The Tale of Dirty Dan - iCarly

iHave a New Show.

When we last left the Tale of Dirty Dan Schneider, interpersonal drama between God-Queen of Pacific Coast Academy, Jamie Lynne Spears, and her co-star, Alexa Nikolas, resulted in the latter leaving the production after a dramatic confrontation with the producers and Schneider himself.

Alexa Nikolas’ part in this sordid tale of misconduct and abuse is not yet over, but, for now, much like in Zoey 101, she exits stage left.

Despite the acrimonious relationship between the two actresses, Nikolas’s character was integral to the chemistry of the cast as the eponymous character’s roommate. Her sudden departure from the program left a gaping hole. This void would be filled by another important figure in the Dan Schneider story.

Enter Victoria Justice.

And, yes, that is her name. Justice joined the cast of Zoey 101 in Season 2, presumably to add some Latin spice to the lily white roster of characters as the character Lola Martinez. Even though she’s only half Puerto Rican. And, I mean, c’mon. Do they really count as Hispanic? I’m not sure, but I’m also too Yakubian to be making that call.

Justice was added as something of an antagonistic foil to Spears’ character. She was the one person at PCA who wasn’t fawning over Zoey, and the one person who wouldn’t answer the question of jump with how high.

At first.

While Justice’s character and Spears’ would maintain something of a tempestuous relationship, as the series progressed, their animosity would wane and, eventually, the two would become friendly rivals at worst and outright bosom buddies at best. Though she did have a small window of overlap with Nikolas’s character, once the latter departed from the show, Justice’s Martinez filled her spot as the Zoey’s second banana.

The only other notable shake-up post-Nikolas was the departure of Sean Flynn, who played the character of Chase Matthews, and served as Zoey’s primary love interest. Unlike Nikolas, Flynn left the show of his own accord on good terms with the cast and crew to pursue higher education, because he wisely realized that being a child star is probably one of the worst career decisions one can make.

Today, he works as the Director of Operations at Eagle Rock Studios in Atlanta, which is one of the largest - physically - production studios in the United States. So, uh… good call, dude.

Zoey 101 enjoyed respectable success during it’s run, but never quite reached the levels of popularity attained by Drake and Josh. I presume that much of this was due to being a show tailored to a young female demographic, while Drake and Josh’s appeal was much more universal.

But, if you can believe it - the drama doesn’t end there. Because this fucking show, apparently, is a perpetual-motion engine of catty back-biting and mean girl bullshit. I had to scrape through more tabloids and internet gutters filled with celebrity gossip to do this research, and, frankly, I’m done with it, so I’m gonna keep this brief.

In December 2007, Jamie Lynne Spears announced she was three months pregnant. She was sixteen. At the time, people were convinced the show was ending due to this unexpected and shocking revelation. After all - a not insignificant amount of parents were really not happy that this girl that had been touted as some sort of larger-than-life, aspirational idol had gotten knocked up. There were petitions to have the fourth and final season banned from the airwaves. Even my mom didn’t want my sisters watching the show after this, but I’m sure they did. By the time the announcement of Jamie Jr. was announced to the public, however, the show’s final season had already wrapped production. It was a done deal. Not even the rest of the cast and crew were aware of the situation until ten days after the final day of shooting concluded.

Oh, yeah. And that revival I mentioned?

Turns out that did happen. You know what comes next.

So, yeah. That’s it. That’s the end of Zoey 101, and thank God for it because I am done with talking about it.

But we aren’t done with Victoria Justice. And neither was Dan Schneider.

However, before we can talk about her part to play in the greater Bakeryverse, we have to turn back the clock a little bit. Retrace our steps. Dan Schneider was a very busy bee during the mid-2000’s, and when one program ended, he was quick to start another one. His tried-and-true habit of hand-picking the next big thing from the cast one show and catapulting them into the lead of their own had paid off with The Amanda Show and Drake and Josh. And, as Drake and Josh came to a close in 2007 - right around the same time as Zoey 101 - Schneider was ready to bake up another big, steaming hit for Nickelodeon Studios.

