Dan Schneider

October 2007

By Anna Carugati

If anyone has proven the
value of staying in touch with your inner child, it’s Dan Schneider—in
his case, the funny inner child. He began his career in television as an actor
playing Dennis on the hit ABC sitcom Head of the Class. He then moved behind
the camera and has produced and written a raft of series and movies to the
delight of tweens. It can be argued that he helped create the tween market with
shows like All That, Drake
& Josh and Zoey 101. All have been significant hits for Nickelodeon;
this summer, the movie Drake & Josh: Really Big Shrimp ranked as the highest-rated TV movie among tweens
and total viewers in the network’s history, drawing an audience of more than
5.8 million. His newest series is iCarly.

TV KIDS: How
did your experience as an actor influence the work you do today, especially the
way you work with child actors?

SCHNEIDER: When
people ask me, “How do you become a great show runner?” I tell them that the
best way to do it is to be an actor on a TV show. Learning it from that side
helps in so many ways. It helps me because I know how actors think and I know
what their needs are. When I was an actor on Head of the Class I felt very much like I was treated like a prop
that talks. You know: here are the lines, say them—and we weren’t always
encouraged to contribute. Now I really maintain a very close relationship with
the actors [on my shows] because I feel like I’m one of them, I’m in their
club, and I want them to know that. I’m not just a producer who can’t empathize
with what they go through.

When I was on television,
sometimes I’d get great lines and sometimes I’d get lines that weren’t so
great. While I would always do my best to do the lines to the best of my
ability, sometimes I would get frustrated when things that were clearly not
working wouldn’t get changed or rewritten. So what I do—and it’s because
of those experiences—I never give any of my actors material that I myself
wouldn’t be excited about performing. The actor in me makes me want to give the
actors great material to work with and I probably ask for more takes than
anybody in kids’ TV. Sometimes we’ll go into double digits on the number of
takes on any given line to get a joke just right, because I feel that part of
my responsibility—as a show runner—is to showcase my stars in the
absolute best way that I can. That’s how I would want to be treated if I were
back in front of the camera. I try to give them the best material and give them
as many takes as I can to get it the best it can be.

TV KIDS: You
have developed this ability to get into kids’ heads. Where does that come from?

SCHNEIDER: I loved TV as a kid. I was a terrible student. I
was never a bad kid, but I was always mischievous. The way I put it is that I
was never in any big trouble but I was always in a little trouble. I was
irreverent. I questioned adults even when I was little. What I learned when I
was very young, that a lot of kids don’t realize, is that just because you’re
grown up and just because you’re a lot older than me doesn’t mean that you’re
smarter than me. And because I was an irreverent kid and because I was always
questioning things, I just feel like I’ve never forgotten it. I know it’s so
cliché to say that I’m a big kid now, but I really feel like I am.

I wish I could tell you
what the process is, but whenever I’m in the writers’ room, and I work with
super-talented writers, a lot of them will pitch stuff and I just have to say, “That’s
great, but it won’t work for a 10-year-old.” Or, “A young teenager won’t identify
with that.” Maybe it’s because I have nine nieces and nephews who I’m close to
and I listen to them and because I’ve been doing this for so long. I bet you
nobody has worked with more kids than I have. From All That and Kenan and Kel and The Amanda Show and Drake
& Josh and Zoey 101, I’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of kids in
different roles. I spent a lot of time with them and I pay attention to what
they’re talking about and what they’re interested in.

I’ll give you a perfect
example: we were coming up with a story for a Zoey 101 episode, and part of it had the kids getting in
trouble for passing notes back and forth, and I said, “You know what, let’s not
do that. Let’s have them texting each other back and forth on their cell
phones.” Because this is what kids do now. When I’m working with Drake &
Josh and we’re trying to give
Drake notes, I see him there in the middle of a scene and he’s texting his
friends—this is how they talk to each other. So part of it is because I
work with kids so much and I’m so exposed to kids—day after day and year
after year—and I have such a close interaction with them, I really pay
close attention to them. And I go to the websites that they go on. I’m on
MySpace, and I go on YouTube and I try to stay young that way. I think that’s
what helps me with my kid voice.

TV KIDS: So
where did your facility for writing dialogue come from?

SCHNEIDER: Wow…I
don’t know. No one has ever asked me that question. I’ve always been an
entertainer, I was always the class clown and I was voted wittiest in my class.
Another thing is that I was a chubby kid and whenever you’re overweight and you’re
a young kid, it does one of two things to you: it either causes you to kind of
shut down and form a shell and you become the introvert, or you go for it and
you say, “OK, I’m chubby, but I’m going to be the funniest one here; that’s how
I’ll be popular.”

Boys are much more
rewarded for it than little girls are, but I guess I learned from an early age
that if you’re funny, people like you. And they want to be around you, and they
want you around. Way back in kindergarten and first grade, kids were always
saying, “Do your impression of the teacher!” Or, “Do your impression of this
kid.” I liked making people laugh, so comedy became my thing and it’s just
never hard for me to apply it to writing. Writing funny dialogue is actually
easy for me, because when you have to be funny at a party or at school or when
you’re hanging out at lunch with your friends, you have to think off the top of
your head. When I’m writing, I have time to think, and I don’t have to be so
fast.

TV KIDS: When
you’re working with tween kids, they grow up physically very fast. What are the
challenges of having a show grow with them, so to speak, so that they still fit
into what you’re trying to do?

