‘iCarly’ Revival Trailer Shows the Old Gang as Adults

Nine years after iCarly went off the Nickelodeon airwaves, the show is coming back via Paramount+. The trailer dropped Tuesday.

For those unfamiliar with the show — meaning people that weren’t the parents of young children or young children themselves in the late Aughts — iCarly centers around tween online talk show host Carly Shay (Miranda Cosgrove), her best friend/on-air sidekick Sam Puckett (Jennette McCurdy), her technical producer Freddie Benson (Nathan Kress), her older brother Spencer (Jerry Trainor), and her oddball friend Gibby (Noah Munck). It ran for six seasons but ultimately ran its course when the actors began aging out of their roles.

Cosgrove attended college at NYU and USC when the show ended, but she continued to act in projects like the science fiction movie 3022 and short-lived NBC sitcom Crowded. Like many others, she found it difficult to escape the long shadow of iCarly, and word of a revival hit in late 2020. She’s returning to the new incarnation of the show alongside Trainor and Kress, and newcomers Laci Mosley and Jaidyn Triplett.

Much to the disappointment of many iCarly fans, Jennette McCurdy is not taking part in the show. She has retired from acting and recently opened up about the difficulties of life as a child star. “I’m so ashamed of the parts I’ve done in the past,” she recently said on her podcast Empty Inside. “I resent my career in a lot of ways. I feel so unfulfilled by the roles that I played and felt like it was the most cheesy, embarrassing. I did the shows that I was on from like 13 to 21, and by 15, I was already embarrassed.”

The new version of iCarly shows a now-adult Carly going on dates, reconnecting with her brother and Freddie, and starting a new version of her online talk show. But the wacky, child-friendly tone of the original feels firmly intact. If anyone was hoping for a dark, gritty reboot of iCarly, this is not it.

A recent attempt to reboot the early Aughts Disney Channel show Lizzie McGuire stalled after filming began because series star Hillary Duff wanted it to have an adult sensibility and the network wanted to stick to the old formula. “I want any reboot of Lizzie to be honest and authentic to who Lizzie would be today,” Duff said. “It’s what the character deserves. We can all take a moment to mourn the amazing woman she would have been and the adventures we would have taken with her. I’m very sad, but I promise everyone tried their best and the stars just didn’t align.”

There’s also an upcoming revival season of Zoey 101, yet another early Aughts show for tweens. As of now, there’s no word on which cast members are returning besides star Jamie Lynn Spears.

“It’s a fine line of making the OG Zoey 101 fans very happy and also inviting the new ones to come in and feel like they’re part of the world as well,” she told Ryan Seacrest last year. “We’ve heard some pretty crazy twists and turns that we’re like, ‘We don’t think Zoey would go there?’ So I’m telling you there’s plenty of surprises up our sleeve.”