began life as The N, a nighttime programming block on now-defunct network Noggin).

“I made ’em make that decision,” he said of his hiring. “And they went with it. They were impressed with how prepared I was”—he trailed off for a moment—“and my vision.”

Mr. Cannon was sitting in his 40th-floor corner office, wearing an orange suit that matched the Nickelodeon logo—albeit in a somewhat dustier shade—pink striped socks and loafers. The room, which was cluttered with unopened gift baskets as well as an Everlast boxing dummy, doubles as a set for his TeenNick promo and teaser shoots: “It’s kind of good branding,” he said, “to pull the velvet rope, to be like, ‘Yo, come in, and be a part of our network.’” (An anteroom next door was cluttered with T-shirts reading “BITCH I’M FAMOUS,” back issues of The Hollywood Reporter, and boxes of FRS Healthy Energy, an energy drink Mr. Cannon promotes.)

The network is now home to the teen show Degrassi (a spinoff of the long-running Canadian series), H2O, about a trio of Aussie mermaids, and popular reruns of 1990s Nickelodeon programming including Mr. Cannon’s own series. “That’s the beauty of what the Nickelodeon brand has always represented,” he said. “Even when I was 17 years old I was a staff writer at a television show for Nickelodeon. From the youngest staff writer in television to the youngest chairman, it makes sense. Kind of.”

Keith Dawkins, senior vice president and general manager of TeenNick and general manager of Nicktoons, meets with Mr. Cannon twice a week. “I look to leverage him for the things he’s excited about, his insight and knowledge and access to our audience—creative ideas he’s passionate about,” Mr. Dawkins said. “He’s a thought partner in that way.”

Mr. Cannon also has a number of other gigs. Since 2009, he’s been the host of NBC’s American Idol–type talent competition America’s Got Talent, and he wakes before 6 a.m. each morning to host a four-hour drive-time radio show on 92.3 NOW, Rollin’ With Nick Cannon. (That is, when he’s in New York; Mr. Cannon is often on the West Coast for America’s Got Talent, in which case he broadcasts through the night.) Each week, he tapes a nationally syndicated radio show called Cannon’s Countdown. He has a recurring role as a talk-show host on the sitcom Up All Night, which has been picked up by NBC for a fall premiere, and he manages several bands (including School Gyrls, an all-female foursome that had their own TeenNick TV movie co-written and directed by Mr. Cannon). He is also a new father, with 4-month-old twins Moroccan and Monroe, a boy and girl, respectively, with wife Mariah Carey, to whom Mr. Cannon reportedly renewed his vows in the maternity ward under the auspices of the Rev. Al Sharpton.

“He doesn’t sleep,” said Sharon Osbourne, a judge on America’s Got Talent. “You see him taking 20-minute naps between takes.” She added that Mr. Cannon has also been eager to restart his music career. “We talk about it a lot. Nick wants to do everything.”

Like Mr. Cannon’s efforts as an actor, which trailed off into supporting roles and small independent films after the 2005 fizzle of Underclassman, a movie he wrote, Mr. Cannon’s efforts as a recording artist have been on hold since the mid-2000s. But he appears to be revving up to re-enter the fray. He recently released a single, entitled “Famous.” In the video, Mr. Cannon appears in one of those “BITCH I’M FAMOUS” T-shirts and parodies stars like Michael Jackson and MC Hammer. (Sample lyric: “Lights, stars, money, cars / When this beat drop let them know who you are.”)

“We have a lot of other stuff coming down the pipeline,” he promised. “I never really left the music industry. I just was behind the scenes doing other stuff. So now we have this single on TeenNick and MTV—it’s one of those things I do because I love it.”
Ms. Osbourne said she had tried to get Mr. Cannon to quit his drive-time radio show to free up some of his time. “He loves it too much!”

She added: “He’s so much into pop culture, with youth, and TV, and film, and cartoons: he’s into everything. He’s going to be one of the next great billionaire entrepreneurs.”

