November 2012 ~ MileyMagic

By Marah Eakin November 23, 2012

Casual television viewers—especially young ones—might not know the name Dan Schneider, but they’ve probably seen one of his shows. After launching a career as a young actor in films like Better Off Dead and shows like Head Of The Class, Schneider stumbled into creating some of Nickelodeon’s most popular shows ever, from All That to iCarly andVictorious. He’s launched the careers of countless child stars including Kenan Thompson, Amanda Bynes, and Miranda Cosgrove, and spearheaded hundreds, if not thousands of hours of smart, funny entertainment for an entire generation of kids. On the eve of the iCarlyseries finale, The A.V. Club spoke to Schneider about how he got into the business, being a showrunner, and whether he keeps up with the kids from Drake & Josh.

The A.V. Club: You grew up in Tennessee and that’s where you started acting, but it seems like you sort of just fell into it. How did that happen?

Dan Schneider: I grew up as the funny guy in class, and that was pretty consistent through my childhood. I was never a great student. The thing I excelled at most in high school was that I would do plays. I moved to a new high school in Memphis my junior year. In my senior year, I won senior-class president. I basically did that by getting onstage and giving a speech that got a lot of laughs. Because of that, I was onstage a lot. I would get onstage in front of people and do little skits and do funny stuff. I realized I really loved performing.

After high school, I kind of floundered a bit. At that time they were shooting a movie in Memphis. It was a big deal because it was the first time Hollywood had ever come to Memphis. My teacher in an acting class at Memphis State—now University of Memphis—said, “There’s a role you might be able to get. There’s a couple of speaking roles.” I went to this big casting call for the movie [Making The Grade]. There was a sea of teenagers. They were doing extra casting as well. It was this huge mob scene. I almost left, and this guy comes up to me and just sort of saw me and said, “Hey, are you here to audition for the film?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Come with me.” I went and read with him, and he turned out to be the producer. He didn’t even know I had an appointment. He liked my face, I guess. He hired me for that movie, and I was supposed to work for four days on it. It ended up being four weeks. Then he hooked me up with another film that was shooting in the Caribbean [Hot Resort]. At the time, I was kind of blowing off school. I had a job. I worked at a store that sold Apple computers. I was fixing Apple computers. After the two movies, I was like, “Wow. I’ve never even left Memphis, and I got two movies. Maybe I should go to L.A. and see what I can do.” So I got a manager and an agent, and that led to another movie or two and that led to a TV show called Head Of The Class. By the mid-’80s, I was an actor. I was never super-famous, but I was definitely on the map.

AVC: On your IMDB page, which is surely very accurate, it says that people still stop you on the streets and say, “Ricky from Better Off Dead!” Is that true?

DS: It is true. Here’s what’s true about it: I did Head Of The Class for five years. It was a pretty big hit on ABC. That’s what most people know me from. But people are like, “Oh yeah, he was Dennis onHead Of The Class. Who cares? Big deal.” [Laughs.]

There’s an age group of people out there, though… I guess right now they’re probably 35 to 45. When they find out I was Ricky in Better Off Dead, they look at me like I’m The Beatles. It’s so funny. It was just this little movie I did in 1985. To this day, I hear about Better Off Dead at least every month. People freak out. Nobody gives a damn that I was in Head Of The Class, but when they know I was Ricky in Better Off Dead, they’re like “Holy crap, man! You were Ricky.” They go crazy.

AVC: You sort of fell into creating All That after you hosted the Kids’ Choice Awards, right?

DS: Yeah, the second Kids’ Choice Awards, which were in ’88, I think. I was a co-host.

AVC: Who was your co-host?

DS: Tony Danza. He was the far more important host. I met this guy, Albie Hecht, an independent producer at the time who was producing the Kids’ Choice Awards. I had a relationship with him, and he landed at Nickelodeon as the head of development. So I ended up writing this pilot called All That, which was a kids sketch-comedy show. I thought it was just going to be a part-time job between acting jobs, because after Head Of The Class I did another series called Home Free, which you probably don’t remember. It was only on for one season. I played Matthew Perry’s best friend. That was right before he got Friends. That show went away. I was just kind of filling the time until the next pilot season when I wanted to get another TV show. Then they put All That on television, and suddenly I was writing and producing a TV show. And that led to Kenan & Kel. Then somewhere in there, I got to be a very busy guy writing and producing two TV shows at once.

