The Tale of Dirty Dan - No Justice

Two stars enter. One star leaves.

When we last left our tale of the most reviled man in children’s entertainment, things were beginning to get a bit sketchy. Victorious served as a turning point in the story of the Bakeryverse. I wouldn’t call it the end of an era, but it was certainly the penultimate installment before the definitive turning of the cycles in the greater Bakeryverse mythology.

Victorious itself is actually a fascinating show - not by the merits of the content, but the meta-narrative that a careful eye can trace throughout the program’s run. Unlike the much more juvenile iCarly, which was intended for both young children and teenagers to enjoy, Victorious was intended for an explicitly older audience. Not adult, mind you, but the demographic it was shooting for was decidedly that of older adolescents. While iCarly was no stranger to playing with romantic sub-plots, the romantic elements were much more pronounced in Victorious. The humor, too, while relying heavily on Schneider’s typical crutch of random, nonsensical comedy, was also laced with copious amounts of innuendo that you didn’t see much of in his other programs.

If you collected a quarter every time an adult character - both men and women - ask the teenage characters - both the boys and girls - if they’re of age or just outright make thinly veiled passes at them, you’d have a couple dollars before the show ran its course. Given that these actors were rapidly aging beyond the status of minors, I suppose this occupies something of a gray area when it comes to acceptability… but it still comes off as skeevy in a way that’s difficult to ignore once you begin to notice just how prevalent it is and how sexualized the leading females are. Just because the actresses were eighteen and technically not minors anymore doesn’t make the forty-plus year old men drooling over them like drunken leches at a bunny ranch any less creepy.

Perversion aside, the fandom surrounding Victorious is one that is surprisingly robust for a show that wrapped production over a decade ago. In a strange way, I find the discourse surrounding many of the show’s once beloved and now reviled elements to be an interesting look at the shifting standards of popular culture and the audience that constitutes it.

For instance - Rex the puppet.

In the show, the character of Robbie - the one awkward, gawky, Jewish kid among a crew of cool, glamorous budding stars and starlets - is portrayed as so crippling anxious and socially inept that, in order to function, he carries around a ventriloquist dummy named Rex, who is… very interesting, to say the least. Compared to the more reserved, nebbish mess that is Robbie, Rex is a foul-mouthed, rude, and, perhaps most surprisingly, lewd character. If he isn’t insulting someone, he’s making snarky, passing remarks about a woman’s appearance and how much he wants to, er… well, let’s just say it’s not Robbie’s hand he wants jammed up his back side.

Whether or not Robbie is a true schizophrenic with a dark, vulgar, rapacious id lurking behind his coke-bottle glasses that only manifests through his puppet or if Rex is some sort of demonically possessed dummy is a question that’s constantly toyed with throughout the show.

Oh. And Rex is also black.

Does the puppet look white? Yes. But Rex says he’s black. I feel like I recall a scene in which Rex states, I’m a black man trapped in a white puppet’s body, or something to that effect.

This is not something that has aged well with the fans, and the discourse around Rex has thusly shifted from, Do you think Rex was possessed by Pazuzu and Does Robbie display enough Dark Triad qualities to be a potential serial killer to Is Rex a racist caricature?

There’s also the relationship between the token mean girl, Jade, and her boyfriend, Beck.

The relationship dynamic between Jade and Beck is, in my opinion, actually rather fascinating. Probably because I’ve known couples that were almost exactly like them. You ever had that one friend that was in a relationship with someone with whom they seemed to share a mutual, smoldering disdain for? Like, they were two people in an intimate relationship, basically attached at the hip, always going everywhere and doing everything together even though you could not figure out what they saw in one another? Mostly because they always acted like they could just not fucking tolerate one another? And you found yourself wondering… why the fuck are you two even together?

That’s Jade and Beck. Beck has about as much personality as a brick. He’s basically just there to stand there, look pretty and be a hot piece of ass for Tori and Jade to tear each other apart over. When he did get things to do, he was there to hang out with the token cool black dude, and the two would go on some zany misadventure for the B-plot while Tori and Jade continued to work on their plots to kill each other through increasingly absurd means. Kind of like if Tom and Jerry were hormonal teenage girls.

I feel like I remember one in particular in which Beck and Andre - the aforementioned cool black dude of the group - have to hunt down Andre’s dementia-addled grandmother when she gets loose on campus and goes on a violent caning spree, necessitating them to wrangle her like a wild animal.