And this one was going to be his most delectable treat yet.

Before Drake and Josh wrapped, Dirty Dan had his eyes on his next big star. Among the pool of talent he had to draw on from his existing casts, none of them had the promise of carrying their own show quite like the actress who portrayed Drake and Josh’s devious, conniving little sister - Miranda Cosgrove.

And he wasn’t just taking her along for the ride. During the run of Drake and Josh, Josh got a job at a movie theater, where he was constantly hassled by the trouble caused by a loud, eccentric, and clinically insane co-worker known simply and appropriately as Crazy Steve. Despite being a minor part in the overall show and doing little more than shouting nonsense at the top of his lungs, Schneider was impressed by the way the actor could so convincingly play the role of a certified lunatic. The way he screamed and hollered with reckless abandon - it just moved Schneider’s cold cut-clogged heart.

This actor was Jerry Trainor.

I bring up Mr. Trainor not only to illustrate that Cosgrove was not the only one to get a leg up from Schneider in his next program, but also because he’s probably the funniest person in all of these shows.

See, Schneider originally envisioned Cosgrove’s starring role to be that of an ordinary girl who’s humdrum life is turned upside down when - gasp! - she lands a spot on her favorite TV show! Wonder of wonders. The show was going to be called Starstruck. But, after a late night boozing with his friend Stephen Molaro, who’s the aforementioned dumb fuck we all have to thank for inflicting this audio-visual toxic waste upon the collective consciousness of America -

Yeah, fuckin’ thanks for that one, pal.

Schneider realized, yeah, actually, that is a shitty premise. Never mind.

Thus, he set to work revising the original idea.

Around 2006, personal computers were becoming an increasing fixture in American homes, and the internet was beginning to take up a larger place of importance in the cultural zeitgeist. This new, novel technology was being touted as the next big thing - which it was - and almost every company was looking into how they could cash in big on it.

In December of 2005, YouTube was unleashed upon the internet super highway, igniting tectonic shifts in both the culture of the internet and broader America. Thousands of hopefuls, young and old, took to the site to show what they had to offer to the world.

And most of it was is terrible. Really, really terrible.

It took a little time to get going. In May of 2005, during the site’s beta launch YouTube was attracting a modestly successful 30,000 unique visitors a day. Not bad, but still small potatoes, even by the standards of the day. After only one scant year, however, those numbers were up. How much, you might ask? Oh, not a lot. There were only twenty five million registered users by the end of the year. The lines on the YouTube graph were going up, up, up, almost at a ninety degree angle, and they were moving faster than Chris Christie when he hears someone open up a bag of M&M’s.

So, while his next show was still the drawing board, YouTube and it’s meteoric rise, online video content creation was white hot in terms of popularity. Today, twenty years on - wait. Hold on a second.

Good lord.

Anyways, twenty years later, where online video content and production has become ubiquitous to the point of mundane, it’s hard to remember a time where it was so new and novel that the world of internet video production felt exciting rather than just another facet of everyday life.

There’s a lot of talk about YouTube, children, and the relationship between the two today, especially whether or not it’s a good thing for them to spend so much time on the site and engage with the content since, no matter how much YouTube wants to ensure parents that Little Bobby won’t accidentally stumble upon a LiveLeak short of some poor Chinese peasants getting vaporized by spilled molten mettle in a foundry somewhere in Zhejiang… it still happens. It happens, it’s always happened, and for as long as there is an internet, children will be finding ways to watch content that they shouldn’t be watching, regardless of anything anyone does to try and curb it. But, that being said, this discussion of children and internet video content is not a new phenomenon. Trust me - I was there, on the ground floor watching this all happen in real time. In 2005 and 2006, I was a child with unfettered access to the internet, a whole lot of time on my hands, and unmedicated ADHD that left me with a thirst to fill my eyeballs with as much internet sloppa as my house’s bandwidth could accommodate.