AVC: Did you always want to write or produce?

DS: Absolutely. I actually wrote an episode of Head Of The Class. As a kid—I say as a kid, but I mean 21 or 22—I knew that actors on TV shows come and go. Some of them last. Most of them don’t. Most of them just sort of fade off into the sunset after the show’s over. I was 21 and thinking, “When thisHead Of The Class boat ride ends, I don’t want to fade off into the sunset. I want to keep working. I want to be involved in the entertainment business.” I felt like, “Don’t just be a passenger on the ship. Learn how to captain the ship. Learn how to drive. Learn how to write. Learn how to produce.” I paid attention to the directors on Head Of The Class and how things worked, and I wrote an episode. I just sort of wrote it on spec, but the producers liked it, and they bought it. That was my first taste of selling something that I wrote.

It’s funny. Right when I moved to L.A., I started writing. I wrote some screenplay. I’m sure it’s terrible. But I wrote a screenplay by myself. When I first moved to L.A., I had no friends. I didn’t know anybody. I just sat in a little studio apartment, and I wrote a screenplay.

I used to write sketches. I loved David Letterman in the ’80s. I used to write Top 10 lists for him, and I faxed them in anonymously. I’m sure they threw them away.

So yeah, I’ve always wanted to write, and after I was doing All That and Kenan & Kel, I got the opportunity to do another TV show—I was still going on auditions. I realized that if I took that show, I was going to have to give up All That and Kenan & Kel. I really didn’t want to do [that]. I was just having too much fun, and I was really enjoying the action of being a writer and producer. I passed on the acting role, and that was really the turning point, I guess, in 1996, when I was like, “You know what? I’m going to put my acting career on the back burner, and I’m going to be a writer-producer.” Then I wrote the movie Good Burger.

AVC: How does your experience as a teen actor affect how you deal with the kids on your shows now?

DS: It puts me in a very unique position, because I’ve seen it from both sides. It helps me because I know how actors think. I know what’s important to them. And I have a very clear perspective because I starred in two TV shows, and I guested on several. I know the emotions and the thoughts that actors have about what they’re doing. I understand them very, very clearly. The kids I work with—and not just the kids, all the actors, because I hire adults, too—all the actors I work with know I was an actor. To them, I’m in their club. They accept me as one of them because they know it’s been my face in front of the camera, and I’ve had to do exactly what they’re doing now. There’s a level of trust and respect that I think a producer that hasn’t done that wouldn’t get. They trust me.

I often play the role of an acting coach. The actors will come to me and say, “Dan, I don’t feel like I’m making this funny. How can I make this funny? How should I say this?” They don’t do that with your average producer because your average producer may not know how to say it; they’ve never been a comedic actor before.

It’s helpful to me because I can anticipate. I’ll be in the writers’ room, and I’ll say, “Yeah, we’re long. Our script is long, but I don’t want to cut this joke because we cut another joke from this scene for him yesterday. If we cut this one, we’re leaving him with no good jokes, and he’s going to be bummed.” I never want an actor to feel bad; I think like an actor.

When I’m with the guys and girls in the writers’ room and we’re writing a scene, when we finish it, very often I’ll go, “Let’s read it out loud. Let’s perform it.” It’s up on the screen already, so we scroll back, and we perform it. I think I do that because I’m an actor. Yes, I’m a writer, but I’m writing words for someone to speak, not for someone to read. I’d write very differently if I was writing a book than if I’m writing dialogue. I know that because I’m an actor. I’ve had lines that were difficult to say, and I’ve had lines that were great and easy to say. I’m familiar with those rhythms. I want to write dialogue that if it were for me, if I were getting it, I’d want that material.

AVC: One thing that Nickelodeon has done is given kids a lot of credit, both as viewers and as actors. Their programming, for the most part, isn’t just dumb shows where kids make fart sounds.

DS: I love that you get that. It sounds like you get the difference between my shows and other shows in my genre. I can’t go around saying that because I don’t want to sound like an egomaniac, patting myself on the back, but I do think that within my genre, which I guess is kids/family TV, my shows stand in their own little niche.

I’m never going to write fart jokes, because I feel like I have a responsibility to the audience to give them good stuff. I should be able to come up with something funnier than any third-grade boy could think of. I’ll say that in the writers’ room. I’ll say, “Would that get a laugh? Yes. Is it okay? Yes, but we’re not going to win a clever award for it. Let’s try to be cleverer. Let’s try to be more original. Let’s try do something that your average writers’ room wouldn’t come up with. Let’s be more creative.”