And, uh… Trina’s usually somewhere in the background being violently abused, in some way, while Robbie has a panic attack over Rex making thinly-veiled cock jokes and Cat just stands there eating rubber cement straight out of the jar.

Anyways, Jade, on the other hand, is not just violently possessive of Beck; she’s borderline abusive, both physically and verbally. They do, at one point, break up, and for a few episodes, Beck dates Tori. It’s not hard to see why, realistically, someone in his shoes would definitely want to move on from a likely sociopath who does nothing but belittle them, berate them, and gaslight them into staying in a relationship that’s about as rewarding as putting one’s balls in a rat trap.

Yet, a few episodes later, they’re back together. It’s played off in a way where Jade is portrayed as a total, dysfunctional wreck without Beck and, when he isn’t there to act as her abuse sponge, she spirals out of control until, out of pity more than anything else, he goes back to her. Also because she’s hot, which, I mean…

Okay. Well. I get it. I’d probably find it in my heart to forgive her for a lot of things, too.

I’d say this is unrealistic, but, again - I have seen this exact dynamic play out in real life between not one, not two, but three different couples. So, I actually have to give Schneider credit here for tapping into a very real and under-explored sort of dysfunctional, co-dependent, toxic relationship dynamic that most people wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Even if he did so unwittingly.

Like Rex, this dynamic, which was once seen as comedic, now raises some eyebrows because abuse - domestic, sexual, verbal, mental, whatever - is now much more of a touchy subject than it was in the 2010’s. I also can’t imagine that some of the fans who probably thought Jade and Beck had the ideal pretty-people relationship when they were 17 grew up to have their own experience with someone who… well, just wasn’t that nice to them. Let’s just say that.

But perhaps nothing about Victorious’s meta-narrative is more interesting to me than the trajectory and evolution of both the lead character and the leading actress.

When Victorious debuted, actress Victoria Justice was at the heart of a media blitz by Nickelodeon Studios that was intended to make her the next big thing for the teenage laity. Around this time, Hannah Montana was still going strong on Disney Channel, Selena Gomez’s star was on the rise, and the crowned heads at the Magic Kingdom had a few new up-and-comers on the bench ready to step in once those two were on the outs. Demi Lovato was one.

We see how well that turned out.

But, at the time, Demi Lovato, by all accounts, looked to be shaping up to be Disney’s next it-girl. All that momentum stopped when she was suddenly and unceremoniously dumped from the star-vehicle sitcom series they had set up for her called Sonny with a Chance in 2011. The official line given was that she was being removed from the show due to ongoing mental health issues. But… well, here’s a little secret. From me to you.

So, the Dallas-Fort Worth metro’s suburbs are a huge talent pool for Disney Channel. Selena Gomez actually went to the school that my mom used to teach at. Debbie Ryan of Suite Life on Deck made life a living Hell for other kids at one of the other high schools in my town. The Jonas Brothers lived ten minutes up the road from me, albeit in the single most expensive ZIP code in the state of Texas, and behind what amounted to a high-security military compound of a neighborhood.

And Demi Lovato? She was from my neck of the woods, too. And, when I was in high school, everyone from Mesquite to Mansfield to Denton to McKinney knew why Demi Lovato had gotten shit-canned from Disney. See, Miss Lovato came back home for what would have been the prom at the high school she’d attended for a year before getting whisked off to Hollywood to live the dream. It was well known she still had a lot of friends in the area, and some of her family still lived there.

Well… turns out that she decided to spice things up at the prom with a little bit of that Colombian Snow from her friends back in L.A.

I imagine she’d have to have some mental hang-ups to bring hard crank to a high school prom. Anyways, word got around, Disney heard the rumblings, and the book was closed on Miss Lovato. She’s continued to maintain a presence in popular culture, acting as a judge on America’s Got Talent and other such D-lister hazbin guff, but, by and large, she’s mostly regarded like the lingering stench of a stale fart in a closed room that just won’t dissipate, or that one regular at the bar who keeps showing up even though no one really likes them and every now and then you tell your buddies, Y’know, they’re not really that bad, and then they come in the next day with a fucking spider tattoo’d on their scalp…

And you’re like, Actually, yeah, nevermind.

I’d say that I feel bad for her, since, like Amanda Bynes before her, she’s gone abjectly looney tunes for reasons I suspect were largely out of her control, but at the same time, even once she got “clean” (supposedly), she’s pretty much done everything she could possibly do make herself look like a pathologically histrionic idiot.

