The Tale of Dirty Dan - Sam, Cat, and the End

Every baked good has a shelf life. And so does every baker.

I do not want to talk much about Sam and Cat.

In a way, I can’t talk much about Sam and Cat, because it was not a show I watched. By the time Sam and Cat aired, I was pretty much out of the loop on Nickelodeon and cable television as a whole. I had, as the good book said, put away childish things, and moved on to bigger, better things more befitting a mature young man.

I’ve never attended Anime Expo, but you get the idea.

I was just in a different stage in my life, and such silly, juvenile things such as a sitcom made for children were not in the picture. Not that I was particularly keen on Victorious or iCarly, but come Sam and Cat’s debut, I was in college, no longer at my parent’s house, and thus was not exposed to Sam and Cat as I was those two shows by virtue of living with teenage girls who were the prime audience for them. This isn’t to say I wasn’t aware of Sam and Cat during its airing; I was, but only tangentially and against my will, the same way that I know about Taylor Swift, despite never having ever willingly listened to any of her music and having no interest in it whatsoever.

I did, however, watch a few episodes for the sake of being able to speak about it honestly. I consider it something of journalistic integrity, if you will, to not speak about something without having first done my due diligence and proper research. Not to boast, but I believe actual journalists could learn a thing or two from my approach.

What I saw in Sam and Cat was bad.

But unremarkably so.

The show is, simply put, a disaster, but even that word feels… well, it just feels a little overstated. A disaster implies a level of grandiosity, a sense of awe and devastation that is simply not engendered by Sam and Cat’s rather tepid flavor of bad. Dumpster fire, to me, seems more apropos. A dumpster fire is liable to draw your attention, and, for a moment, you’ll probably think, Oh, wow, that looks bad, but after a minute or two of watching refuse burn, you’ve really seen all that’s going to happen and the rancid fumes start to make you light-headed, and since there’s nothing you can really do about it, you just shrug and move on with your life, leaving the fire to smolder and burn by its lonesome until someone with the means to do so will put it to an ignominious end.

The main conceit of the show is that Sam Puckett of iCarly, after leaving Seattle by motorcycle to do whatever she damn well pleases, arrives in Los Angeles, where, through a revolving door of comedic mishaps and coincidences, crosses paths with Cat Valentine from Victorious. The two girls instantly become best friends despite having zero chemistry, both in terms of characters and the actresses playing them, and Sam decides to crash on the couch at Cat’s grandmother’s house, who is promptly relegated to an old folks home so jokes can be made at the expense of the elderly suffering from dementia - something that Dan Schneider seems to find particularly tickling.

They also open up a baby-sitting service. You know. Because reasons. This mostly results in copious amounts of child endangerment and neglect, if not outright abuse. Cat’s grandma - affectionately known as Nonna, and played by seasoned veteran of day time soaps, Maree Cheatham - is a constant side-character in their escapades, as is their thirteen year old neighbor known only mononymously as Dice. And, yes -

There are notes of the Diceman in his character. Namely, they’re both obnoxious. This is the second time I’ve brought up Andrew Clay in this series, which isn’t a lot but I’m still surprised it happened more than once. Dice is a skeevy, duplicitous little shit who also has a side hustle - at thirteen - managing a MMA fighter played by Zoran Korach, who might just have the most Serbian name I’ve ever heard. This character’s name is Goomer, which is only one letter away from… you know what?

Not here. Not now.

Point is, Goomer is so… mentally deficient that he makes even the arrestingly stupid Cat Valentine look like a card-carrying member of MENSA. And Goomer and Nonna are also the only characters that even got a snicker out of me.

Big ups to Mr. Korach and Mrs. Cheatham for being the only parts of this show that were more entertaining than plucking out all of my nose hairs with my bare fingers, one by one.

From what I saw, Sam and Cat is a rather tonally inconsistent mess that takes much more after the absurdist, gonzo humor of iCarly without even a hint of the romantic intrigue and minor dramatic stakes of Victorious. The show is all comedy, all the time. Ostensibly.