And, at the time, YouTube and the burgeoning micro-celebrities taking form in their ecosystem was the hypest shit imaginable. Before, children’s place on the internet had been (rightly) relegated to playing chincy flash games on various sites like DisneyChannel.com, Nickelodeon.com, CartoonNetwork.com, and a smattering of independent sites with considerably better content. But, with YouTube, the floodgates were blown wide the fuck open, and, now, Little Ape could overdose on audio-visual stimulation watching 30-year old manchildren reigniting the console wars of their youth, funny videos of silly cats doing goofy things, crusty, 240p episodes of anime chopped into three parts, AMVs, and, of course, my personal favorite…

Performatively angry guys shouting about bad retro video games I’d never played and didn’t even know existed.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

One of the biggest shifts in this era of content creation was not just enabled by YouTube, but by increasingly cheap digital camera technology which put the power of (relatively) high quality recording in the hands of the average American, young and old. I mean, when I was naught but a wee lad, I remember my father had a video camera. It looked like this.

I didn’t even realize just how much he actually used the thing until he found his stash of VHS tapes a couple years ago. Ten years later, though, he got one for Christmas that looked like this.

Even the average digital camera around this time had basic video recording capabilities. And, yes - my sisters used both to record all sorts of stupid bullshit, though, the only one I can really remember making with any clarity was just us dancing in the study to Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie, which, I have to admit - still goes hard, I’m afraid.

We never did upload anything to YouTube because, wisely, my parents didn’t allow it, and I’m really glad there aren’t videos of ten year old me sperging out to various latin pop songs, laying deep and undiscovered at the benthic levels of YouTube, just waiting to be rediscovered. I would throw my hat into the ring when I was older and make my own YouTube Poops, but that’s a story for another time.

The thing is, it wasn’t just that YouTube and other video hosting and streaming services offered children had a platform where they could post content, if they so chose. With this new and relatively cheap recording equipment, every middle-class kid in America had the means to make content for it. Kids love acting a fool for an audience. Give ‘em a camera? Oh, they’ll put on a show. It’s just how kids are. What child doesn’t want to make their own movies? I reckon if I went back to 13th century Anatolia and gave a camera to some peasant Byzantine children, they’d make the most kick-ass amateur movie ever seen.

Well, the American youth’s fascination with the internet and, in particular, the burgeoning field of video content creation, was something that took a while to cotton on in the corporate entertainment landscape. I think this is partially due to a fear on their part of being dethroned by this rising force in culture and entertainment that they didn’t control, which only seems to be validated by Viacom - Nickelodeon’s corporate leash-holder, for a time - tried to co-opt YouTube and wipe the site clean of copyrighted content; a particularly destructive period of internet history that I touched on briefly here. I think it was also partially due to the fact that the old, out-of-touch fogies and suited stiffs that run these media outfits are perpetually two to three hundreds steps out of touch with internet culture and the break-neck rate at which it changes.

But Dan Schneider? Well, he was a little different than the rest. More than anyone else at Nickelodeon Studios, he seemed to boast a good pulse on what kids like. It’s likely that spending the lion’s share of his waking hours working with and being around large amounts of children had something to do with this, but I also believe that… well, I’m about to give Schneider a compliment, but the guy was just generally pretty good at keeping up with the times in a way a lot of his adult peers in the industry just weren’t.

Often times, he’s described, by both himself and those who worked with him, as a kid at heart. He stated before that he liked to think of himself as one of the kids, or the big brother to the cast of children working under him. He credited much of his continued success to this approach. And, in a way, I don’t think that’s an inaccurate characterization of the man. As we continue, we’ll see that he demonstrates remarkably juvenile and often immature behavior that would not be out of character for a child to exhibit.

This is all to say that Dan Schneider could tell which way the wind was blowing, and he smelled were the barest traces of the dollar-dollar bills, y’all, that were being cooked up in the YouTube kitchen. And he wanted some that of that cheddar in his bakery’s industrial ovens.

He was about to tap that nerve in a big way with his next show, which would debut in 2007.

iCarly stars Miranda Cosgrove as Carly Shay - just your everyday, unremarkable young teenager living in a Seattle with her eccentric artist brother, Spencer (played by Trainor), while her father is overseas for ambiguous reasons that have something to do with military service. Spencer and Carly share and apartment which is not only fucking huge, but also three stories tall. Maybe it could be more appropriately called a condominium, but they always called it an apartment, so that’s what I’m going with.