More to the point, in 2010, they also debuted Shake It Up, starring two new bright-eyed starlets vying for the big time.

Much like Lovato, the red-head there also flamed out into a steaming wreck of drug-addled degeneracy before ultimately becoming, of all things, not a star, but a director of pornographic films. She even won the vaunted award of PornHub’s Visionary of the Year. At the age of 22. Which is, ah… um…

Well, the word questionable comes to mind, but at the same time, if you look at the different men (and women) she’s been with, like the deceased ‘rapper’¹, er - Lil Peep…

You realize that directing smut is probably not the worst decision she’s ever made. Again - it’s hard not to feel bad for her since it’s blatantly obvious that she, too, lost the plot at some point and is in dire need of help, and probably an exorcism, too. Just in case. Should be a mandatory procedure when you leave Los Angeles. Kind of like delousing your dog after you take it on a hike. You just wanna make sure nothing bad hitched a ride with you out.

Her co-star… well, you might have seen her around, once or twice. She doesn’t really turn up that much these days, you really only see her in literally fucking every major Hollywood production for the past four years.

By 2026, I fully expect every single major Hollywood production to star either Zendaya, Timothee Chalamet, and most likely both of them.

So, yeah. We see who won that particular race between the two of them.

This is all to say that, despite Lovato descending into drug-induced mania, Disney was not hurting for new talent they could fuck up mold into the next big thing. They had that shit down to a fine science and were churning out new teenage celebrities and hit-makers on a bi-annual basis.

So, uh… where was Victoria Justice in all this mix? How was her music career doing?

The Victorious Soundtrack, which might as well have been called, Y’all Heard About Victoria Justice Yet?, hit Number 5 on the Billboard 200 Album Chart. And the single… Freak the Freak Out… probably should have workshopped the name a bit harder - well, it got on the Billboard Top 100.

At number fifty.

For reference, Miley Cyrus’s album released less than a year earlier, had a song peak at number eight. This song was called Can’t Be Tamed, which, yeah, Miley - trust us. We know. You’d make that obliquely clear in the coming years.

That same year, Selena Gomez’s album, When The Sun Goes Down, would get to number three on the Billboard 200 Album Chart, with the lead single reaching, again, number eight on the Top 100.

Miss Justice, for one reason or another, was not making much of a splash in comparison to her Disney contemporaries. While the music from Hannah Montana and Shake It Up was moving massive volumes, the music from Victorious was hardly proving serious competition. Justice might as well have been performing at children’s birthday parties.

And, while the show Victorious was performing quite well, it was becoming increasingly clear to the Nickelodeon executives - and Schneider himself - that the success was not due to any burgeoning star power radiating from Justice. If anything, the rest of the cast seemed to be pulling the lion’s share of the weight.

As I stated before, Tori’s status as the do-no-wrong paragon of perfection rendered her as the least remarkable individual in her own show. In fact, the fact she was portrayed as so above everyone else left no small amount of viewers with a certain disdain for her. Even on the odd occasion Tori was allowed to be slightly off-kilter, by the time the episode wrapped, she’d have either proven herself to be every bit as immaculate and untouchable as she was at the start, or she’d completely humiliate and dominate the antagonistic force of the episode.

Even Beck and Andre got more entertaining subplots because, even though Beck was the stereotypical dumb pretty boy and Andre was the archetypal cool, chill black guy, and neither of them had much depth to their characters… they didn’t really need it since they were also allowed to be weird as fuck and do off-the-wall bullshit. People liked Rex because he was an out-of-pocket pervert, and people liked Robbie because he was basically Woody Allen Junior. People liked Cat because she was so stupid that, every now and then, she said something so moronic it was basically a work of dadaist art. Jade was fun to watch because she was allowed to be just the absolute worst.

And she got hit in the head with a car battery.

At Back’s request. I feel like I should mention that.

That’s what people liked. That’s what people enjoyed. That’s what people remember. They didn’t want to see Tori being perfect and having the rest of the cast worshiping at her suspiciously overexposed feet - they wanted to see all the other characters be zany, wacky, weird, and go through copious amounts of physical abuse and psychological torment.

Which leads us to perhaps the most curious element to the series that begins to emerge as the seasons progress.

The show was conceived, first and foremost, as a star vehicle for Justice. It takes place at a performing arts academy. Music is a major factor in the lives of the students who attend this school. Many of them are training to be singers and/or musicians. Yet, Tori is the only one who regularly sings. The other girls in the cast sing a handful of times, but, when they do, they always do so with Tori, or in a setting where they all sing together, and their voices are kind of lost in the mix.