If anything, it takes the style of LOL XD RANDUME!! humor that defined much of iCarly and cranks it up to previously unseen levels of random, effectively taking the metaphorical knob and twisting it so far in one direction that it snaps off and breaks, triggering a cascade of mechanical failures that ends up imploding and triggering a full-scale meltdown of anti-comedy. With iCarly, yes, Gibby screamed GIBBEH!, and Sam had a strange fetish for fried chicken, and Spencer made sculptures of butter and somehow smuggled exotic livestock into his apartment complex located in the heart of Seattle, but there was some small, albeit incredibly warped, layer of sensibility to it. Like, the logic of the show’s universe was not in line with that of our own, but there was what felt like a sense of bizarro comedy logic that underpinned it all.

In Sam and Cat, there is an entire episode that is nothing but a thin pastiche of Breaking Bad of all things, wherein the girls begin to illegally manufacture and distribute a particular brand of soda called Blue Dog Soda after it’s banned by the state of California for having obscene amounts of caffeine in it. That is a level of pure absurdism that I do not recall seeing in iCarly, even at its most ridiculous. If there was some tenuous rooting of iCarly in the vaguest sense of reality, Sam and Cat dispenses of it entirely, giving the audience scenes where Sam tapes a baby’s hands to a moped and lets said infant drive around the nightmarish, labyrinthine hellscape that is the Los Angeles highway network, Sam rides a bike over a tank of carnivorous tuna fish¹, and there’s an entire restaurant that’s serviced by hyper-advanced robot waiters who vaporize disagreeable clientele with finger-mounted lasers.

I cannot stress how much it felt like the writing staff was grasping at not straws, but twine-thin strings, trying to find plots to pad the run-time with, and often it feels as if the first idea they came up with was the one they settled on with a resigned, Fuck it, let’s do it.

It is stupid in the most unremarkable way. The kind of stupid that you don’t even feel the need to think about, or criticize, or even worthy of more than a few seconds of your attention before you just say, Well, that’s dumb, and go about your way.

It is obliquely clear that no involved was interested in the project. It’s an open secret that both of the leading actresses - Jeanette McCurdy and Ariana Grande - were about as enthused do the project as I am excited at the prospect of slamming my hand in a car door. As explained in the previous installment, McCurdy was participating at the behest of her ailing mother, who’s desire to vicariously live out the career of a Hollywood star through her daughter was really the only reason McCurdy ever got into acting to begin with. Not only that, but due to several financial misfortunes suffered by her father, McCurdy’s income from iCarly had become her family’s main source of financial stability. McCurdy was not in a position to decline the opportunity.

Ariana Grande, on the other hand, was experiencing a meteoric rise in the music industry under the stewardship of Republic Records. Though she has always spoken fondly of her time working on Victorious, I highly doubt that she felt terribly enthusiastic about reprising her role as the bumbling idiot Cat Valentine while simultaneously maintaining the image of the ultra-glamorous, hyper-sexual pop princess she was being groomed to be.

Even Dan Schneider had better things going on. At the same time that Sam and Cat was being filmed, he was already working hard on the development of another series called Henry Danger - a ridiculous superhero parody which would ultimately become one of, if not the most successful production he ever worked on.

I can find no corroborating evidence to substantiate my suspicions that Schneider was putting more effort into getting this show off the ground than he was in producing Sam and Cat, but everything about Sam and Cat feels so sloppy and half-assed that I can’t help but think that his heart was simply not in the project. There was a meticulous level of detail that Schneider was known for in his productions, and while most of the other hallmarks that defined his output were present in Sam and Cat, there is a notable absence of the careful, fine-tuning of Drake and Josh or iCarly or even Victorious that is about as difficult to miss as a sucking gunshot wound to the chest.

Sam and Cat entered production in 2012. In June 2013, the debut episode premiered on Nickelodeon following an aggressive marketing push that even I, removed as I was from the world of the Bakeryverse, was aware of. The first round of episodes enjoyed high ratings in the millions, which trumped the final episodes of Victorious. Half-way through the first season, Nickelodeon Studios would double their order of episodes from twenty to forty within a month. Despite the marked decline in quality, viewership would remain consistently high throughout the series’ first season. Even though I can’t imagine the older teen audience that had made Victorious a success stuck around for it, clearly, the younger demographic that buoyed iCarly remained, and brought with them a new generation of viewers that were coming into the ages for which the show was marketed to. Critically, the show was panned, but at the same time, almost everyone panning it was aware they were criticizing a show made for babies.

