The Tale of Dirty Dan - Victorious

Everybody wants to be the next big thing.

In 2005, the Zoey 101 set was not a good place to be. We’ve already discussed this at length in a previous installment in the tale of Dirty Dan, but, in order to set the stage for the next chapter, we must first dial back the clock to the height of the absolute slobber-knocker of a personal beef between leading lady and Stank Master Supreme, Jamie Lynn Spears, and co-star Alexa Nikolas. In the midst of this, a new actress was auditioning for a part that, conveniently, would fill the hole left behind by Nikolas after her contract was severed and her working relationship with Nickelodeon Studios would be brought to a sudden and abrupt end.

As we all know, then-thirteen year old Victoria Justice would, indeed, snag the gig and become a member of Zoey 101’s core cast.

Whether or not her unexpected introduction to the main cast right before Nikolas’s departure was a happy coincidence or a carefully calculated contingency plan is unknown. It is, however, a particular hot topic of speculation among fans of the Bakeryverse, of which there are a lot, and yes, we will get to that later.

What’s important about Justice’s introduction into the tale of Dirty Dan is not what she would do for Zoey 101, but what she would do for the Bakeryverse as a whole. From the word go, her place in the pantheon of Bakeryverse all-timers was sealed. Three episodes into her introduction to Zoey 101, Schneider called his corporate masters and told them this - I’ve got your next star.

When Zoey 101 came to an end, Justice’s job security wasn’t in jeaopardy. It wasn’t a question of if she’d work another Schneider production - it was a matter of what kind of show she’d work with Schneider on. With iCarly already well into it’s first season by 2008, there was no place for her there, and I’m certain that Dan Schneider did not want to waste what he had, for years, considered leading lady material as another mid-season drop-in to play second fiddle on a show where they had kids chugging milk and belching the alphabet. Zoey 101 had been a much different show than iCarly with a much more sedate, grounded feel to the absurdist, hyper-strange comedy that typified the latter.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long for Nickelodeon to tell ol’ Dirty Dan what kind of show they wanted him to make next. And, since he had proven himself remarkably capable of juggling the production of, at most, four shows at once at his peak, I don’t think that adding another to his plate while iCarly was in full-swing was a big risk. After all - Dan’s a big man. Big boy’s gotta eat.

Which reminds me of a humorous anecdote from the aforementioned Jeanette McCurdy, who said that the man was constantly surrounded by platters of cold cuts and cheese that he would snack on constantly throughout the day, and regularly demolish several on the regular. That’s not important - I just think the mental image is funny.

In 2008, Nickelodeon execs had noticed that their sworn enemies at the Disney Corporation had been having wild success with a new sitcom of their own. Up until now, the two companies had kept at parity with one another when it came to the domain of children’s sitcoms. One had never really managed to get a leg up on the other, and neither had that killer app that would cement their status as the undisputed lords of entertainment for babies.

But that was changing. In 2006, Disney had added a new, fresh-faced rising star to their stable of talent, and, with her help, they were beginning to pull away with the competition. And Nickelodeon was keenly aware of that.

Hannah Montana had them shit-scared.

I don’t want to dive into the dirty dealings behind the closed doors and walled garden of the House of Mouse’s television empire. That’s an entirely different story unto itself, worthy of another multi-part exploration. But, at this part of the story, it’s unavoidable to not mention the teenage sitcom arm’s race between Disney and Nickelodeon that had been raging for over half-a-decade at this point, as the trajectory that Disney took with the release of Hannah Montana in 2006 would alter that of the Bakeryverse as well.

With the success of Hannah Montana, Disney wasn’t just beginning to hack away at an increasing portion of Nickelodeon’s solid viewership; in the star of the show, the now infamous Miley Cyrus, they were beginning to establish themselves on the charts, too. Her songs were getting playtime on the radio. And not just Radio Disney, either - like, the actual radio stations that people beyond just children listen to. She was becoming a bondafide celebrity in a way that their previous sitcom stars and those of Nickelodeon Studios weren’t. This isn’t to say that people like Jamie Lynn Spears, Drake Bell, and the others weren’t celebrities in their own right. But their clout and fame was limited. Miley Cyrus was rapidly becoming a celebrity of a greater caliber. Hannah Montana the show and Hannah Montana the musician proved to be a double threat.

