Now Tracking: Nickelodeon’s new “iCarly” series

14 July 2007 | Community, Culture, Eventness, Internet, Media, TV & Movies | Comments

A small item in today’s L.A. Times caught my attention:

‘iCarly’ invites viewer content

“This is the future of TV,” Dan Schneider, creator and executive producer of Nickelodeon’s “iCarly,” told TV writers on Friday. The journalists, as inundated with new technology as anyone, were ready to believe it.

“iCarly” is a show-within-a-show that invites tween-age viewers to submit their own videos, à la YouTube, to be included in the show, which will premiere in September. Designed for kids who have grown up with a multitude of media, the show gives viewers specific assignments that relate to an upcoming show. They are then directed to a website to post their content.

The show stars Miranda Cosgrove as Carly, and Jennette McCurdy, Nathan Kress and Jerry Trainor as her friends Sam, Freddie and Spencer.

Lynn Smith

I’ve written before about what Henry Jenkins calls “transmedia storytelling,” and it looks like Nickelodeon is bravely starting to experiment with it. User-submitted videos are great, but what about blogging, commentary and chats? And how is Nickelodeon going to respond to the user-submitted videos? Is this going to be a real conversation — a la what Charles Dickens did in his endless correspondence with his readers while his novels were being serialized — or just something that the audience does itself?

Will, in other words, Nickelodeon work to create eventness for “iCarly”?

Stay tuned!