In March of 2014, Sam and Cat would be renewed for a second season. In April of that same year, less than thirty days after breaking the big news, it would be announced that the series would go on an unexpected and abrupt production Hiatus. In July, the episode #GettinWiggy would air. At the time, even Nickelodeon was unaware it would be the last new episode of Sam and Cat.

Sam and Cat, after a little more than a year of broadcasting, was cancelled.

Though no reasons were ever formally given for the show’s abrupt cancellation, one doesn’t need to dig very hard to find the reasons why.

For one, it was apparent that there was growing acrimony between on set. And it wasn’t really between McCurdy and Grande themselves, so much as between McCurdy and the staff. One of the biggest issues that McCurdy had was that she, like Schneider before her, had aspirations to do more than be just another run-of-the-mill sitcom rube. As she aged, she took an interest in writing, directing, and other facets of film production, and came to the conclusion that if she had to be in the entertainment industry, she’d feel more fulfilled as a screenwriter or director. Schneider and Nickelodeon had agreed to allow her greater creative input on Sam and Cat when she was first brought onto the project. They had even conceded to let her direct episodes of it, and, failing that, they offered to give her the opportunity to direct something else for the studio. Even at the time, McCurdy suspected these were hollow platitudes only said in some vain hope of keeping her content, or at least quiet.

I doubt she was all that surprised when they never materialized.

Worse still, she was being treated as a second-class citizen on the set of a show of which she was one of the title characters. As Ariana Grande continued to scramble up the music charts with the speed of a spider monkey tweaking on Bolivian marching powder, leaving a burning trail of novelty-sized gold coins in her wake, the top brass at Nickelodeon knew that had to keep her real, real happy, lest she walked. She had fuck you money, now. The only thing keeping her around was preferential treatment… and a fat paycheck per episode didn’t hurt. Grande has refuted any and all claims that she ever made more than McCurdy on the show.

Frankly, I don’t believe that. And, even if I did, she was routinely showing up to the set late due to other obligations from her musical career, leaving McCurdy and the rest of the cast and crew just sitting around waiting for her. As one of her tours kicked off, she was allowed to skip entire days of filming, and increasingly bizarre leaps in logic were added to the script to explain why Cat was absent. There is an entire episode of Sam and Cat in which Cat is stuck in a box for… reasons, which meant that Ariana Grande was not needed on set, and her dialogue could be added in post-production.

Meanwhile, McCurdy was effectively trapped on set for grueling production days that could extend upwards of twelve hours, if not longer.

So, take all that together. Ariana Grande wasn’t even on set most of the time, and they were probably paying her more than the one person who is. McCurdy, despite going along to get along, still wasn’t getting what the studio promised her, and if her testimony is to be believed, the producers were becoming increasingly confrontational over her deteriorating patience with them.

McCurdy later wrote of the day it all fell apart. A day when, after an extended absence from the studio, Ariana Grande appeared on set - late - and told her this.

What finally undid me was when Ariana came whistle-toning in with excitement because she had spent the previous evening playing charades at Tom Hanks’ house. That was the moment I broke.

Jealousy is obviously a factor in McCurdy’s emotional response to this, but, at the same time, I really cannot fault her for being so. She’s gone on to say that she was never mad at Grande personally. She didn’t fault her for anything, actually. Ariana Grande was just following her own musical career, doing what was best for her, taking care of other responsibilities she had to meet.

But was Jeanette McCurdy allowed to do the same?

That day, McCurdy approached the producers. Production was put to an immediate halt. Meetings were arranged. Discussions were had. While this was happening, McCurdy was invited to attend the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards - the same award show that would inadvertently serve as the catalyst for Schneider’s entire career.

She declined to attend, citing unfair treatment by the Nickelodeon staff and a stark disinterest in participating. She was, of course, roundly decried by the media for being immature about the situation.

At this award show, Grande would be given the award for Funniest Television Actress. Schneider would be personally gifted a lifetime achievement award by the studio for his contributions.

