Dan Schneider

Tween Hit-Maker Dan Schneider

A self-professed kid at heart—actually he says he’s always going to be that cutup in class making fun of the teacher—Dan Schneider has the uncanny ability to be able to get into kids’ heads and think, talk and act the way they do. He has put this talent to good use creating some of the most successful shows on Nickelodeon, including Drake & Josh, Zoey 101  and, most recently, the mega tween hit iCarly. He talks about the passion he has for his craft and his latest projects.

TV KIDS: What advice do you have for the actors in iCarly to help them stay grounded and not let their celebrity status lead them astray?
SCHNEIDER: iCarly is the seventh show I have created. I’ve had stars who needed that type of advice, but these actors really don’t. I’ve never seen one of them in a bad mood. They are highly professional; they really seem to love the show. It’s hard not to love a show that has been as well received as iCarly. Sometimes you work on a TV show, and I’ve visited sets like this, where the actors weren’t proud of the show, and that creates an icky environment because people aren’t happy to be there.

Everybody who works on iCarly knows it’s a quality show. We get massive ratings, and the actors get a lot of love when they go out in public. They are all psyched to be here and work really hard. These aren’t the types of kids who do bad things when we are not shooting. They don’t get into any trouble. I’m never going to get a call that one of them was picked up by the cops. I’m never going to get a call that one of them got caught doing something illegal—they are not that type of kids. These kids are role models, and by the way, I just got lucky with that, or maybe I have a good feel for it, because believe me, I never want to be on a show with a kid who is on TMZ every day. It’s just not a good thing. So I try really hard to pick kids who seem nice and solid to me, but it’s hard to know during an audition process, because you’ve only spent maybe a couple of hours with them, max, over a couple of weeks. It’s very hard to know what their personalities really are.

But in the case of Nathan Kress, Jennette McCurdy and Miranda Cosgrove [the stars of iCarly], if you wanted kids living with you, these are the ones you’d want, they are just so charming, sweet and considerate.

As far as advice, mine would be don’t get caught up thinking that you have to skyrocket and be Will Smith or Miley Cyrus tomorrow. It’s a long race. Don’t get too competitive and feel like you have to get that next movie or that next TV show. Avoid feeling too competitive about being an actor and just try to audition well and get really good stuff.

I remember, when I was on a sitcom, the piece of advice that Bill Cosby gave me. I met him and I was so starstruck I could barely talk! In the late ’80s Bill Cosby was a huge star because of The Cosby Show. When I met him, I had just been on Head of the Class for a year, and I was so nervous, but he asked me to sit down and we talked for a long time. He ordered a pizza. So I’m sitting there eating pizza with Bill Cosby, thinking, I’ve got to call every friend I’ve ever had in television!

What he said to me I’ll never forget, and I pass this on. He said being on a hit TV show is a rare and wonderful thing. It’s not easy to pull off; most shows don’t make it. So if you have the good fortune of being on a good show, enjoy it every day because there will be a time when you won’t be on a hit show and you will miss those times.

And he was so right, because by the time I got into the fourth and fifth seasons of Head of the Class, it was easy to start to take it for granted and say, “Oh what a drag, I’ve got to go to work today.” But I said to myself, Dan, you are a lucky bastard! You get to wake up every day and be silly and funny and get paid a lot of money to do it. You entertain a lot of people and make them happy. You are really fortunate to do that. Cosby said don’t take that for granted, enjoy it every day because you may not have it one day.

That’s what I’ve tried to tell kids I’ve worked with in the past: really appreciate what you have.

TV KIDS: How did iCarly come about?
SCHNEIDER: The first thing that interested me was Miranda Cosgrove. She had played the little sister in Drake & Josh for four seasons and I loved her from the first day she auditioned for the part. I watched her grow as a comedic actress and as a beautiful girl and she just got better and prettier. I really loved working with her and wanted to develop a show for her. And Nickelodeon was very on board with that.

It’s interesting, for about a year, while I was doing Drake & Josh and Zoey 101, I had developed a project for Miranda that was about a girl who gets plucked out of obscurity to star in a TV show and how that changed her—going from a regular girl next door to a TV star. But something about that idea just felt a little tired and unrealistic and I didn’t like it. It was one of the first times I had ever written a script and I said, “You know, I’m not loving this right now.”

At the time, YouTube was becoming so popular and so many kids were doing their own videos and putting them on the web, I thought, What if she does her own web show? That was so much cooler and empowering for many reasons. Number one, it’s more relatable, because anybody with a camera can shoot their own stuff and put it up on the web very easily. That was the first thing I liked about the idea—it was immediately much more relatable to kids because they can do that.

Number two, all my shows are about kid empowerment—kids taking on the world and not letting the usual barriers stand in their way. They do their own thing, have a strong will and are determined to do the fun things they want to do. So I thought this second idea was a lot better because it showed a girl who didn’t need adults. Carly was a girl who wanted to do a show and got her friend Freddie, who had a camera, and her friend Sam, who is really funny and cool, to put on a show together without anybody’s help. They write it, they produce it and they webcast it.

I just thought the whole thing felt fresher and more contemporary and more relatable.

TV KIDS: How has iCarly changed children’s expectations of a live-action tween show?
SCHNEIDER: iCarly has a lot of random humor in it. It doesn’t get too bogged down in plot. Every minute is packed with pretty hard-hitting jokes. There is a lot of comedy horsepower there, and the cast is so good. This is an amazing quartet of actors: Jerry Trainor, Nathan Kress, Jennette McCurdy—she is a genius actress; I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Jennette won an Oscar—and of course helming it all is Miranda, who is a phenomenal actress who could also win an Oscar.

You know how you watch some TV shows and there’s that kid acting thing—it feels a little amateurish? iCarly is different because these kids aren’t kid actors, they are just really good actors. They could be cast on any prime-time show or any movie. They are acting at several notches above what you normally see in kids’ television. So for one thing, you’ve got a very high-quality show in terms of the talent, and all four are hit-it-out-of-the-park funny.

And then there is the whole show within a show. A lot of people will tell me, “I can’t believe how much an episode of iCarly packs into a half an hour.” If you look at a sitcom like Everybody Loves Raymond, you’ll see people sitting on a couch having a conversation. iCarly moves so fast and there is so much happening.

We go from the point of view of the audience watching the characters playing their roles to the web show, where the characters are speaking directly to the camera and they are doing wacky, off-the-wall stuff.

One of the really unique things about iCarly is that you are seeing a normal situation—comedy played out, but within that you’ve got this show within a show where the girls can do much bigger, broader, sillier comedy. But it makes sense because that is what they are supposed to be doing in their web show. So you get a lot of different types of comedy—you get the more grounded comedy related to the plot of the episode and then you have the broader, sillier, crazier, more random comedy of the actual web show.        

TV KIDS: Are you working on new projects?
SCHNEIDER: I am in the thick of a new project. It’s my next TV show, starring Victoria Justice, who was one of the stars of Zoey 101. We’re doing it in the studio where they shot I Love Lucy, which is pretty cool to me! Just as I created iCarly for Miranda Cosgrove, I created this new show for Victoria Justice, and it’s a half-hour comedy about kids who go to a performing-arts school.