Last Friday, Nickelodeon stalwart iCarly taped its final iShow and said goodbye (in an episode appropriately titled “iGoodbye”) to 6.4 million viewers.
For Plugged In, iCarly’s exit was a little bittersweet.
Nickelodeon’s kid-centric, half-hour sitcom was one of the cleanest shows on television: Sure, it had a bit of bathroom humor here and there, and its adults weren’t the role models we’d like them to be. But in an era when pretty much everything on network television has PG-13-level concerns, we could be grateful that Nickelodeon and its rival, Disney Channel, were producing programs without steady streams of profanities or sexual innuendo. And, of course, we have to acknowledge that iCarly gave the world the concept of spaghetti tacos, too.
But problematic content goes beyond the whole language-sex-violence tropes. Messages matter. And in that respect, iCarly’s legacy is a bit more mixed.
Again, let’s give credit where it’s due: Miranda Cosgrove and Co. weren’t doling out lessons like “Be mean to your friends” or “Just say yes.” Indeed, most episodic morals were just dandy. But the show—like most of the saccharine sitcoms on both Nick and Disney—fed a certain obsession with fame. That quest for, and promise of, celebrity was the root of iCarly—which, after all, focused on a couple of normal kids who became famous through an online comedy show.
As iCarly was taking its final bow, journalists were taking a fresh look at a 2011 study from UCLA—research on how tweens see celebrity, and how the shows they watch impact their impression of fame.
Researchers Yalda Uhls and Patricia Greenfield say that fame has become way more important in kids’ lives than it ever used to be. They write:
Although most people should agree that the media landscape has drastically changed, not everyone may believe that today's children are so much different than those of previous generations. Recent research conducted at later points in the developmental pathway from childhood to adulthood indicates otherwise. Surveys show that adolescents and emerging adults have, over the decades, become more focused on the self, unrealistically ambitious, and oriented toward material success.
But those studies were done on older kids and young adults. Were (the researchers asked) young children—kids ages 10-12—also attracted to fame?
Yes indeedy, the researchers said. Right out of the gate, they gave their young subjects a choice of seven life “goals” to shoot for. A full 40% said they most wanted to be famous—the biggest vote-getter by far. And even children who were more altruistic in their ambitions couldn’t help but be attracted to fame. One girl, who talked about how she was “helping out in the community, like going green,” brought up several times that her outreach helped her get on television.
The researchers also had the kids watch three shows: an episode of iCarly, an episode of Hannah Montana (which also features a normal kid who becomes super famous) and the NBA All Star Game. Then researchers sat down and talked with the kids—both about what they saw on television and their own ambitions.
The subsequent conversations were pretty interesting.
Most of the kids thought that the Internet brought fame well within the reach of most of them: All of them watched a lot of YouTube and most had posted videos. The kids were intimately aware of how many views their vids had gotten and how many friends they had on Facebook (never mind that both YouTube and Facebook are ostensibly off-limits to those under age 13)—often bragging they had “friends” they barely knew. And many of them seemed either inspired or encouraged by the examples of iCarly and Hannah Montana. One child thought, in fact, that iCarly was based on a real story.
The boys were more attracted to the idea of fame as presented in the NBA All Star Game. One student said he was going to become an NBA big shot—even though he doesn’t play basketball:
First, I'm gonna take it seriously, play, um, travel basketball, and, um, I'm going (to) college for one year, see if I'm really good, and, I wanna be on a really bad team so, I can be like the star.
Researchers caution that the study was pretty small—just 20 kids—and the fact that it was done in fame-centric Los Angeles might have skewed the results a bit. They hope other researchers might broaden what they’ve started sometime soon.
But Uhls and Greenfield still find the connections between fame and media pretty revealing:
Fame is an aspiration that narcissists fantasize about achieving; our findings suggest that the documented historical increase in narcissistic personality in emerging adults begins in the preadolescent years with a desire for fame. A potential synergy exists between observing the fame-oriented content of popular TV shows and enacting the value of fame by participating in or posting online videos. Now even children can and do achieve their 15 min of fame, in the words of Andy Warhol.
Nickelodeon will try to fill the vacuum left by iCarly and another outgoing show, Victorious, with a spinoff that plunders an actor from each: Sam & Cat stars the former’s Jennette McCurdy and the latter’s Ariana Grande as roommates and fledgling entrepreneurs, trying to start a babysitting service. It’s set to premiere sometime in 2013.
I wish the show the best of luck … and I hope they don’t change their minds midstream, using their babysitting skills to somehow bounce themselves into the limelight. Instead of becoming Web stars or rock musicians, I’d love to see them just try to be the very best people they can be.
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