While all this was happening, McCurdy was embroiled in controversy for after pictures surfaced of her at the beach wearing - horrors upon horrors - a two-piece swimsuit. Oh, and some racy photos of her in compromising positions were leaked. Nothing nude, either. Just her in, er… lacy unmentionables. She accused her boyfriend at the time - NBA player Andre Drummond - of leaking them, which he has vehemently denied. Whether he did or not is unknown. But, uh… well, here’s her and Drummond at the time.

Oof. Looks pretty bad, right? I mean, she’s twenty-two here! What is she doin’ that big mother fucker? This guy’s gotta be some sort of cradle-snatcher. He’s gotta be at least, what? Thirty at the least?

Oh.

Well, even though she was a year older than Drummond at the time, other people weren’t happy about her dating him for… other reasons. You know. Because he’s very… tall. Yeah. That’s gotta be it. That’s the rub.

Hehe… ooh. Is it a little stuffy in here? Or is it just me?

This chain of events was effectively chum in the digital waters for the shark-finned tabloid gremlins and terminally online Twitter ghouls. It did not take long for the internet hate mobs and media cretins to begin circling around McCurdy.

She was being petty,they said. Immature. Petulant about her treatment from Nickelodeon, which, c’mon - it couldn’t be that bad, could it? Worse still - those pictures of her a swimsuit? Abhorrent. Children looked up to her. Did she not know that? They idolized her. Who was she to be out there at the young, tender age of… twenty-two, flaunting so much skin in a swim-suit or sending titillating images to an intimate partner that were never meant to be seen by the public? What would the children think of such a sight? One shudders at the implications that they, too, may grow up to wear two-piece swimsuits (as an adult) on a public beach like… like some sort of hussie…

Not long after, McCurdy took to social media and issued a statement on the matter. Here are the most salient pieces, in my opinion, from her statement.

I am not a role model.

I don’t claim to be, I don’t try to be, and I don’t want to be.

There was a time when I tried to live up to the aggrandizing title, that pedestal of a thing. Maybe it wasn’t so much that I was trying to live up to it. Perhaps I thought I could and I thought I was supposed to, so I gave it my best shot.

To remove myself from the role model battle, the falsified standard set by the bubblegum industry, is — in my eyes — to remove myself from the counterintuitive battle of attempting to be something perfect while being glaringly aware of my imperfections.

But in order to be thought of as a real, true role model, I believe you have to know a person and their actions, inside and out. Calling a celebrity a role model is like calling a stranger a role model. The knowledge you have of a celebrity is no more than a caricature drawn by media tastemakers specializing in selling you an image you’re dying to buy. It’s good to have heroes, but you have to look for them in the right places. They say don’t look for true love in a bar, well I say, don’t look for role models on screens.

I encourage you to find role models in the people around you, the people in your everyday life, the people that are your friends and family. I encourage you to base your idea of a role model off of someone you know well enough to see purely, not in the light, cameras, and actions of Hollywood.

While this statement was, at the time, met with accusations of being defensive, jealous, and petty, I think it’s a actually pretty solid refutation. McCurdy is absolutely right in everything she has to say, and the fact that the people who need to hear exactly what she’s saying are the ones calling her defensive and jealous speaks volumes of just how correct she is.

The other insults levied against her at the time were much less kind. You know the kind of words that get thrown around when scandalous pictures get leaked. Slut. Whore. Hussie. Strumpet and harlot and a woman of ill repute.

For obvious reasons, I won’t post any of the leaked photos of McCurdy, but here’s one of the tabloid shots that landed her in hot water.

Oh, my, my, my… are those shorts she’s wearing!? And in public? At the beach!? How scandalous! What might she do next? Show a little heel at the function? Oh, well - we shan’t be having any of that harlotry, we won’t.

Just for the sake of comparison, here’s a picture of Ariana Grande at the MTV Music Video awards that same year.

I suppose it’s totally kosher for her to wear the classic Playboy Bunny fit with all the fixin’s save the ears for an audience of millions. That’s fine - but we here in polite society draw the line at wearing shorts on a beach. We can’t be having our sweet little angels who adore dear Jeanette so, er… wear swim-suits at the beach. Why, next thing you know, they might be dancing to that wretched pop music, swaying their hips devilishly like that ghastly Elvis fellow.