Why is this?

Well, I think it has something to do with the fact that, of all the actresses on the show, Victoria Justice was actually the least musically inclined of all of them. This isn’t to say Justice can’t sing. She can. Better than most folks, at any rate. But, at the same time, she lacked that critical element that separates the simply good singers from the great - she just wasn’t interesting.

This may sound strange to draw as a comparison, but think of Brian Johnson of AC/DC fame.

No one in their right mind would call Johnson a good singer in the conventional sense. But when you hear him, you know exactly who you’re listening to. Bob Dylan is a fucking awful singer, but the strength of his songwriting chops made his warbling, nasally voice tolerable; when I listen to a Dylan song, I don’t want to hear it from anyone else. I despise Creed, but every time I have the misfortune of hearing With Arms Wide Open - sorry, With A-a-ahms Wha-a-ade Ohw-pa-a-ahn-uh - I can’t help but try to do my own terrible imitation of Scott Stapp, which might actually be better than Scott Stapp doing Scott Stapp.

The hallowed halls of music royalty are filled with men and women who weren’t good singers… but they were great².

Miley Cyrus, for all her faults, possesses a voice that has a bit of a gruff, raspy edge that, when you hear her, you know you’re listening to Miley Cyrus. Selena Gomez, in another life, would have been a great lounge singer in some shady speakeasy; she’s got a low, husky voice that lends itself well to crooning, and it’s a shame she’s been made out to be some sort of glitzy pop princess instead of something… I dunno. Not that.

Unfortunately for Victoria Justice, she had nothing to really differentiate her from the pack. It probably didn’t help that Cyrus and Gomez had the full might of Disney’s megalithic studio apparatus and infrastructure behind them, and poor Justice was playing with the second-stringer B-team over at Nickelodeon Studios, but even with a better crew surrounding her, I’m not sure she would have been able to muscle out the competition.

But, here’s the thing about Victorious’s cast; they did have access to singers that were a cut above the average. They just weren’t Victoria Justice.

Liz Gillies - the actress who played Jade - doesn’t just look like she’s fit to be a singing in some swanky, upscale lounge back in the 50’s; she sounds like it, too.

She’s had a respectable post-Victorious musical career. Mostly because she found a guy who really, really likes to collaborate with her. A guy who likes to fancy himself a sort of Sinatra-esque crooner and, to my perpetual surprise, has the pipes to back it up.

Yeah. Seth MacFarlane.

That Seth MacFarlane.

Like, yeah, I know he loves to throw in a good show tune to the Family Guy mix every now and then as a gag, but I didn’t think he was, like… y’know. Serious about singing. Let alone good at it. Like, just listen to this feature he did on a recent rap track, which is only well-known for his part and his part alone.

My man was born to be Sinatra, and cursed to be Peter Griffin³. Not that I think he’s complaining.

MacFarlane aside, Gillies is a gifted singer, and while she may not have the a terribly distinct quality to her voice that makes her stand out, she has the ability to mimic the style of great female singers of the 50’s and 60’s that makes her unique enough to hack out a place for herself in the musical landscape.

But Gillies is small potatoes compared to her co-star. When I first mentioned the character of Cat Valentine, I didn’t mention the actress who portrayed her. I suspect most of you already know who she is. Even if you didn’t know her as Cat Valentine, you most likely know her today.

When Schneider and Nickelodeon studios kicked off Victorious, I think that, in hindsight, they probably agree that they collectively backed the wrong horse when they chose to bank on Victoria Justice instead of the young woman who is currently one of the biggest fucking names in pop music.

I suppose that they really had no way of knowing that Ariana Grande would, by the 2020’s, only be eclipsed by Taylor Swift as the definitive pop star of the decade. And, even then, until the explosion of the Swiftie phenomenon, it looked as if she was the biggest female name in music.

But… I can’t help but think that the signs were all there. I do not like Ariana Grande’s music. Not at all. I find pretty much all of it extremely annoying and thematically disagreeable. I do not particularly like her voice, either. But I would be both remiss and factually incorrect to say that she does not have a very distinct voice, an extremely impressive range, and talent in spades. In a world where modern pop music wasn’t scientifically, meticulously calculated to be as vapid, annoying, grating, hackneyed, and all around fucking terrible as is humanly conceivable, I imagine I could like Ariana Grande as a singer. However, that is not the world we live in.