It didn’t help matters that, also in 2006, Disney Channel had dropped a audio-visual atomic weapon onto the children’s entertainment scene with their made-for-television Disney Channel Original Movie, High School Musical.

I remember when this thing came out, and, I can tell you this - it wasn’t just big. It was big big in a way that made-for-television movies just aren’t. Basically overnight, stars Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens became stars. The former is still a very large profile actor, and the latter… well, she’s around. The other actors and actresses you don’t hear much about these days, but, believe you me, you saw a lot of them at the time. The music from this movie was fucking inescapable.

I watched this movie at least a dozen times through it’s entirety, and probably dozens more in bits and pieces. This was mostly because I had little sisters who watched this fucking thing more times than can be counted. We had the soundtrack that got constant play in the car. Some of the songs were escaping containment and even leaking onto conventional radio stations. It left such a massive, steaming impact crater in my generation’s psyche that, even when I got to high school years later, this was a song I remember all of us singing at pep rallies. Everyone. Even the kids you would never expect to admit ever saw the movie, and the kids who wouldn’t sing short of putting a gun to their heads. It did things to people, man.

And… yeah. Okay. I won’t lie to you. It goes hard, I’m afraid.

The movie was basically my generation’s West Side Story.

Is High School Musical a good movie? Fuck no. Of course not. That’s a stupid question. But, for what it is… is it a good fuck-off, don’t-think-about-it, feel-good family musical?

Yeah. I’ll give it that.

The success of High School Musical and it’s sequels, as well as Hannah Montana, caused Disney to pivot away from making sitcom stars and focus on making actual stars; glamorous, multi-talented individuals who could sing, dance, and… well, acting wasn’t always their strong suit, but they could turn in a passable performance. And, with the resources at the hands of the House of Mouse, they were doing a damn good job at it. In 2007, they churned out yet another mega-star with their next sitcom, Wizards of Waverly Place, in which they unleashed Selena Gomez upon the world.

These days, Selena Gomez looks like 2007-era Selena Gomez if she got stung by a dozen bees in the face, but she’s still very much a present and relevant person in the pop music scene. So is Miley Cyrus. Unfortunately.

When Disney turned up the heat, they started cooking, and Nickelodeon was struggling to catch up. This isn’t to say that they hadn’t tried to take a similar tack in the past. In fact, they’d been trying to do what Disney was doing the whole time, but only ever met with middling success.

They tried to prop up Amanda Bynes as a big presence in major motion pictures, and, at first, succeeded.

It didn’t take very long for the wheels to fall off that train.

They’d tried to prop up Drake Bell as a serious musician, and, for Bell himself, a serious musician was what he wanted to be alongside his accolades as an actor.

Bell actually wrote the theme song to Drake and Josh, which… yeah. I’m gonna say it again.

Goes hard, I’m afraid. Especially when you consider how young he was at the time.

He actually contributed a lot to the soundtrack and, in 2005, released his debut album, Telegraph. While the reception to this album was actually rather positive, rock as a cultural force was on the decline on the charts. Worse still for Bell, he was, in particular, a self-professed adherent to the Power Pop genre. And I don’t mean that as in Power Pop is a bad genre.

In fact, Power Pop is my favorite genre of music. It’s great stuff. One of my favorite bands is Fountains of Wayne, which is one of the poster boys of the Power Pop genre.

If you know anything about Power Pop, or Fountains of Wayne, you know that we live in a cruel, debased world where justice is but a myth and the good do not prosper, and bands that sound like Fountains of Wayne rarely, if ever, succeed. Even Fountains of Wayne only really notched a notable hit with the seminal milf-lover ballad of Stacy’s Mom before disappearing from the charts after their next single had a music video (for their best song, I might add) banned from MTV for having two girls lip-syncing a line about drinking wine, effectively killing their hype, stifling their momentum, and derailing their career.