All jokes aside - McCurdy got a raw fucking deal here.

She was belittled for making the mistake of sending racy photos to someone and trusting them not to share them, which - yeah. She shouldn’t have done that, but many, many people have made that mistake. The blame for the cancellation of Sam and Cat was being laid squarely and solely on her shoulder, all the while being lambasted by the media with every scathing word you can imagine; greedy, selfish, conceited, narcissistic, you name the insult, people both online and in the media were slinging it her way.

And the poor girl couldn’t even go spend a day at the beach without people jumping her shit.

Jeanette McCurdy, later that year, followed in the footsteps of the fictional Sam Puckett and start her own web series titled, What’s Next for Sarah?, of which she was the writer, editor, and executive producer.

The series - which featured a handful of minor iCarly alum - centers around a teen sitcom star who spirals into a deep depression after she realizing that her career peaked with a stupid show for children, and struggling with what to do next with her life.

Subtle.

The next year, she would star in a Canadian young adult science-fiction series aired on Netflix called Between, a production that she later claimed she was fooled into doing, and a show in which she was lauded as “One of the few cast members who can act.” Though she remained in show business in the years immediately following the termination of Sam and Cat, she took notably low-key roles in notably low-key productions, gradually slowing her output until announcing her retirement from acting in 2017 to focus on what she felt was her true passion - writing.

Ms. McCurdy’s part in the Tale of Dirty Dan is not yet complete, but, for now, she exits the stage. We will revisit her in an installment entirely devoted to her tale - not Dan Schneider’s - as I believe it is one that deserves to be told. Not that I need to or want to speak for her.

In 2022, McCurdy’s first book and memoir was released under the title, I’m Glad My Mom Died. The book sold out from multiple large retailers including Amazon, Target, and Barnes and Noble, within a day of its release, and ultimately moved 200,000 copies within a week of release. It remained a best-selling hard-cover for over a year, and, by 2023, had sold over two million copies and counting. Critically, the work received glowing, almost universal praise.

In a world where there are almost weekly op-eds about the death of literature and a marked decline in readership in America, this level of success for an author’s debut work is no mean feat. And the praise is received is well-deserved.

I thought the title was pretty fucking harsh when I first heard about it. Then, I actually read it. And, then I realized - it wasn’t harsh enough.

But, again - we’ll come back to it.

Ariana Grande, for her part, would put acting on the back-burner to pursue her musical career. Since then, she’s only met with more success. At present, Grande has sold upwards of eighty-five million albums, which puts her right between Justin Timberlake and rock band REM on the list of Best Selling Acts of All Time. She’s sold more records than Van Halen. She’s sold more records than Imagine Dragons, The Black-Eyed Peas, Bob Segar, and KISS. Some of her songs are among the most streamed tracks in the world, accruing over ninety-eight billion streams in total. As of May 2024, she is the third most streamed artist on Spotify, only ranking behind Taylor Swift and The Weeknd. Without the almost totalitarian and abjectly disturbing command T-Swift holds over the American zeitgeist and American women at present, I think it could be safely said that Grande would be the preeminent female artist in mainstream music. She has broken thirty-five Guinness World Records for recording artists, including Most Songs to Debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and Most Consecutive Monthly Listeners on Spotify.

For reference, Beyonce just released a new album. When Queen Bey releases an album, people shut up, buy, and listen… for reasons beyond me. I’ve never liked Beyonce’s music.

And she is currently three spots beneath Ariana Grande.

Needless to say, I think Grande made a wise career change.

Schneider, too, took the failure of Sam and Cat on the chin and moved on to another streak of successes beginning with the aforementioned Henry Danger.

Henry Danger is not a show I can talk about. If I was out of the loop when Sam and Cat began to air, I might as well have been on the surface of Mars when Henry Danger dropped. I wasn’t even aware it was a thing until years later, when there was some minor controversy around the discovery that one of the lead actors - Michael D. Cohen - was trans.

A transman, that is. Cohen was, to crib politically correct parlance, assigned female at birth, and had been living as a man for the past twenty-something years, well before beginning a career in acting or the T was even tacked on to the LGB acronym. Which, hey - looking at him, I would have never guessed, so… good job?

