Former Memphian and Head of the Class star Dan Schneider is featured in today’s New York Times Magazine. The article is about Schneider’s success as a writer of sitcoms on the Nickelodeon channel and his upcoming series iCarly.
From the article: “That sense of himself as an advocate for the child actors he hires has its roots in his own experience. ‘By the time I was on TV, I was 19,’ he told me, ‘but I played a kid, and they treated us like kids, so it’s almost like I was a kid actor. Basically we were considered props who spoke.’ In practice, Schneider’s desire to empower his young actors is more about emotional support than anything else, for total creative control is something he freely admits to requiring. ‘Delegating,’ he said, ‘is something that I don’t do as much of as people wish I would.’ But his need to make the kids feel like stars is a key to not only how he runs his shows, but also to what those shows are about. It can be summed up in the simple mandate Nick executives gave him when he first started writing for them: ‘Kids win.’