Like I said - Lady Justice is dead, and the angels weep over her mutilated corpse.

And, just to validate Bell’s chops as a Power Pop acolyte, and to prove my own street cred as Power Pop’s biggest cheerleader, here’s a video of Bell and his band singing Joining a Fan Club, which is one of the best Power Pop songs from one of the best Power Pop bands, the criminally underrated, often forgotten, and extremely talented Jellyfish.

He does an alright job, but it’s exceedingly hard to beat the original. You can’t fault the guy for shooting for perfection and missing.

Bell is still an very active musician, with his most recent album, Non-Stop Flight, releasing earlier this year in 2024. But mainstream, major success has always eluded him. At least in America. But - and I’m sure you’re tired of hearing this - but we’ll come back to it.

After Drake’s swing-and-a-miss, Nickelodeon tried to do the same thing with Miranda Cosgrove during the filming of iCarly. She sang the theme song. With Drake Bell. Did some other songs. Dropped an album. She even dabbles with music here and there presently, but hasn’t released a proper album since 2010. It went nowhere. I don’t mean to insult Cosgrove’s talent, here, but she’s a strictly decent singer without much special to her voice, and it seems as if she lacked the aspiration and ambition to be a serious musician, and the general star power to be a pop star. And I don’t mean that as an insult. Cosgrove and her iCarly character, Carly Shay, were so inseparable that it was difficult to imagine the same goofy, non-sequitur spouting sped from iCarly who was intrinsically connected to showcasing children playing recorders through their nose could manage to pull off the cool, mature, and risque image of a pop-star. More importantly, Cosgrove as a person entirely divorced from her on-screen persona comes off as too… level-headed to be as interesting to the tabloids like the flaming train-wreck from Hell that is Cyrus. Like I said - that isn’t a bad thing, especially for Cosgrove herself, who has (so far as I’m aware) maintained both her decency, dignity, health, and, most importantly, sanity in a way that many of her Disney Channel contemporaries didn’t.

I’m not just saying that because she looks like two of my exes, so I may or may not have a soft spot for her.

There’s a lot of talk about how Bell and Cosgrove and several others under the Nickelodeon banner had their musical careers mismanaged by the studio. Compared to Disney’s well-oiled music machine, the chumps at Nick looked like unqualified amateurs that had zero clue what they were doing. And, to a degree, that was probably true. While I’m not sure either Bell or Cosgrove, or anyone else in the Nickelodeon bullpen, had the makings of a pop star on par with Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez, it’s demonstrably clear that Disney, by virtue of having a much wider spread of success and infrastructure in many different domains of media - including music - were always predisposed to kick Nick’s orange ass up and down when it came to beefing over the charts.

So, yeah. Nickelodeon was seriously lagging behind Disney, who was, in turn, rapidly gaining ground ahead of them in the star department. They needed to change that. And fast.

So, in 2009, they made another stab at creating a pop star. And this time, they weren’t just gonna make one - they were gonna make four.

Wait. Sorry. Wrong picture.

There we go.

Big Time Rush is not a part of the Bakeryverse. The show was made by another Nickelodeon big-wig named Scott Fellows, who had previously made one of Nickelodeon’s only other successful non-Bakeryverse sitcom, and my personal favorite teen sitcom of all time, Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide. While there was significant overlap between the style of comedy presented in Big Time Rush and that of the Bakeryverse shows, and, if I recall, Bakeryverse actors did occasionally pop into Big Time Rush, and vice versa, for the most part, they were disconnected entities.

Big Time Rush was, first and foremost, a show about a band comprised of hunky, good-looking, but terminally dim-witted teenage boys who, before being thrust into international stardom, were high school hockey players from Duluth, Minnesota that just so happened to be musically-gifted idiot savants.

The concept had actually been conceived immediately Post-Hannah Montana in 2007, but, with Nickelodeon’s resources significantly less flush than Disney’s, it took a few years to solidify. Fellows, for his part, was the first person Nickelodeon tapped to try and beat Disney at their own game - not Schneider. Fellows claimed that his original idea for Big Time Rush was to recreate The Monkees for a modern audience.