That’s about the extent of my Henry Danger knowledge.

Oh, and Goomer shows up in it, since, y’know - interconnected canon, and all. I guess after Goomer’s MMA career went up in flames post-Sam and Cat, he got a job as a hired goon for a super-villain called… Frankini.

And yes, if you can’t tell from one look, Frankini is gayer than a three dollar bill.

Frankini, interestingly, played by Ariana Grande’s brother, Frankie Grande. Frankini also may or may not be the mysterious brother that Grande’s Cat Valentine mentions in various gags throughout Victorious. And there’s a solid argument to be made that Goomer and Frankini are… well, let’s just say that there’s a lot of subtext about their relationship you can read into that ambiguously suggests that that the two are a little bit more intimate than just a super villain and his bumbling goon².

Yes - the Bakeryverse lore is less of a rabbit-hole and more like some sort of megalithic underground structure built by mole-people, replete with giant ziggurats adorned with blasphemous runes and filled with the remains of human sacrifices.

The premature and abrupt end of Sam and Cat and the beginning of Henry Danger proved to be a turning point for the Bakeryverse. With the termination of Victorious, the output of the studio would pivot to a slightly younger, decidedly gender-neutral audience, but return to and maintain the undercurrents of romance and drama, albeit pared down for a less mature crowd. If Victorious had been intended for a mostly-female audience anywhere between sixteen to eighteen, and Sam and Cat was written for particularly dim-witted twelve year olds, then Henry Danger started a trend in which the Bakeryverse would tow the line between them at the demographic of thirteen to fifteen year olds with elements that appealed to both boys and girls.

Clearly, it worked; Henry Danger would run for five seasons and one-hundred and twenty-one episodes, edging out iCarly for the vaunted title of Longest Bakeryverse Production. It had not one, but two spin-off shows - both of which are running as of this writing - as well as a movie that debuted on Paramount+, beginning a sub-canon within the Bakeryverse that fans of these programs dub the Dangerverse³.

Sensing that he had found his next Cash Printing Machine and it was going brrrrr, Schneider realized that he had to grow the Dangerverse beyond the confines of Swellview… which is the fictional town where Henry Danger takes place. Or so Wikipedia tells me. Look, I didn’t watch the show, man. I couldn’t do it. I watched too much Victorious and Sam and Cat to put myself through a Henry Danger marathon.

In 2015, Schneider used his seemingly preternatural ability to tap into the vibe of what’s hip with the kids to capitalize on the world of video game development, online Let’s Plays, and the rise of mobile gaming on smartphones, and expanded the Dangerverse sub-canon with the loosely connected series, Game Shakers.

As iCarly is to online video content, Game Shakers is to online video game content. Schneider even got his former All That and Keenan and Kel star, Kel Mitchel, to return for a starring role, because Keenan was still too busy doing Saturday Night Live to bother, I suppose. The show tapped into the burgeoning (and abhorrent) world of streaming culture, preempting the hostile take-over that streaming has since performed to become the predominate form of online content and entertainment, and bringing on guest stars not just from former Bakeryverse shows, but also YouTube personalities.

Some of these include a woman who goes by GloZell; real name - oh. Wait. That’s actually her name.

Alright.

Anyways, GloZell is a Florida-based YouTuber who made a name for herself as many prominent YouTubers did - going viral from doing something stupid. In this case, the cinnamon challenge.

Or, as I call it, The Pharaoh’s Curse.

Apparently, she was big in the early 2010’s. She interviewed Obama in the White House in 2015, right before the MAGA Putsch that put Cheetoh Hitler into the Oval Office. Research tells me that she’s also known for a song called, My Push up Bra will help me get my man, wearing green lipstick, and being capable of opening her mouth very, very wide.

You could fly a C-130 straight down her windpipe.

Not exactly someone I think I’d be eager to have my kids watch, but, aside from being uncomfortably loud and crass, she seems… harmless enough.

Also featured was David Moss, a contributor to Smosh Games, which, if you don’t know what Smosh is… well, it’s another story for another time. He seems to be your run of the mill sperg that somehow got big on YouTube playing video games and screaming at a camera, much to the delight of the hordes of idiot children who’s parents let the internet play babysitter for them. He goes by the very early 2000’s handle of Lasercorn.