One of Mr. Cannon’s signature achievements at TeenNick, he and others said, is spearheading the network’s annual HALO Awards, which honor young viewers for their charitable endeavors. (Last year’s winners included a high school senior who used Twitter to help Haitian earthquake victims find their families and the young president of a foster youth advocacy organization.) “It kind of just helps it build an identity,” Mr. Cannon said. The goal, he explained, was to make a statement about what TeenNick represented. “A socially aware, socially conscious, young-minded kid or teenager is who we look to gear towards,” he said.

TeenNick has made still more of a splash, though, with the launch of “The ’90s Are All That,” a programming block of Clinton-era Nickelodeon programs aimed at a slightly older viewer, the nostalgic 20-something, including reruns of Kenan and Kel (on which Mr. Cannon was credited as a writer), All That (on which he starred), Doug and Clarissa Explains It All. The idea was an instant hit: on the first night, TeenNick had four of the top 10 programs among 12 to 24-year-olds in the midnight-to-2 a.m. time period. Overall, the network saw a rise in total viewership of 114 percent from the previous year, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Perhaps more important, the repackaging of this archival material sparked a frenzy on Twitter and Facebook.

Credit for the coup is hard to assign. According to Mr. Cannon, he has been pushing the idea since starting his new job. “It was one of the first things I talked about,” he said. “It was probably more of a sell for myself—like, people love that! On Twitter, all the time, people were like, ‘Bring back All That! Bring back Kenan and Kel!’”

Mr. Dawkins, however, suggested that the idea had other origins. “The late-night block was an idea independent of Nick,” he said. “That was about the audience speaking out in volume, 15 million strong: ‘Bring our Nickelodeon back!’ We were hearing that out there on Facebook, Twitter, video-based sites. And then there’s a bunch of 20-somethings who reflect that audience who work here now, and they presented us executives the same idea.”

Mr. Cannon, he said, was helpful as a sounding board: “I asked him what it was like, what was the audience feedback,” he recalled. “I showed him the spots. I wanted to hear from anyone who was part of that journey.”

Mr. Cannon’s entertainment industry journey began early: he grew up in San Diego and Charlotte, N.C. (Dad was a televangelist), getting his start in local talent shows. After making San Diego his permanent home at 15, he began auditioning and was eventually cast on All That, sort of an SNL-for-kids, that still has numerous admirers. “At the time I thought I was too old to be on there, because there were younger cast members,” he said. “I was 18. Looking back, it was the perfect age.”

There are those to wonder if, at 30, he isn’t a little young to be the face of a network. Last year, to retaliate for the rapper Eminem’s various attacks on Ms. Carey’s virtue, Mr. Cannon released a comedy single under the persona “Slick Nick,” which included the lyric, “I dunno if I should hit him cuz he’s feminine, Slick / Excuse me, Eminem, but why you lyin’ on your dick?” Around the same time, he Tweeted that late-night host Chelsea Handler was “white trash” and “looks like she got hit in the face with a hot bag [of] nickels.” These are not the kind of comments that are likely to get someone a HALO award nomination.

Mr. Cannon was asked about such unguarded moments. “I think that’s part of life,” he said. “There’s a difference between my occupation and who I am. But it’s always from respect and positivity. I don’t attack people, but I stand up for what I believe in. And I think that’s what we teach our viewers. From Degrassi to the HALO Awards, everything represents using your voice to stand up for what you believe in.”

Mr. Cannon often finds himself standing up for Ms. Carey and their relationship. When we ventured that many observers found the pair’s 2008 wedding surprising due to an 11-year age difference and a certain perception of Mr. Cannon’s role, he finished our sentence. “Errand boy?” he said.

He chalked up the misconception to “everything from my youthful exuberance—the fact that I look young—to the fact that people think I don’t deserve to be in certain situations.” As for tabloid rumors: “It’s so damaging to their own credibility. It’s so untrue—to me, obviously untrue—if it seemed like a possibility that I could be a womanizer or my wife could be overpowering—all that stuff is so ridiculous to me.” (Mr. Cannon is somewhat reticent about his personal life these days, having perhaps learned a hard lesson about acting out a romance in the public sphere: in October 2007, he and his then-fiancée, Victoria’s Secret model Selita Ebanks, broke up just five months after he broadcast his proposal to her on the giant MTV Networks Times Square Jumbotron.)