If you know anything about the history of music, and, in particular, pop music, you know that The Monkees were musically-inclined actors that were brought together to make a band specifically for a sitcom show about a band that rapidly took on a life of their own due to the wildly ambitious intentions of the men the studio had acquired. Even though the show only lasted two seasons, The Monkees as a band distinct from the sitcom were a powerful force in the musical landscape of the late-60’s. At their peak, they were outselling the fucking Beatles. All in all - not bad.

Was Big Time Rush a similar success?

Well, by the time Big Time Rush finally got off the ground in 2009, it just so happened Disney Channel had just released a little show of their own featuring a band that wasn’t specifically made for a television show. And one that already had a rabid fan-base baked in and ready to support them to the bitter end.

In 2009, Disney released the sitcom, Jonas.

So, ask yourself. Do you still hear about Big Time Rush?

Now, ask yourself - when was the last time you heard about Nick, Kevin, or Joe Jonas?

Well, if you’re not abreast of pop culture, maybe never, but, I assure you, all three of these men are still very, very prominent figures in the entertainment industry. Nick Jonas in particular has enjoyed a very lucrative solo career, releasing several songs that have scraped into the Billboard Top Ten, and made even more headlines with his marriage to Indian actress Priyanka Chopra. You may not have heard of her, but she is, to put it bluntly, a big fucking deal in India. She’s such a force in Indian culture that not only was she awarded one of the country’s highest civilian awards for her work in Indian cinema, but also named one of the most influential people in the world in 2022. Given that marrying outside of the Indian ethnicity is exceedingly rare among Indian Americans, and Indian Nationalists are some of the most vehemently vocal, well… I don’t know if controversial would be the right word for how their marriage was recieved, but you can imagine that the biggest female name in Indian culture marrying an American white guy was kind of a big deal over there. And here, because Beyonce and Jay Z were on the skids at the time and the tabloids needed another power couple to bandy about.

His brothers have had less remarkable post-JoBros careers, but have certainly not been hurting for money, fame, or chart hits with solo projects. Hell, they got back together as the Jonas Brothers and continue to cash checks on millions of former-teenybopper Millennials to this day.

If you had told me that we’d still be talking about an annoying teeny-bopper band like the Jonas Brothers in 2024 when I bumped chests with Nick as he was coming out of a movie theater bathroom in suburban Dallas¹, I wouldn’t have believed you.

This is all to say that, with Jonas, Disney notched another W in their books. With Big Time Rush, Nickelodeon… well, they didn’t take an upper-case L. Maybe just a lower case one. Musically, Big Time Rush a modest success. The show, like Fellow’s Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, was very much enjoyed by the people who watched it, and fondly remembered today, but the audience was not nearly as large as that of iCarly. Big Time Rush was never a serious competitor to the Jonas Brothers undisputed reign as the de facto boy band of the late 2000’s.

Which is sad, because I actually remember liking the show. And it wasn’t just because Zoey 101 alum Erin Sanders was in this one, too, and this time, they only made her character slightly eccentric instead of a social pariah.

Scott Fellows shows all have a very distinct feel, much like Schneider’s, and something about them always appealed more to me than much of the Bakeryverse. While I did enjoy the bone-headed antics of the dipshit boy-band stars in the show, I also was not a teenage girl, so I didn’t find them attractive, and I wasn’t rushing out to buy their records or posters or t-shirts or have I LOVE KENDALL!!! tattooed on my right ass cheek.

So - another swing for Nickelodeon. Another miss.

But let it never be said they don’t try.

Let’s do some math. You’re a Nickelodeon executive. You’ve got Dan Schneider in your bullpen, ready and contractually obligated to make another show. You’ve got Victoria Justice, who’s young, pretty, and brimming with talent and coming prepackaged with a good voice to boot. What do you do?

You make 2010’s Victorious.

And, yes - if you noticed that Victoria Justice is standing literally head and shoulders above everyone else, congratulations; you understand basic symbolism. And you probably know exactly where this is going from that alone.