Even as Victorious aired, Grande was gaining clout, and gaining it fast. Cat Valentine, by virtue of being the comedic relief that was given a lot of the shows most memorable gags and scenes, was arguably the most popular character on the show.

But it was still Victorious. Not… Ariana-ious. Grande-ious? I dunno. Point is, neither she nor Gillies were allowed to showcase their musical talents, and always, always, always had to play lode-bearing pillars to Justice’s image, often to their own detriment.

And that, my friends, is what we in the business call a huge fucking mistake.

See, Nickelodeon Studios would not let Grande release any music under their own label. They’d dumped a lot of money into propping up Victoria Justice’s career, that was their girl and they would be damned if they wasted so much as a cent on the pink-haired retard from Victorious.

So, in 2011, Ariana Grande signed with Republic Records, instead.

In 2012, only two years after its debut, it was announced that Victorious would not be renewed for a fourth season. Instead, the third season would be divided in two, with the first half being labeled as season three, and the latter half as season four. The final episode would debut in February of 2013.

In August of that year, Grande’s debut album, Yours Truly, would drop. And Grande would become one of just fifteen female artists to ever have a debut album release at number one.

Again, what’s so interesting about the meta-narrative of Victorious is the fact that, as Justice’s star began to dim and the hype around her cooled while Grande’s own fortunes were in ascendancy, this is, in turn, reflected in the show. In the later episodes of Victorious, Tori increasingly becomes the butt of more and more jokes. She’s no longer the infallible, God-like figure she had been at the beginning of the series. This isn’t to say she’s ever explicitly shown to be terrible, but, as the series limped towards its end, Tori Vega was no longer the gilded figure she was made out to be. A lot more begins to happen at her expense, and I presume much of this was due to the fact that, once it became clear that Victoria Justice’s fate was to not be the next Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez, there was no longer any impetus to keep pretending she would be.

While the cast and crew, when asked why Victorious’s run was cut so short, always seem to say something to the effect of well, the series ran it’s course, I do not believe this. Not for a second.

While viewership for seasons three and four are markedly lower than the first two, the show was cancelled before season 3 was even part-way through airing. If it was a matter of ratings, it seems to me like it’s a rather knee-jerk reaction to a dip in viewership. This is to say nothing of the fact that, of all the Bakeryverse shows, it feels like Victorious enjoyed a substantial audience of dedicated followers who still talk about the show to this day. Maybe the audience wasn’t as large as Nickelodeon would have liked, but they were there, and they were watching.

While Drake and Josh, The Amanda Show, and Zoey 101 are fondly remembered, they’re treated as relics of another time. Artifacts, even. iCarly and especially Victorious do not seem to be regarded in this same sense. Out of all the Bakeryverse programs, Victorious is the one that seems to inspire the most debate, discourse, and general interest among a living, breathing fandom. By that metric alone, I would argue that the show was, at least culturally, not a failure.

Yet, there are also… rumors of discord on set and acrimony between the stars. Maybe not of the hot, heavy, and explosive type that typified Zoey 101’s tumultuous run, but more like a slow simmering crock pot of catty, low-intensity conflict. The Troubles-style down, dirty, and discreet kind of sectarian street violence rather than an out-and-out crusade. I’m not entirely sure if these claims are founded in reality. Most of the cast, it seems, still reunite on social media and at various entertainment events rather regularly.

Here’s a picture of them at a function a few years back.

Here’s some of them at a nightclub in Hollywood, taken just a year ago as of this writing.

Here’s another Ariana Grande concert in Atlanta not long ago, where she brought her old cast-mates up on stage to raucous applause.

It seems that they still enjoy a rather friendly relationship. But, uh… do you notice anyone… missing in these photos? Anyone… Victorious, perhaps?

Just an observation I made⁴. Make of it what you will.

But it is easy to imagine that, as her fortunes waned and Grande’s waxed, Justice wasn’t a little miffed. She’s profusely denied any allegations of feuding with her co-star, and, for her part, Ariana Grande hasn’t seemed bothered enough to comment on the speculation at all. One can only wonder why.

If someone were to say that Victorious ended because of Ariana Grande, I would say that’s most likely correct. I don’t think she, individually, had a hand in ending it, either by request, or being such a terror that they had to pull the plug prematurely just to be rid of her. From what I can find, Grande has never spoken a bad word about her time on Victorious, and often claims that it was one of the most exciting and fulfilling experiences of her career.

But even though I don’t think she wanted Victorious to end, I think she was the ultimate catalyst that convinced the executives at Nickelodeon to axe Victorious.

