I'm Glad My Mom Died

Since its inception in the late 1970s, Nickelodeon has been an extremely popular pay television channel and has significantly expanded since. It has experience-based ventures like cruises and hotels, a magazine, movies, and video games. It has multiple sister channels, as well as several production studios. Beginning in 1993, Schneider began writing and producing shows for Nickelodeon. In 2003, he started his production company, Schneider’s Bakery. The first show he created with his production company was called Drake and Josh, which began in 2004. The show was extremely successful and was on air through 2007.

Next, Schneider wrote a new show starring Miranda Cosgrove, who had previously been on the cast of Drake and Josh. This show, iCarly, would be about a teen girl named Carly whose homemade web series becomes an internet sensation. Jennette was cast as Carly’s “tomboyish” best friend, Sam Puckett. After the show’s end in 2012, Schneider created a spinoff series called Sam & Cat. It starred Jennette and Ariana Grande, who had been a cast member on another of Schneider’s shows, Victorious. While the spinoff had a successful first season, the production of the second season was put on hiatus, and the series was ultimately canceled in 2014. In 2021, a reboot of iCarly premiered on the streaming channel Paramount+. The original starring cast returned, with the exception of Jennette.

In 2022, Jennette’s memoir and her depiction of “The Creator” brought new scrutiny to Schneider. Her allegations of Schneider’s emotional abuse and nonconsensual touching, as well as the subsequent offering of hush money by Nickelodeon, received significant media attention. Jennette’s experience dovetails with a wave of accusations made by women against powerful men in the entertainment industry following the 2017 reports about movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who was eventually convicted of sexual assault and rape. Weinstein’s downfall opened the floodgates for many women across different industries to share their experiences of sexual harassment and assault on social media using the umbrella hashtag #MeToo. A phrase coined years earlier by the activist Tarana Burke. The MeToo movement led to the investigation and resignation of several prominent men in media—including Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and Les Moonves—though some question whether structural changes have occurred to prevent future abuses of power.