Victorious is a show about just another girl from Los Angeles named Victoria “Tori” Vega, who is accepted to attend an illustrious performing arts school in Hollywood called… Hollywood Arts. It’s impressive that they found a name for a school even less inspired than Pacific Coast Academy. Surrounding her are a cast of classmates that run the gamut from Cool Black Guy to Bitchy Mean Girl, and Neurotic, Possibly Schizophrenic Woody Allen Stand-in and, most importantly, Clinically Diagnosed Invalid.

And, apparently, Schneider did not learn his lesson from Zoey 101 about making a show in which the lead character is basically a God among schlubs.

Tori is smart. She’s gifted. She’s beautiful. And she’s got a set of pipes on her. And I’m talking about her voice, you dog. Get your head out of the gutter. And every other female student is either insane, dumber than a post, or both. They either love female classmates either love Tori, or they want to kill her. Literally. From the moment she arrives on campus, resident big bitch Jade decides, apparently on a whim, I absolutely have to end this whore’s life by any means necessary.

If you think I’m kidding, Jade has gone down in sitcom history as one of the meaniest, pettiest, most spiteful, hateful female characters of all-time. If you look up this character, you will find scads of articles with headlines like, Why is Jade so mean to Tori? and What was Jade’s Fucking Problem?

Maybe it was cerebral trauma from having a car battery dropped on her head in that one episode.

The problem is that the writers needed Tori to look like a saint, and the only way they could do that was by making every other lead female character look like total, er… See You Next Tuesdays.

Take Tori’s older sister, Trina, for example. Again, I am not exaggerating when I say that Trina is the butt of so many mean-spirited jokes that I genuinely have trouble understanding why actress Danielle Monet was willing to subject herself to it. I cannot imagine she was paid that well. Especially when she had bottom billing.

Not only is she constantly getting violently ill with all manner of awful, debilitating maladies that require extensive and grotesque monster make-up to render, not only does she have no friends and only hangs out with Tori’s gang because she has no one else to be around (and even then, they all hate her and think she’s annoying), not only is she so neglected by her family do her parents not even remember her fucking name and it’s a running joke that they call her something different every time they see her, but there is an episode… oh, there is an episode - an infamous episode - called The Birthweek Song.

In this episode, it’s Trina’s birthweek. You see, the poor girl is so neglected and overlooked by her own fucking parents, that she feels the need to celebrate her birthday for a week rather than just a day. It’s played off as her being conceited, even though at one point she states that if she doesn’t do it, no one will even remember it is her birthday.

So, what does Tori get her sister for her birthday? Well, she writes her a song, and she invites pretty much everyone from Hollywood Arts to come to Trina’s big birthday bash so they can all hear this lovely little piece about how much she loves and cherishes her older sister, just to show everyone that, no. Sometimes, they argue. Sometimes, they don’t always see eye to eye. But they are sisters. And that’s important.

Just kidding. Tori sings a song about how Trina’s crazy, and how she’s awesome, and when Trina doesn’t even realize it’s supposed to be a gift, Tori has the audacity - the temerity - to get mad at her for not realizing a song in which she’s being insulted to her face in front of the entire student body was the gift.

There is absolutely furious debate in the Victorious community - which, yes, is still a thing - over who was in the right in that episode. There’s also a lot of debate over whether or not Jade is justified in her hatred for Tori. Like, yeah, Jade’s a bitch, sure, but think about it from her perspective, where this uppity young buck slides just shows up at the school one day, destabilizes the entire social landscape, upstages you, steals your parts in the school shows when all you’re there to do is act, and, at times, seems to be trying to snag your boyfriend.

Just saying… I’d be a little mad, too.

But Jade and Trina don’t even get the worst of it. Oh, no. That award goes to the character of Cat Valentine.

And, yes… if that actress looks a bit familiar to you - we’ll get there.

I throw around the word retarded more than perhaps I should. Sometimes, it’s really the only word that can really describe something, though. And, usually, it’s for comedically hyperbolic effect. But I mean it when I say that Cat Valentine is actually, genuinely functionally retarded. She has the IQ of a shovel. If Hollywood Arts was a real school, and Cat Valentine was a real person, she would not be able to go there, because she would not be able to complete the most rudimentary curriculum.