Asked whether Ms. Carey ever advised him on his various endeavors, Mr. Cannon said pillow talk between them rarely touches on work. “There’s so many other things to talk about,” he said. “When you’re at home you want to talk about anything but work. We try to have fun, even though the media tries to make up stuff—we just have the perfect relationship.”

Not that ever loses sight of his No. 1 goal. “I just want to be a part of great entertainment, at the end of the day, whatever aspect it could be,” he said. “Whether I’m on stage telling a joke, making a record, TV, acting, hosting, producing, starring in a film, I just love entertainment. You ever have a sports buff, who loves golf, and basketball, and loves going to horse races—you’re a sports enthusiast. I’m an entertainment enthusiast.”

And he’s not alone in that: Ryan Seacrest, for example, produces programming for E! while hosting American Idol and a nationwide radio show, and Andy Cohen juggles a gig managing Bravo’s programming with another as host of a late-night talk show. The Observer asked Mr. Cannon how he’d compare himself with the two, and he pondered for a moment. “People say I’m the hardest-working man in entertainment,” he began, whereupon Mr. Dawkins walked into his office.

“Like those shoes, man,” said Mr. Cannon.

“A little Cole Haan, actually,” said Mr. Dawkins. The two discussed the more fashionable choices the shoe company’s designers had been making of late.

“It’s funny, I was watching—with my wife—your stand-up on Showtime,” Mr. Dawkins noted, referring to Mr. Showbiz, a special from this year during which Mr. Cannon referred to Eminem as “Enema.” He said she was pleasantly surprised. “I think she has a certain lens on what Nick Cannon is, and she was like”—Mr. Dawkins feigned surprise—“‘this is funny!’”

“It’s so funny that people say that,” Mr. Cannon replied, aware that his reputation as a kiddie entertainer has created a certain perception. “I’m sorry you were thinking it would be not hilarious.” Mr. Dawkins said Mr. Cannon would need to prove himself continuously. “Andre 3000 said it best,” said Mr. Cannon. “You’re only funky as your last cut.”

We asked Mr. Cannon, again, how he’d compare himself with Mr. Seacrest and Mr. Cohen. “I think it’s a new kind of entertainer now,” he said, before reconsidering. “Actually it’s not a new kind of entertainer. You think about Bob Hope and Johnny Carson, Desi Arnaz—he was a great producer. It’s the same thing where—I call it an entrepretainer. It’s a businessman and an entertainer at the same time. That’s kind of what you have to be.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

He was leaving MTV Networks, he explained, to finish writing a musical. “I know you’re shocked,” Mr. Graden wrote to his colleagues. “A gay man who loves musicals.” Also: He’d be writing two books.

“If you look at the shows we have all created together … you can feel a tangible fascination with people on the brink of their next great adventure in life,” wrote Mr. Graden. “Over the last year, I woke up to the fact that I’m a character in my own personal reality show, and this is my time for that next transformation."

Roughly two months later, on a Wednesday morning in mid-August, Mr. Graden, who is 46, settled into a table at the London on West 54th. His latest journey in life, he said, began unexpectedly. A few years ago, he had to come up with a birthday present for a rich boyfriend. What do you give a guy who has everything? When he was growing up in the ’70s in the small town of Hillsboro, Ill., he had played keyboard in a cover band called Ace Oxygen & the Ozones. Now he decided to write his boyfriend a song.

Afterward, he kept going. “I got a Mac and got like 200 songs done,” said Mr. Graden. “I started thinking this would be kind of a cool musical, knowing full well that I have no idea what I’m doing and don’t have the proper training.”

Also, he had a career that kept him busy. As the entertainment chief of MTV networks music channels, he was overseeing the creative and business developments at multiple music and lifestyle channels, including MTV, MTV2, VH1, CMT and LOGO. At any one time, he had dozens if not hundreds of other people’s creative visions to try to nourish and grow and sustain in a harsh media environment. His personal creative impulses could wait.

