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Shortly after the Jonas Brothers guest starred on the Hannah Montana episode "Me and Mr. Jonas and Mr. Jonas and Mr. Jonas", development for a TV series and Disney Channel Original Movie called Camp Rock starring the Jonas Brothers began.
The original concept for the TV series was about the band playing concerts as a cover while working as government secret agents to save the world and was entitled J.O.N.A.S. (an acronym which stood for "Junior Operatives Networking as Spies"). At the same time, they tried to hide their double lives from their mother and Frankie. Meanwhile, Stella, ignorant of the Jonas' double lives, dated each of the famous brothers without informing the others and reported the details in her teen magazine column. Said Staub, "So pretty much the entire show, it's all of us lying to each other, and kind of everything backfiring, and us getting caught in awkward situations." She described the concept as, "like The Monkees and a little of bit of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. There's going to be fun action sequences and still be a sitcom".
The J.O.N.A.S. pilot was shot in 2007, but the 2007β2008 Writers Guild of America strike impeded progress. However, Disney Channel Asia aired it during the Sneak Peak 2008. Instead, Disney Channel filmed a mini reality show, the 2008 Disney Channel Original Short Series Jonas Brothers: Living the Dream, which followed the Jonas Brothers on a concert tour and premiered May 16. A few weeks later on June 20, 2008, the Disney Channel Original Movie Camp Rock, in which the brothers starred as the fictional, non-fraternal band "Connect Three", debuted. The Jonas Brothers also released Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, a Disney Digital 3-D concert film. "After this rush of releases, the Jonas Brothers became too popular to imagine them as anything but more dramatic versions of themselves," explained executive producer Michael Curtis. "The spy concept was very big and very ambitious and it started to not feel quite right. As the band got bigger and bigger, doing a show that captured more of their real lives and trying to turn that into a more grounded, real version of what they might be doing became more interesting to do and more fun to do.". βIt is now about us being a band and balancing a normal life,β Nick Jonas told Access Hollywood. The title of the series changed from J.O.N.A.S. to JONAS, dropping the acronym but remaining in all capitals.
Producers have drawn connections between Jonas and productions by earlier bands. Show creator and producer Roger S. H. Schulman claims that "It's hard not to make parallel comparisons to The Beatles in 1962 and 1963 when you see the kind of response that the Jonas Brothers' fans have to them," and describes the 1964 A Hard Day's Night and 1965 Help! as "very much a template" for the series. Producers and critics have also compared the series to The Monkees, a popular but short-lived mid-1960s television comedy also following a real life band. At the Television Critics Association winter press tour in January 2009, Gary Marsh, entertainment president of Disney Channel Worldwide, described Jonas as a cross between The Monkees and Flight of the Conchords. The Chicago Sun-Times remarks that Joe Jonas parallels "goofy Micky Dolenz", Kevin Jonas "quirky Michael Nesmith", and Nick Jonas "dreamy Davy Jones". The Jonas Brothers reportedly watched episodes of The Partridge Family and The Monkees "for literally three days straight" for inspiration.
Read more about this topic: Jonas L.A.