There is not a single episode where Cat does not do or say something that is so ridiculously stupid that it doesn’t take you out of the show, and make you just kind of go… huh? And it didn’t start off that way. She began being the token air-headed ditz, but, over time, the writing for her character had degraded to the point that it was hard to believe someone with her intellectual capacity could walk and talk at the same time. Her voice started out relatively normal, but evolved into this awful, keening whine that sometimes reached a frequency that only dogs could hear.

And I get that I’m not the target demographic for Victorious. Now, or when I watched it. But, here’s the thing. Cat Valentine is stupid not just for comedy relief, she’s stupid because, by being so, Tori looks like a genius. Just like Trina, just like Jade, she’s pretty much there to be laughed at by the audience and act like a drooling imbecile so Tori looks better when they stand next to each other. This had mixed results among the fans.

A lot of people who like Victorious say that Tori has a bad case of Straight Man Syndrome; by being the most normal individual among the cast of colorful characters, she is, by proxy, also the least interesting thing in a show that bears her name. This is only exacerbated by the way she’s made out to be this lordly figure among peons, which, in a lot of ways, means she can’t be interesting, because that would require her to be imperfect. I’m inclined to agree with these people.

A lot of viewers also took umbrage with the way that Cat, Jade, and Trina were depicted. Needless to say, there are a lot of girls who, in their high school years, were made to feel stupid, or lesser, or neglected, or mischaracterized as scheming, outright evil harlots by girls higher up on the social pecking order. I imagine more than a few viewers saw more of themselves in Cat, Jade, and Trina than they did the immaculate Tori.

And, perhaps it would have been different if, with Trina, the jokes wasn’t so mean spirited, or with Jade, she wasn’t so ridiculously overwrought in her malice. But Cat… Cat is an interesting case. Because the way Cat is portrayed as the butt of the joke doesn’t come off quite as mean-spirited as it does with Trina… though, there are times that line is dangerously skirted. And, while her stupidity is almost as ludicrously overstated as Jade’s malice, it’s… not quite the same.

No. Cat’s portrayal seems a lot more… well, here. I’ll show you.

There’s an episode where Cat, for an assignment, must act like a baby for a day. She dresses the part. And talks about… doing things that babies do. I’m sure you can read between the lines.

There were a lot - a lot - of gags about her feet. There was an episode where the entire sub-plot revolved around the cast discovering those weird little fish from Turkey that eat dead skin cells and people use them for pedicures. There’s a lot of talk by not just Cat, but everyone about how smooth and clean their feet are. There’s a lot of feet in that episode. But I seem to recall Cat taking off her shoes a lot.

There’s an episode where Cat is addicted to junk food. She spends the episode shoveling food in her moan. And moaning. Sensually.

Look - if I had to go through and name every instance where Cat did something questionable, this article would be an hour long. The point is, there is a lot of weird stuff that Cat does that, when you’re young, just seems like goofy, random, nonsensical humor.

But when you’re an adult… and you know how adults are… it would take willful denial and extreme suspension of disbelief to miss the fact that Cat often feels uncomfortably sexualized in ways that are so fetishistic that, unless you’re aware certain kinks and fetishes exist, you wouldn’t even know to look for them. But, unfortunately, I am lamentably well-versed in that world just by proxy of being terminally online. You soak up a lot of that stuff from osmosis over time. Usually against your will.

And, even those who weren’t subjected to as much niche fetish material as I have been on Twitter and darker places still, no one who’s been on the internet for any extended period of time - and I mean not a fucking soul with an internet connection - is so sheltered that they don’t know that there are guys out there who really, really weird about feet. And usually, they’re really, really vocal about how weird about feet they are, too. In fact, it is - and I am (unfortunately) not making this up - the most common sexual paraphilia. It’s so common that, unlike most paraphilia, we know why it happens².

Oh, and she was also, y’know - sixteen. At most. That’s also kind of a problem.