Now, I was much less in tune with the average rent in Seattle around 2007, being both in middle school and living in Texas, but even at the time, I thought the most unrealistic conceit in the plot was that a guy who makes sculptures out of butter for a living could afford a sprawling, three-story living space in the heart of downtown Seattle.

The main thrust of iCarly is that Carly and her friends make a video, it goes viral, and, the next thing you know, they have the most popular online show in the world and are thrust into stardorm as internet celebrities. Sounds to me like a living Hell, but, hey. When you’re thirteen, being famous on the internet sounds like one of the coolest gigs you can have. To a thirteen year old, it seems like the be-all-end-all of energy expenditure as an online content creator is turning on camera, acting goofy for a bit, turning it off, and promptly going out to the mail box to collect the novelty-sized check sent from YouTube headquarters for ten gajillion American greens.

Rounding out the cast were her put-upon neighbor, resident techie, punching bag, and spineless beta simp, Freddie, and, in later seasons, a bit character known for being fat and weird and running around with his shirt off named Gibby would be elevated from a glorified background gag to a main staple of the cast.

All these years later, everyone remembers Gibby. For an entire generation, this kid - and his catchphrase, which was simply, GIBBEH! - remains one of the most iconic facets not just of iCarly, but the entirety of the Bakeryverse, if not Nickelodeon as a whole. And, here’s a fun fact for you. Noah Munck, the actor behind Gibby, currently runs his own YouTube channel-cum-Media Enterprise called SadWorld.

When my friends and I discovered it a couple years ago, a friend succinctly described as a budget friendly, much more psychadelic alternative to the infamous Sam Hyde’s Million Dollar Extreme. Hundred Dollar Extreme, if you will.

We’ll talk about what happened to Munck later on, but, suffice to say, his experience the Bakeryverse were… well, let’s just say his turn to SadWorld makes sense, when you read about it.

But there’s perhaps no one in the story of the Bakeryverse, if not the entirety of Nickelodeon Studios, who’s story is more sordid, tragic, and outright disturbing than that of the actress who played what was arguably the most popular character on the show. Rounding out the original Pre-Gibby main trio of iCarly was Carly’s best friend, Sam Puckett - a crude, boorish, and aggressive girl with a penchant for violence and a stupid streak that spanned the length of the Puget Sound, played by a young actress named Jeanette McCurdy.

If you know anything about the category five hurricane of shit surrounding Schneider’s Bakery and Nickelodeon, it’s most likely because of McCurdy’s story. I wouldn’t be surprised if, even if you had no experiences with the Bakeryverse at all, you’re still somewhat familiar with Jeanette McCurdy.

There is perhaps no one more important to the story of the Bakeryverse, both it’s rise and it’s inevitable fall, than Jeanette McCurdy.

But we’ll come back to her.

I’m not here to review iCarly. I’m not here to review any of these shows. Was it something I watched? Maybe not as regularly as Drake and Josh, but I did watch it every now and then. I remember liking it well enough. Unlike Zoey 101, despite featuring a pair of female leads, the show was much more focused on comedy. The bulk of it wacky, random, mid-Oughts LOL XD RANDUME!!1! humor. Here’s some examples.

• Gibby takes off his shirt and shouts, GIBBEH! Because he is fat and shouting his own name, which is not something most people do, it is funny.

• Sam eats a bucket of fried chicken like an animal. This is funny because she’s a teenage girl, and teenage girls would not publicly gorge themselves like a starving dog on ungodly amounts of fried chicken, which, in itself, is a humorous food item as the word chicken just sounds kind of funny if you repeat it enough.

• Spencer makes a sculpture out of butter. This is funny because sculptures are not usually made of butter. Spencer also makes a funny face.

• A character has an undying love of ceviche. This is funny because ceviche is an odd food that most people, let alone a child, would not be obsessed with.

