‘ICarly’: a webcast within a TV show that actually is both

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/09/2007 (6606 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – What if, just like Andy Warhol predicted, we gave everyone their 15 minutes of fame?

Fifteen minutes is a long time, though, particularly in an era of truncated attention spans. So how about 15 seconds? That ought to be enough time to squirt milk out of your eyes on worldwide television. Or play a trumpet while jumping up and down on a pogo stick. Or use a blender to make a spaghetti-and-meatball smoothie, then drink it.

Welcome to the world of “ICarly,” where all of that really happens. It’s a webcast within a TV show that actually is both.

“I think we’re the first narrative show, the first scripted show, that has solicited content from viewers,” says “ICarly” creator Dan Schneider.

A show like “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” of course, borrowed for years from viewers’ collections of funky videos for its belly laughs. But “ICarly” raises the bar a notch higher.

“ICarly” is a sitcom about kids putting on a webcast from bits of outrageous video that they collect from the web. Only they really collect those outrageous bits of video from the web and show them on the web in their fake webcast. What’s more, they sometimes invite the stars of the videos onto their real TV show to demonstrate their talents.

“It’s the ultimate in reality TV programming,” gushes Schneider, the former kid actor (“Head of the Class”) whose fertile mind has produced such hit shows for tweenagers as “Zoey 101,” “Drake & Josh” and “The Amanda Show.”

His latest effort seems to have struck a chord with the 10-to-14-year-old set. Forty-eight hours after some 3.5 million viewers tuned in for the Sept. 8 premiere of “ICarly” on the Nickelodeon cable network, more than 2,000 of them rushed to their computers to upload videos of their own weird talents and ship them to the website icarly.com.

“I’m sure we’re going to get some people with really great talent,” says the show’s—year-old star, Miranda Cosgrove, who plays web star Carly Shay. “Maybe kids could do cooking or make inventions.”

For the time being, however, non-actor Simon Bernal’s milk-squirting trick in the premiere episode seems to have set the benchmark – at least for weirdness and perhaps for grossness as well.

“Oh my gosh! That was so freaky! … I’ve never seen anything so weird in my life,” says 15-year-old Jennette McCurdy, who plays Sam Puckett, Carly’s best friend.

(Basically, Bernal holds his nose, snorts up a mouthful of liquid and … well, the rest really has to be seen to be appreciated.)

“When he did it our reactions were sort of real because we really were freaking out,” says Cosgrove, who on a recent day on the set is wearing a giant bumblebee suit for an episode that will air around Halloween.

Bernal, who says he had little interest in acting before going on the show, mainly enjoyed the opportunity to meet Cosgrove, who played the conniving younger sister in “Drake & Josh.” But now, he says, he may enrol in an acting class.

“That’s one of the things that’s really nice about the show,” says—year-old Nathan Kress, who plays the ICarly team’s “techno-geek” and provides Carly’s budding love interest.

“If there’s some really good performers who have really good talents, they could get a start out here in Hollywood,” says Kress, who has been acting since he was three.

That’s something Schneider says he anticipated when he created what he calls “a show within a show about a show.”

“Everywhere I go, kids are always, ‘I want to be a star, I want to be on TV,’ ” he said.

Add to that the fact that over the last five years tens of thousands of kids have begun carrying digital cameras. Then throw into the mix the fact that real kid actors, like Jamie Lynn Spears of Schneider’s hit show “Zoey 101,” have begun creating their own web pages on places like myspace.com and using them to communicate directly with their fans.

Suddenly, Schneider realized, the leap between making an amusing home video, putting it on the web and then getting it on TV had grown potentially much smaller.

Now that Schneider has opened the floodgates to the public, actor Jerry Trainor predicts a “tidal wave” of submissions from kids who want to get on a Hollywood-based TV show and who, thanks to the Internet, are no longer limited by geography.

“There’s always that sense that when it comes down to the Internet that the world is way bigger than you think it is,” said Trainor who portrays the show’s requisite “adult,” in this case Carly’s goofy older brother.

“Everyone thinks that there’s only a certain amount of talent in the world and it’s all in Hollywood,” said Trainor. “Or it’s all on Broadway. And that’s totally not true.”

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On the Net:

http://www.icarly.com/