Mr. Graden, who is a bottle-blond with an intense air of hyper-attentiveness, explained that he took his next step forward, musically, on his birthday. As a surprise present, his boyfriend at the time arranged for Mr. Graden’s two favorite playwrights, Liesel Reinhart and Steven Seagle, to assess the songs he had already written. A month or so later, they returned. “They had listened to everything and thought up story lines,” said Mr. Graden. “It took off from there.”

In January of 2009, Mr. Graden and his collaborators hosted their first listening party for their nascent musical, Limbo (“10 Defiant Hearts: 1 Unimaginable Decision”). They hired a cast of actors, invited some 200 guests to Mr. Graden’s house in Los Angeles and plied everyone with alcohol. When Mr. Graden heard the songs for the first time, he felt overjoyed. The next day, like hundreds of aspirational TV characters before him, he woke up determined to leave his day job. But how?

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Graden met with friend and media mogul Barry Diller at the IAC headquarters for some career advice. “He didn’t understand what all the drama was about,” said Mr. Graden. “He said, ‘Write down what you want to do. That’s your job.’”

Over the years, Mr. Graden had crafted countless development memos, mapping out various strategic plans for a range of TV channels in need of guidance, programming strategies and mission statements. Now, it was Mr. Graden’s chance to turn his executive skills inward. He wrote a roughly nine-page memo, mapping out a framework that would maximize his odds of creative success.

Thus began Brian Graden’s redevelopment of Brian Graden. 

“I wrote it all down, and I sort of backed into what my life would look like if writing for three hours a day and doing songs two days a week and making a TV show was my job,” said Mr. Graden.

He said he had already begun work on his nonfiction book, Phenomenon, which would investigate the business and artistry of “hit-making.” The book will recount his own experiences in television, including his role in developing the likes of South Park, Total Request Live, Jackass, and The Newlyweds. He will also be interviewing friends in Hollywood about their experiences feeding the zeitgeist. He plans to include sections on American Idol and Survivor.

The takeaway lessons, Mr. Graden said, should be applicable to the business world at large. He recounted a story about a friend who helped to create green ketchup for Heinz. “That was a huge explosion, and then 18 months later, every color was done and it was over,” said Mr. Graden. “There are so many businesses with arcs like that. It occurred to me that increasingly, everyone is in the hit business.”

In September, Mr. Graden will officially begin shopping the project to publishers. Depending on how the writing goes, Mr. Graden is also tentatively planning a second book, Phenomena, which will look at hit-making in a more spiritual framework.

Somewhere in the mix, Mr. Graden will likely recount his own dramatic bildungsroman—the story of how a hyper-sensitive kid, the elder of two brothers from a modest farming family in the Midwest, went on to become a top general in the cutthroat business of American entertainment.

MR. GRADEN HAD JUST graduated from Oral Roberts University and settled down in Tulsa, Okla., when he had a breakthrough. He was working as an accountant-consultant and was engaged to a woman. He felt trapped. Everything was wrong. Then one day, he was flipping through Newsweek and read an article about Harvard Business School. It was the ’80s. M.B.A.’s were cool. Mr. Graden saw his way out. “Business school is what set me on my creative path,” said Mr. Graden.

Last year, Mr. Graden wrote a chapter about his childhood for a book called Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing up Gay in America. But in the world of media executives, Mr. Graden is perhaps better known for his periodic, long-form studies dissecting the multi-variable calculus of TV development. In the spring of 2002, while serving as the president of programming for MTV and MTV2, Mr. Graden agreed to assess sister network VH1, which was struggling. Three weeks later, Mr. Graden banged out his magnum opus of memo writing, a gripping analysis of a complex system gone awry and a lucid prescription on how to fix it, which would seem to bode well for his future as a business writer.

Over the span of the 41-page document, Mr. Graden suggests more than 200 specific recommendations for how to revive VH1’s sagging fortunes. Along the way, he provides a mathematical model for the tracking and forecasting of ratings progress; unleashes a battery of snappy programming criticisms (“Watching Kid Rock serve French Fries holds up for about 60 seconds before it feels slightly desperate”); provides a realpolitik assessment of VH1’s schedule; and coins some nice turns of phrase (“in this ‘behind the scenes of everything’ age”…). The writing is at once rigorous and funny—a highly readable mix of quantitative and qualitative reasoning, playfully foxtrotting between the right and left hemispheres of Mr. Graden’s brain.

