Pete and Pete was the best show ever. For three inexplicable years in the mid-90s you could turn on Nickelodeon and see a show in which the Strongest Man in the World accessorized with a belly shirt and a mass of tics, a show in which kids sold land-mine insurance door-to-door, a show in which Michael Stipe was the ice-cream man and Iggy Pop the next-door neighbor. The kind of meticulous coolness on display in Pete and Pete’s cameos and cultural references is easy to sneer at now, in the age of Seth Cohen and Natalie Portman, but the thing was that there was no way the show’s writers could have expected the ten-year-olds watching to realize what was so bizarre about the skinny old guy next door. In fact, Pete and Pete doesn’t appear to have been created for an audience at all; watching it now, all you can think is, these people were doing it for themselves. Sometime in 1993 the show slipped through the cracks into the green-lit room below, and Nickelodeon didn’t boot it out until 1996. It’s almost like they didn’t notice they were airing this thing.

Pete and Pete’s music was what you’d expect from its aesthetic: Stephin Merritt, Robert Schnieder, and R.E.M. all had their chance to soundtrack the titular brothers’ magic-realist adventures. But most of the empty aural space was filled by Polaris, a truncated version of the almost-successful 80s jangle-pop outfit Miracle Legion. The songs Polaris did for Pete and Pete (finally released on a rerecorded soundtrack album in 1999) hang like mobiles in the same trebly atmosphere that suffused early Pavement, twisting in the breeze of just enough jangle to get the band eternally and unhelpfully compared to R.E.M.. Pete and Pete’s title theme, “Hey Sandy,” is a straightforward but enjoyable slice of joyously unintelligible pop, but Polaris’ greatest moments lie elsewhere: with “Summerbaby,” a near-flawless exercise in classical construction that name-checks Vincent Van Gogh and Marshall Brown, in between call-and-response choruses singer Mark Mulcahy delivers with the rock-n-roll bravado of a man who’s either decided to pretend he isn’t recording a soundtrack for a Nickelodeon children’s show or—more likely—realized how cool that makes him; with “Waiting for October,” sung in a childish, tempo-shifting mumble that fades into a gently supported falsetto in the song’s last minute; and, most impressively of all, with “Everywhere,” which gets its own rather digressive paragraph:

Going back to Pete and Pete the thing that strikes me is how absolutely right it had suburbia. There always seemed something lacking in American culture’s two most prevalent depictions of the asphalt-and-bougainvillea sprawl: the “Wonder Years” approach, in which daisy-chained cul-de-sacs are stages for a perpetually golden-flecked kind of revised Americana, and every week someone makes another neat step towards Adulthood; and the Todd Solondz approach, in which long stretches of suicidal boredom are occasionally interrupted by rape. Neither captured the simultaneous mundanity and beauty of the place—its prefab flatness, its identical lawns sprinkled with shrugging stabs at differentiation, its rain gutters and storm drains, its silences and distant automotive purrs and sounds of discarded styrofoam scraping on concrete. Pete and Pete understood suburbia. It didn’t try to be lyrical or cynical or clever about it; it just understood that, growing up there, the only thing you can do to make sense of the tangled dullness of the suburbs is to assume that behind every streetswept corner, across every manicured lawn, is a story of such dizzying and horrifying absurdity, of such unabashed, unrestrained romanticism, that far from dying of boredom the best you can hope for is to be able to take it all in without breaking your mind.

And so did Polaris, which explains “Everywhere.” Every spare chime of the song’s guitar is a dead leaf on a suburban street; every lamentation of its harmonica a breath of dusky air, a mother calling the children to come in. And once everyone’s there, Mark Mulcahy, a glorious ten year old, sits in his upstairs bedroom and looks down at the deserted, styrofoam-studded street: “I can try to hide / But why waste my time … Everything I do says you’re everywhere.” It’s a breakup ballad, most readily applied to a girl, but it’s good enough to be about more than that—it’s about wanting to escape something that deep down you know you can’t and that even deeper you know you don’t want to. We have a word for this; it is “childhood.”

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