• Sam and Carly shout SHRIMP! at the camera. This is a masterful blend of the classic GIBBEH! gag, which incorporates the fact that normal people do not often shout the names of random foodstuffs, and Sam’s fried chicken joke, because shrimp is just kind of a funny name for a food.

• Sam punches Freddie, because it’s funny when someone gets hit, especially when it’s a little weenie beta boy like Freddie getting mogged by a girl. Boys don’t get hit by girls! That’s silly.

You get what I mean. It’s funny when you’re ten or twelve. But, there was also a lot of slapstick humor, which was usually incorporated with the character of Spencer, due to Jerry Trainor’s natural talent for physical comedy, and also Sam, because, again - it’s funny when a girl has such crippling anger issues that she’s willing to deck someone in the face a minor sleight.

But, in between it, there was also more clever, thoughtful wordplay and visual gags that went beyond he usual random nonsense. Still absurdist bordering on surrealism, but jokes that had more effort put into it than shouting out the names of random food.

I also very vividly remember this bit.

There was only sparing emphasis placed on the will-they-won’t-they romantic love triangle of Carly, Sam, and Freddie, though, as the series would progress, it would become an increasingly important factor of the plot. From what I recall, the shipping between them never felt intrusive, and it did a good job at balancing the zany humor boys could appreciate, and the drama and romance that girls cared more for, without overdoing it in a way that would turn off one demographic or the other. In a way, it felt like a carefully balanced synthesis between the more grounded (albeit juvenile and simplistic) puppy-dog romance of Zoey 101 and the heavy comedic emphasis of Drake and Josh.

It was much easier for both teens and children of both genders to enjoy, and, in a way, I think that Carly and Sam were portrayed in such a way that they felt much less… messianic than Jamie Lynne Spears’s Zoey. This, by and large, was a good call on Schneider’s part, because it opened the door to a wider audience.

And a wide audience it received.

This show was wildly popular, and deeply loved by an audience of both children and teens. I believe it actually has the longest run of any Bakeryverse project, with a total of six season, 96 episodes, and several television specials that are basically movies. It spawned scads of merchandise, as well, more than any of the previous series combined.

But a big part of what made iCarly click so much with the demographic it was aiming for wasn’t just the comedy, the romance, and the goofy, memorable characters and settings; a large factor in iCarly’s success was the interactivity.

Before iCarly launched, a website was created for the show by the same name. This in and of itself was not uncommon for shows at the time, but most proprietary sites for television programs were basically just glorified advertisements. They didn’t offer much more than a few shitty flash games, a video tab that played some of the more notable scenes at repulsively low quality, those bullshit What Character Are You? quizzes, and maybe some .jpegs to download as wallpapers, so when your dad come home and boots up the family PC to play Close Combat II, he’ll find that your sister changed the home-screen from a revolving selection of quaint family photos to something like this.

Or maybe that was just at my house.

Point is, most websites made for these shows were made with the barest minimum of effort possible, and, for all intents and purposes, were just another way to advertise the program to impressionable children.

iCarly.com was not like that. The website for iCarly was as much a part of the show as the series itself. It was posited to be the real iCarly site that was really run by Carly and her friends. Blog posts made in-character were regularly posted, featuring the deep and thoughtful insights of the characters, as if they were really writing to you - the audience! Not only that, but entirely unique videos of the cast, filmed on much lower quality cameras, were routinely posted as ancillary material, all designed to feel as if they were legitimate outtakes or just casual videos made and posted by the characters. Of course, the usual shitty games and what not were all there, too, but the real draw of iCarly.com was the fact that it really did feel as if you were logging onto a site that was managed by and populated with content made by the characters; an ingenious move that capitalized on the show’s main conceit of amateur internet video production.

But it wasn’t just the fact that, on this website, you could really feel as if you were reading Spencer’s unhinged ramblings or Sam’s reviews of fictional fast food joints. No - you couldn’t just interact with the colorful characters of iCarly. You could be part of their world.

Through the website, viewers could submit their own content to the show, which, if selected, would be aired on an actual televised episode of iCarly, and commentated on by Sam and Carly in the show.