There’s also something about him that would make me extremely reluctant to leave him alone with a child. Maybe it’s the shitty, patchy, wiry facial hair. Maybe it’s his apparent penchant for dying his hair bright colors, which, to me, is a textbook example of aposematism.

Maybe it’s the fact that he looks as if he’s geeking on bath salts in almost every photo I found of him.

Either way, I would go out of my way to keep my child from engaging with this man in any form or fashion.

Last guest of any interest to me was Jared Knabenbauer, better known by his YouTube handle, ProJared.

If you know the trouble this guy was in circa 2019, you would never believe they would have put him within thirty miles of a children’s show production. Not because any of the heinous allegations against him stuck - it later turned out pretty much every accusation that had been made about him was leveled by his (soon to be) ex-wife as a sort of fuck-up revenge play for divorcing her, and he’s since beaten the rap and enjoyed a successful rebound in his YouTube career.

But, er… well, let’s just say that you do not want to look him up on Google Images. You will not like what you see, because while the worst of his allegations were disproven… well, let me reiterate again, here - do not send pictures of yourself in compromising positions. To anyone. Not even your intimate partners. Because they might not be so intimate in the future. And you do not know what they’re gonna do with those pictures.

Filed under: Things that have aged quite poorly for John Mulaney.

Still - victim of a malicious scheme or not, he’s probably not someone you want associated with a kid’s show.

They really picked ‘em well for Game Shakers. Regardless, the show was as much as success as any other in the Bakeryverse. Game Shakers would run for three seasons before it was announced that it, too, would shuffle off the airways and into the great, big syndication in the sky with all of Schneider’s other projects.

And Schneider himself.

On March 26th, 2018, the television empire that Schneider had built for himself would come crumbling down around him. In a joint statement delivered to entertainment industry rag Deadline Hollywood - supposedly from both Nickelodeon’s Board of Directors and Schneider himself - the following was said:

“Following many conversations together about next directions and future opportunities, Nickelodeon and our long-time creative partner Dan Schneider/Schneider’s Bakery have agreed to not extend the current deal. Since several Schneider’s Bakery projects are wrapping up, both sides agreed that this is a natural time for Nickelodeon and Schneider’s Bakery to pursue other opportunities and projects.”

“We thank Dan and his Schneider’s Bakery producers, executives and social media team for their immeasurable contributions to Nickelodeon, and we wish them the best in their future endeavors. And Dan and Schneider’s Bakery are proud of the work they did together with Nickelodeon and will always remain big fans of the network.”

Some speculate that this was, indeed, a mutual decision on the part of both Schneider and Nickelodeon. At the time, Schneider had found himself at loggerheads with the executives at the company. The public was beginning to notice Dan’s strange obsession with women’s feet on Twitter, and the first rumblings of discontent from former stars on his projects were beginning to make disturbances in the world of online gossip. The same people that had formerly derided McCurdy’s claims of unfair treatment were beginning to take said allegations a little more seriously.

Things had been moving in that direction since McCurdy’s acrimonious departure from Nickelodeon. In a way, she seemed like the first pebble to fall in what would become an avalanche that would ultimately consume the Bakery. When a formal investigation into Schneider’s conduct on set was launched and concluded in 2013 - which may or may not have been triggered by McCurdy’s complaints - he was subjected to a much greater deal of scrutiny by the higher-ups afterwards; scrutiny which only grew as public suspicions mounted.

Additionally, under his direction, programs like Henry Danger and Game Shakers were beginning to routinely blow through their budgets and racking up eye-watering costs for the studios. Production days on set commonly exceeded fifteen to seventeen hours a day. It’s well-known that movie and television shoots can demand grueling hours from everyone involved, but those hours are carefully budgeted by the studio bean-counters. When one considers that an extra hour of filming can bleed a production for thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands, one’s head begins to spin when they consider how much excess money was being burned as this habit for many, many hours of overtime became more and more common.

Nickelodeon was also looking to move the production of other, non-Bakeryverse sitcoms into their Burbank studios, which, until then, had been the exclusive domain of Schneider and his crew of dedicated baking staff. He was not happy about having to share the space. It was his fucking bakery, damn it.