The run of Victorious and the run of iCarly overlapped for much of their broadcasts. In fact, Victorious aped off the success of iCarly’s web-savvy approach and created a website to mimic the in-universe social media site of choice, The Slap, on the actual internet. This site, like iCarly’s site, was packed with scads of ancillary material, like outtakes from the set, side videos of the characters directly addressing the audience as if they were social media followers, so on and so forth, which, again, I think had a similar effect of endearing viewers to both the characters and the setting of the show. It’s worth noting there was also a Twitter-like feed of “posts” made by the characters, some of which would be shown in between scene transitions of the show. They were, uh… well, they were something.

Actually, those were fan-made memes, which are apparently still very popular to post on Twitter.

But hopefully I didn’t actually need to tell you that.

Victorious and iCarly’s broadcasts, in tandem, ran parallel to the rise of The Slap’s real-life counterpart, Twitter, and Schneider’s use of the platform to advertise his programs.There’s a reason that, during the run of these two shows, people started asking questions. There is a reason that, at this time, it became increasingly clear that there was something very… strange in the way the female characters in his programs were being portrayed, and the way he spoke about them.

Because it wasn’t just Cat getting undue and lavish attention to her… well, I was going to say some cutesy metaphor for feet or toes, but, frankly, I actually find feet to be one of the most repulsive part of the body and I can’t bring myself to do it. So, suffice to say, any female in Schneider’s employ, both on Victorious and iCarly had a pair of functional feet and ten toes?

She was gonna have pictures of them blasted out on both the show’s official Twitter page and Dan’s own personal Twitter.

A lot.

Was it because Schneider was becoming more bold? With over a decade with Nickelodeon Studios under his belt and a non-stop winning streak of success, it’s reasonable to think that the lofty position he held in the company and the friends he’d made in high places made him feel as if he could just… get away with certain things. As we’ll discuss in the upcoming parts, by this point, he’d already gotten away with quite a bit of bad behavior, though, most of it had to do with his treatment of his juvenile actors rather than sexual impropriety.

Perhaps the platform of Twitter just allowed him to air his… eclectic tastes in a way that he couldn’t before. It’s likely that he’d always been this way, and, given that Twitter erased the space that formerly existed between him, his audience, and the broader public, they were simply seeing who he had been the entire time.

Personally, I think it’s something of both, but with a heavier burden on the former rather than the latter. The questionable and uncomfortable elements that were becoming increasingly unignorable in both Victorious and iCarly seemed to be absent from Drake and Josh and Zoey 101. Maybe they are there and I’m just forgetting, and perhaps if I gave both series a complete rewatch, I’d find more than I would expect.

Perhaps it’s easily explained away by the fact that the leads of Drake and Josh were male, and the cast of Zoey 101 were much younger than the cast of Victorious and iCarly. For example, the leads of iCarly and Victorious were all sixteen at the youngest when their respective shows began. When Zoey 101 debuted, the majority of the cast was eleven to thirteen.

But I can’t shake the feeling that Dan Schneider’s rising stock in Nickelodeon Studios instilled in him a sense of confidence that made him think he could bend an increasing amount of rules. Why do I think that?

Because it was about to get a whole lot worse.

But we’ll touch on that… next time.

1. This actually happened. I remember I was seeing the Shia LeBeouf movie, Eagle Eye. He was coming out of the bathroom. I was going in. We bumped against each other. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “No problem,” he said back. We both smiled slightly and walked past each other. It wasn’t until I heard some girl shriek, OH MY GOD, IT’S NICK JONAS! that I realized why he looked so strangely familiar. Also, if you don’t believe me, the Jonas Brothers mostly lived in the suburbs of Dallas, even when they were at the height of their Disney fame. Look it up.

2. It is believed that, in the human brain’s layout of the human body - which does not line up with the actual lay out of the physical, human body - the part of the brain that recognizes feet and the part of the brain that recognizes genitalia are beside one another, resulting in, on occasion, a mix-up in communication between the two where the natural human inclination for one is erroneously attributed to the other.