iCarly star Miranda Cosgrove
Paramount Plus is keeping itself in the iCarly business for another year, as Variety confirms today that the streamer has signed on for a third season of the adult reboot of the long-running Nickelodeon show. The series stars Miranda Cosgrove as Carly Shay, who is somehow still a social media influencer with her own online comedy show, even though she’s now been an online fixture for what must be centuries in Internet Years.
In addition to Cosgrove, the iCarly revival continues to star Jerry Trainor, Nathan Kress, Lacey Mosley, Jaidyn Triplett, and the gap in space where former series star Jennette McCurdy would be if she hadn’t declined to have anything to do with it. Paramount+ exec Tanya Giles issued a statement about the renewal today, gushing that, “’iCarly’s’ loyal fan base grew up with Carly, Spencer and Freddie, and have now fallen in love with Harper and Millicent, too. We’re thrilled to have Miranda, Jerry, Nathan, Laci and Jaidyn return for a third season and we know Paramount+’s growing YA audience is as well. And I, for one, must find out what happens with #Creddie!” (We leave the existence of “#Creddie!” as an intellectual exercise for the reader to ponder.)
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The shout-out to the streamer’s YA audience is an interesting one, though, since iCarly is smack in the middle of the ongoing questions about who these adult-starring revivals of former teen projects are meant for—a question that ultimately tanked the Lizzie McGuire reboot after Hillary Duff and creator Terri Minsky both pushed Disney+ to allow the series to tackle the fact that these characters now, well…grown ups. In the lead-up to the show, Cosgrove herself talked about wanting to aim the new iCarly at more adult topics—but a quick perusal of the descriptions of the first two seasons of its return shows that they’re still largely focused on kid-friendly concerns (albeit with a more modern spin). Which, hey: If it works, it works, we guess.