It is unknown whether or not Game Shakers was cancelled before or after Schneider and Nickelodeon parted ways. There’s reasons to believe it could be either or. For one, Game Shakers’ third season apparently ended on a cliff hanger that, without being renewed for a fourth, would remain unresolved. My first thought was that, oh - that’s because Nickelodeon cut Dirty Dan off mid-way through production. It could have also been the same ploy the team behind the 2000’s Cartoon Network mega-hit, Teen Titans, pulled; after being cancelled, the final episode left the series on a cliff hanger that the crew hoped would spur fan demand for a revival. If that’s the case, this worked out for Game Shakers the same way it did for Teen Titans - it didn’t.

But it could just as easily be that Nickelodeon axed the show for purely monetary reasons, and that was the last abuse from them that Schneider would tolerate. This theory holds some water, I think, because his other show - Henry Danger - was not cancelled, but rather handed off to another show runner, and would continue into 2020, while its spin-offs continue to this day. If Game Shakers was always intended to get a fourth season, it stands to reason they would have done the same with it.

I also suspect that there may have been an element of quiet firing at play. As a rift grew between Schneider and the leadership at Nickelodeon, it wouldn’t be outside of the realm of possibility that various contracts and legal arrangements made outright shit-canning the man was an impossibility, or, at the very least, a legally risky proposition. But they could try to… y’know. Nudge him out the door. Little by little. Make his life increasingly difficult here, there, and everywhere, so that they wouldn’t have to fire him - he’d just walk off of his own accord.

The truth of the matter is that we’ll never know what shape or form the final split between Nickelodeon, the once-great Bakery, and its despotic overlord took. Perhaps it was mutually amenable. Perhaps it was mutually hostile. But I have my suspicion that, if Schneider could have remained, he would have.

What ended between them was a twenty-four year partnership that produced some of Nickelodeon’s highest-regarded and fondly-remembered programming. Series that weren’t just beloved at the time, but are still beloved today. Series that launched the careers of entertainers that, today, are household names. Programs that accrued hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and padded Nickelodeon’s coffers for the better part of two decades.

Twenty-four years of hard work, single-minded dedication, and effort - gone in an instant. And I do mean gone. Since 2018, the Bakery has been dormant. It is still in operation, nominally, but only so. The windows are boarded and lined with dust, while the sign above the door bearing Schneider’s once-proud name has been baked dry by the sun and the colors warped by exposure to the abusive elements. Inside, it is dark. The ovens are cold and the trays, once lined with colorful assortments of baked goods, are empty.

After twenty-four years, Schneider’s Bakery went gone quiet.

What was it that prompted this sudden split between the studio and a man that had, for twenty-four years, toiled ceaselessly to provide them with quality programming? Why, after so long, did they decide to part ways? Was his behavior truly so abhorrent that it warranted his summary expulsion from the entertainment industry? In America, the almighty dollar reigns supreme, and mad worshipers of Mammon lay prostrate at his alter of greed, consumption, and vice - for a studio to dismiss a man that made them so much cash, truly, his nature must have been detestable.

If you’ve read the previous installments, and now the saga of Dirty Dan, you most likely already know the answers to these questions. Now that we’ve arrived at the cold, desolate, and unceremonious end of the Bakeryverse, it’s time we take a deeper look at what led up to this point in greater detail. It’s time we peel back the flour-dusted apron, and see the true colors of the oven-mitted man behind it.

I doubt you’ll like what we find.

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1. Parodying the infamous jumping the shark incident from Happy Days, without much self-awareness of what that entails.

2. If you’re really curious to learn more, YouTuber Quinton Reviews has a video in which he spins a very elaborate theory about Goomer and Frankini’s relationship from a thoroughly-researched and extremely comprehensive timeline. I would highly recommend Quinton’s videos, as they are both entertaining, stunningly comprehensive, and also informative if you care too much about children’s television. But I will warn you - if you think my content is long… well, just look at the video for yourself.

3. Yo dawg we heard you like verses so we put a verse in your verse so you can have two interconnected canons in your sitcom for babies.