Nickelodeon, as I’ve made explicitly clear, made a the wrong call in setting up Justice as their next it girl. They’d made the mistake of letting Grande sign to a label outside of their own while they continued to try and breath life into Justice’s career, which was tantamount to trying to resuscitate a decapitated corpse. Those were big blunders on their part.

They’d missed out on capitalizing on Ariana Grande’s newfound star power. They’d lost the opportunity to cash in on her musical career. But they could still cash in on her.

Ariana Grande was still under contract with Nickelodeon Studios. Even though Victorious had come to an end, she was contractually obligated to continue working with the studio on whatever they saw fit. So, tell me - if you were an executive at Nickelodeon Studios around this time, what would you do?

Would you let this newly minted, bonafide celebrity run out the clock on her contract playing second banana to a non-starter? Or would you cut your losses and make sure you struck while the iron was hot, while you still had her on a leash, and give her a show where she’d be the star?

Well, as it turns out, Ariana Grande wasn’t the only break-out star they had sitting in their bullpen, lined up to bank on.

In November of 2012, only four months before the conclusion of Victorious, iCarly would also come to an end. This decision had been made at the end of the previous year. Unlike Victorious, iCarly had ground on for six seasons and ninety-plus episodes. If any show had run its course, it was iCarly. By the time the iCarly set was dismantled and Spencer’s palace of curios and artistic oddities were pawned off at auction, everyone involved was ready to move on from the project. But none more so than Jeneatte McCurdy.

Unfortunately, the choice of whether or not she would finally be allowed to escape the confines of the Bakeryverse was not hers to make. That decision rested upon the shoulders of her mother, Debra.

In 2012, as iCarly was winding down, Schneider had made it clear that McCurdy was the next in a long line of stars he would take from one successful project and parlay into the leading figure of another. According to McCurdy, he’d been plotting her rise to solo stardom for a long time. Even in the early days of iCarly’s production, he had promised her that if she behaved herself, and she did well, she would get her own show. By 2012, McCurdy was beginning to question whether or not the path of a television star, let alone one as an actor, was truly a road she wanted her to tread.

But it was the path Debra McCurdy wanted her to follow. For years, McCurdy’s overbearing mother, Debra, had struggled with cancer. Come 2012, it was apparent that the diagnosis had escalated from aggressive to terminal. Even if McCurdy’s mother had not been such a domineering force in her life, I imagine that McCurdy would have had trouble denying the wishes of her terminally ill mother to continue her career, even if she didn’t particularly want to.

So, that same year, McCurdy signed on to star in an iCarly spin-off, reprising the role she’d come to loathe as Carly Shay’s brutish, ill-tempered, and crude best friend, Sam Puckett. The show was going to be called, Just Puckett - a name that I cannot imagine would have flown with the censors. If you don’t get it… just keep reading the name until it clicks.

Around the same time that it was announced that Victorious would come to an end, McCurdy got the news that Just Puckett was being taken back to the drawing board. With the ending of Victorious, Nickelodeon had Ariana Grande, and nothing for her to do. And, with Just Puckett being taken off the docket, they had McCurdy on a contract, and no projects for her to work on.

Then, Schneider had an idea.

Both Sam Puckett and Cat Valentine had been among the most popular characters of their respective shows. So, obviously, if you took the two characters, both of whom came from wildly different shows of varying levels of maturity and thematic content, played by actresses of radically different temperaments and levels of fame, neither of whom even really want to be doing a show for Nickelodeon Studios at this point… well, what could go wrong?

In a word?

Everything.

This brings us the show that brought about the end of an epoch in the Bakeryverse. It wouldn’t be the last Bakeryverse program, but it would serve as the definitive conclusion to an entire era of children’s television that so strongly influenced the American youth for well over a decade at that point. In 2012, it would be announced that Ariana Grande and Jeneatte McCurdy would be reprising their iconic roles as Sam and Cat in the show… Sam and Cat.

To quote the late, great Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy; “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

A bad move that we will discuss… next time.

1. I use the term rapper in the loosest sense of the term, here.

2. Scott Stapp is not included among them.

3. “Nyeh-heh-heh, look, Lois! I’m singin’!”

4. It would be fallacious of me to say that there are no pictures of the cast hanging out with Victoria Justice post-Victorious, but they are few and far between, and all of them that I could find were within a year of two of the show ending, while the most recent picture of the rest of the cast seen together in public was in 2023.