SCHNEIDER: On Drake & Josh, when we started out, Drake and Josh were about 15
years old; when we finished they were 19. And that was because we did very
short orders. In the first season we only did six episodes, in the second season
we did 14 episodes. It wasn’t until the third season that we did 20. Is it
terrible [that the actors grow up]? No. I wouldn’t say it bothers me, but it’s
kind of nice when the show remains consistent, which is what’s so nice about The
Simpsons: the characters never
age.

Nickelodeon has realized
that when kids are 12, 13, 14 or 15, they’re in their prime for Nickelodeon. So
now we’re trying to [order more episodes] so that when it’s been two and a
half, three years, you can get your 65 episodes and be done with the series.
The next show we’re doing is called iCarly. We were originally picked up for 13 episodes. They loved the pilot
so much that they bumped it to 20 for the first season. And when they saw the
first couple of episodes, they liked them so much that they bumped it to 40. So
I’m actually doing forty episodes of iCarly in the first season.

TV KIDS: What
can you tell us about iCarly?
There’s a lot of anticipation for it.

SCHNEIDER: There’s probably more anticipation for iCarly than any show I’ve ever done. And this is my
seventh one for Nickelodeon. iCarly
is pretty revolutionary because for the last several years we’ve been hearing
people talk about convergence of the web and television. And I think iCarly has really cracked the code for that. It stars
Miranda Cosgrove, who played the little sister on Drake & Josh and who was also in School of Rock.

In the pilot episode,
Carly and her best friend Sam are acting silly, being 13-year-old girls, being
witty and playing around just like any kids with personalities like that do.
Their friend Freddie has been videotaping them and he accidentally—he
doesn’t mean to—puts the video up on a website like YouTube; we call it
SplashFish. And at first the girls are mortified because they didn’t know they
were being videotaped and they were being silly and acting goofy. It takes
Freddie a few hours to figure out how to take the videotape down, but while it’s
up, it catches fire a little bit. And people start watching it and thousands of
people start clicking on this video and watching it and they think that Carly
and Sam are really funny. And they say, “Hey, when do we get to see more of you
guys?”

Then Carly, Freddie and
Sam come up with this idea—“They want to see more, let’s give them more.
Let’s do our own web show online live, every week.” So, by happenstance they
became these underground Internet stars and they create their own web show and
they do it online live every week and it gets more and more popular. It’s a
really empowering show.

I’ve been in focus groups
where kids have watched iCarly,
and I love watching them, because, you know the word they use? It’s really
funny to hear it come out of an 11-year-old’s mouth: “inspiring.” At least five
different kids in each focus group say, “It inspires me to want to make my own
web show.” There are so many kids out there now and anybody with a digital
camera can send their own little video clip and upload it on to YouTube. This
show takes that and puts it on steroids. There’s a great line in the pilot when
Carly is referring to a mean teacher and says, “I hate it when adults like her
tell kids what they can and can’t see. We can do our own show about whatever we
want with no adults to tell us, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that.’ It can
be whatever we want, we can say what we want and do what we want and it can be
about whatever we want.’’

The show also has a retro
feel because it’s like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney: “Hey kids, let’s put on
a show.” But it’s the new millennium version of that. And here’s the great
thing about it, there’s iCarly.com, so there’s a huge website that’s completely
in character. Kids can go to it and send us ideas and send us their own video
clips. That’s another big element of the show: we are asking kids around the
country to send us their funny pictures and funny videos, and we’ll show them
on the show. So it’s the first narrative show that’s invited the audience to be
on the show. We’re getting thousands of submissions because, of course, every
kid wants to be on TV.

TV KIDS: The
tween market is getting pretty crowded. Are you concerned about competition?

SCHNEIDER: I’m
not concerned about competition. I remember when I was a kid there was a
McDonald’s my dad used to take me to and I remember when they opened up a
Burger King across the street. And I said to my dad, “Wow, I bet McDonald’s is
really upset about the Burger King.” And my father said, “No. It’s good, it
just brings more people to the area and it makes more people interested in
coming to this place. So in a way, yes, they’re competitors, but it helps them
both because there’s more activity around them.” I feel the live-action [tween
market is] like that. Disney has helped show how profitable and how mainstream
it can be.

I’ve done two Drake
& Josh movies over the last
year and a half. They’re both two of the highest-rated movies that Nickelodeon
has ever had. Huge ratings: much bigger than we ever thought, and not only just
6- to 11-year-old kids, but even teenagers. And that’s very interesting to
advertisers. And look at High School Musical; we all know how big that is, that’s just a
massive audience. Competition is good. It’s what American business is all
about. Competition makes you try harder and makes you strive to be better than
the best guy. I think that’s healthy, but really more than anything, it
awakened the entertainment business and made people go, “Hey, this is a really
hot market: teens and tweens and kids.” I’ve noticed that the talent agencies
now are gearing up and paying a lot more attention to Nickelodeon and to Disney
Channel and are sending out actors [to audition for shows on those channels],
because they realize how valuable this is. It’s funny that network TV wants to
be so edgy, edgy, edgy, to the point where we don’t have [the Friday night block
Thank God It’s Friday on ABC] anymore. We don’t have any family sitcoms like Growing Pains. But when you think about it, what have been the
giant television hits for the last few years? Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars. What do these shows have in common? Mom, Dad,
kids, grandparents, everybody can sit down and watch them and have a great
time. I have people telling me all the time, “I watch Drake & Josh with my kids; we love it.” There’s a huge value to
family TV. And there needs to be more of it. If the Disney Channel is helping
with that message—that family entertainment is good and profitable—we’ll
all benefit from it.