In universe, the iCarly internet show is basically proto-reaction content. If you don’t know what I mean by that, I know you’ve seen content in that vein before. You know the type - some talentless chode sits down in front of a camera, plays a video, and reacts to it. It’s basically the format of America’s Funniest Home Videos, but instead of someone charming, charismatic, and funny - a professionally trained television host, if you will - like Bob Saget or Alfonso Ribiero, you get some borderline illiterate moron who just says, Wow! That’s Amazing! or, Wow! What a fail!, and very little else. Though content of this sort has plagued YouTube since inception, it was popularized in the late 2000’s by Canadian talentless hack, Ray William Johnson, who, for a while, was the most profitable and successful person on the site and made millions stealing other people’s videos and saying, Woah! Epic Fail!

It’s low effort. It’s terrible. It’s fucking annoying and, for some reason, it’s popular enough to warrant scads of fuckers aping the style to this very day, who apparently have done nothing but live their entire lives sequestered in rooms surrounded by nothing but bare drywall and eating saltine crackers because these people will react to everything for the first time¹. And, much like cable television, there’s apparently an audience for it that eats this shit up, because some of these reaction channels still get millions of views. Because there is no justice in the world.

Not to continue this screed any longer than it needs to go, but there are only two types of valid reaction content. The first is that channel that takes old Pakistani people from some remote village in Punjab and let them play Super Mario or drink a can of Monster. This is valid, because I very much enjoy see people who don’t even have running water in their village or even know what a Nintendo is play Super Mario, or consume more sugar from one can than they’ve had in their entire life up until that point. It’s not just funny - it’s honestly kind of heartwarming.

The only other valid reaction content in existence is this one video of this random guy listening to Weird Al Yankovic’s Hardware Store for the first time. I remember when I heard this song for the first time, too. I had probably the same reaction this guy does, starting around the 4:07 time mark.

And that’s it. The rest of it is terrible. All of it. No other exceptions.

Anyways, that’s the conceit of iCarly’s in-universe web show. Except the stuff they react to would be user submitted content. From children. Sure, there were other parts where it would be, like, Carly and Sam dumping spaghetti sauce on themselves or slapping each other with rubber chickens, or some dumb shit, but, at the beginning, the show featured a lot of viewer submitted videos of kids doing everything from singing to dancing to playing kazoos with their noses. I feel like I remember one kid who’s claim to fame was chugging an entire jug of milk in less than a minute. And it didn’t stop at video submissions, either; if the producers found a kid with a really impressive - or in some cases, grotesque - talent or skill, they would be brought on the show itself to perform with the cast.

It was kind of like a version of America’s Got Talent, but for children and medically diagnosed imbeciles.

And the thing is… it’s kind of genius. What kid wouldn’t want to have a clip of them seeing how many coconuts they could juggle or how many rubber bands they could wrap around a watermelon before it exploded to be broadcast on iCarly for millions of other kids to see? Those were some serious bragging right to bandy about on the playground or school lunchroom while you dined on Lunchables with toxic doses of lead contamination.

So, to ensure that they had a steady flow of pre-teen talent to feature on iCarly, Nickelodeon was soliciting content online through various means. iCarly.com, Twitter, Facebook, you name it, they were there like penniless bums, hat in hand, begging for clips of children acting like idiots to pad out their show, which also just happened to be about teenagers acting like idiots.

And so was Dan Schneider. He had taken to Twitter like a Redditor takes to collecting Funko Pops. He was having blast, that Dan. He was posting all sorts of fun stuff from behind the scenes. Candid pictures of the stars. Some of himself. Silly little videos. You know. Miscellaneous stuff.

And that’s when people started asking questions.

But we’ll have to talk about that more… next time.

1. If I had a nickel for every LISTENING TO BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY FOR THE FIRST TIME! or WATCHING STAR WARS FOR THE FIRST TIME! I’d have enough cash to retire tomorrow, and, forgive me for being skeptical, but I just do not think there are that many people in modern America who made it to adulthood without hearing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody at least once.