Also, I never woke up one day and said, “I want to write TV for kids.” That was never a goal of mine. I sort of fell into it through my relationship with Albie. I grew up watching reruns of old shows. My dad would have me watch the shows that he liked. I watched I Love Lucy. I watched The Dick Van Dyke Show. I watched M*A*S*H and Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart and Taxi and Cheers. In fact, I credit the Charles brothers [Glen and Les], who were the main forces behind Taxi and Cheers and a little bit of the original The Bob Newhart Show. To me, those guys were my heroes. And also Larry Gelbart, who did M*A*S*H, and Larry David, who did Seinfeld. Those are my heroes. That’s the kind of sitcom writing that I like. I like Friends. I like Seinfeld. I’m a student of sitcoms, of comedy television. I love it. The original Saturday Night Live is another big influence. I was watching that when I was 7, 8 years old. That’s the comedy I like. When I got into kids TV, I never was like, “I want to write a kids show.” I was like, “I want to write a show like M*A*S*H or Cheers or Friends. That’s what I love, but I have to make it suitable for kids.”

AVC: Do you think about the success of your show in the long run, whether it will stand up to scrutiny 10 or 20 years down the road?

DS: That’s exactly how I feel. Often I will say when we’re writing or producing something, and I want to do one more take, make it a little better, and people are looking at me like, “Wow, it’s late, Dan. We’ve already done six takes. Do we really need another one?” I’ll always say, “Guys. Our name is on this forever.” I take a lot of pride in it.

Television audiences have fragmented so much because there’s so much product and there are so many channels and so many shows. No shows get the big audiences like they got 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. All the audiences are small. It used to be, for an episode of Cheers orM*A*S*H, practically the whole country was watching. Now, you’re a big hit show if 13 million people watch, which is a relatively small audience compared to what audiences used to be.

What I love about kids TV is it’s really the last bastion of television where everybody watches. You can’t find a teenager who doesn’t know Drake & Josh. You can’t find someone in their 20s who hasn’t heard of All That and Kenan & Kel. And you certainly can’t find a kid today who hasn't heard of iCarlyand Victorious. They all watch. I know when those kids grow up, in seven, eight, nine, 10 years when they’re in college, that’s going to be a common thing that they remember together.

I try to make my shows smart. God knows I do a lot of goofy, physical, broad comedy, but so did Kramer on Seinfeld. On Friends, Joey and Chandler had a duck and chicken. Broad comedy works at all levels of television. Saturday Night Live has very broad comedy. So I do my share of broad, goofy comedy, but I also try to make it smart.

And I do think about that. I think to myself, “I want iCarly to live on, and people who watch it when they’re 20 and 30 to still like it.” Sometimes I will look back at a show I liked as a little kid, and I’ll go, “Oh my God, that show was so stupid. What did I see in it?” I don’t want anybody to say that about one of my shows.

All episodes are in avi tv-version. Bitshare only

Episode 1 : " The Drake & Josh Inn "   Original Air Date—2 April 2005
Episode 2 : " The Peruvian Puff Pepper "   Original Air Date—9 April 2005
Episode 3 : " We´re Married "   Original Air Date—16 April 2005
Episode 4 : " Mindy´s Back "   Original Air Date—30 April 2005
Episode 5 : " The Affair "   Original Air Date—21 May 2005
Episode 6 : " Playing The Field "   Original Air Date—4 June 2005
Episode 7 : " Helen´s Surgery "   Original Air Date—11 June 2005
Episode 8 : " Paging Doctor Drake "   Original Air Date—1 October 2005
Episode 9 : " Foam Finger "   Original Air Date—8 October 2005
Episode 10 : " Girl Power "   Original Air Date—15 October 2005...coming
Episode 11 : " Sheep Thrills "   Original Air Date—22 October 2005
Episode 12 : " Megan´s New Teacher "   Original Air Date—28 January 2006
Episode 13 : " Little Siblings "   Original Air Date—4 February 2006
Episode 14 : " Theater Thug "   Original Air Date—18 February 2006
Episode 15 : " The Domonator "   Original Air Date—25 February 2006
Episode 16 : " Alien Invasion "   Original Air Date—18 March 2006
Episode 17 : " Dr Phyllis Show "   Original Air Date—8 April 2006

MileyMagic

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