Several months later, Viacom put Mr. Graden in charge of restructuring VH1. Under his guidance, the channel took off. And some seven and a half years later, the memo lives on as something of an underground classic in the development community—the type of thing an up-and-coming VP would keep tucked away on his office bookshelf and turn to occasionally for inspiration.

One of Mr. Graden’s many devotees is Matt Stone. In the mid-’90s, Mr. Graden was working as a development executive at Foxlab studios when he became impressed with two young animators. He famously hired Mr. Stone and Trey Parker to create a video Christmas card, which gave rise to the viral hit “Jesus vs. Santa.” When Fox later passed on Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker’s animated series, Mr. Graden left the studio to help steer South Park into creation. 

Years later, Mr. Stone is one of the many people in Hollywood carefully tracking Mr. Graden’s career transformation. “Nobody has bitched more about studio people over the years than Trey and me,” said Mr. Stone. “But eventually you realize that a great network president isn’t the same as someone managing a tire factory. It’s that combination of an amazing analytical brain, and also being able to put yourself in creative people’s shoes. It’s a skill set that Brian possesses on an almost guru level.”

Lisa Sherman, who Mr. Graden hired to lead Viacom’s LGBT channel, LOGO, concurred. “He has a degree from Harvard Business School and yet has the most incredible creative instincts,” she said. “That combination in one person is pretty rare. He gives you guidance and then lets you follow your heart.”

“He gives more than lip service to the idea and the ideal of happiness,” added Mr. Stone. “When we were working together, he would always say that you have to set things up so that you’ll be long-term happy.”

So can Mr. Graden manage to follow his own blueprint?

He said he plans to keep his hand in the management game on a part-time basis. “This is the fun phase of being the cute girl at prom right now in Hollywood, where everyone wants to throw a lot of money at you to keep making TV and film,” said Mr. Graden. “I’d be kind of dumb not to take advantage of that window now.”

Recently, his name has surfaced in press reports about former NBC exec Ben Silverman’s new venture for Mr. Diller at IAC. But Mr. Graden said that when he met with Mr. Diller this past spring, no specifics were discussed. “There’s nothing in the works,” said Mr. Graden.

In the meantime, as his remaining time at MTV Networks ticks down, Mr. Graden continues to adjust to the life of developing projects on a much smaller scale. “It can take me like three hours to get down eight paragraphs,” said Mr. Graden. “But when I’m done, I’m all psyched and really proud, even though they’re tiny compared to the scope of what I did.”

Which is not to say that the transformation from development guru to developing writer is free from anxiety. Years ago, in his memo about VH1, Mr. Graden quoted Oscar Wilde: “The basis of optimism is sheer terror.” A hint of that sentiment remains in his current work.

The core character in Limbo, according to Mr. Graden, is a musician who can’t finish his musical. “Ultimately, he dies in a funny way, and wakes up in limbo,” said Mr. Graden. “We’re calling it a metaphysical comedy.”

fgillette@observer.com

The New York Times reports:

The kids were holed up at 155 Water Street in Dumbo, working on their designs (here's photos of the space before the renovation on the Engine Room blog). Their Tim Gunn is apparently hottie MTV news correspondent SuChin Pak and they were judged by "a diverse panel that included musicians, filmmakers, museum curators, a physicist, a tattoo artist, critics and Pete Connolly, an art director from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the Hewlett-Packard creative agency," according to NYT. Even Moby and Kevin Smith swung by!

Each episode is from five to seven minutes and each and will air for seven weeks. For the finale, one team will win $400,000 in cash and a chance to program whatever they want on the giant MTV screen in Times Square for a night (no naked pictures, we assume).

MTV will premiere the show on Sept. 15 on their main channel and MTVu.

Gawker has the memo...

Employees at Viacom's MTV Networks (which includes, in part, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Logo, and Spike) are threatening a walkout on Monday, apparently in protest at a new plan from management that would roll back benefits to the networks' legions of freelance workers.