Miranda Cosgrove received the best birthday gift on Friday (May 14) — the news that the iCarly revival series will premiere June 17 on Paramount+!
The actor' iCarly castmates Jerry Trainor, Nathan Kress, Laci Mosley, and Jaidyn Triplett were on set to celebrate Cosgrove turning 28 with a cake, which then revealed the announcement.
Along with this news, Cosgrove chatted with EW about what viewers can expect from the upcoming series, and gave us details about some awesome set reveal photos. And make sure to check out the video of Cosgrove and Trainor giving a tour of the set, which should look very familiar to fans of the original series. In the video, Trainor teases that, as the show is aimed towards an older audience, it'll feature swearing, although it's unclear whether the actor was joking or not.
The 13-episode season will pick up nearly 10 years after the Nickelodeon series, which ran from 2007 to 2012. The core cast are all reprising their roles, with Cosgrove once again embodying Carly, while Trainor and Kress are returning as Carly's brother Spencer and her friend Freddie Benson, respectively.
And because it's been a while since we've seen the cast, "Carly has gone through a lot over the last 10 years — all the characters have," Cosgrove told EW.
"With the Freddie character, he's gone through a couple divorces," the actress reveals. "Spencer has become very wealthy, so there's a lot of different dynamics and different things going on."
As for Carly, she went to college and is pretty successful, Cosgrove continues, but she's "kinda in between" where Freddie and Spencer are at.
Spencer, who's "the most successful of all" the characters, still resides in the original loft he and Carly lived in, though he's remodeled it a bit. Cosgrove says she and Trainor worked with the set designer to keep some of the flair from the old series in the new set.
For instance, you can see below the bottle bot, a sculpture Spencer made that was a fixture on iCarly. Though they couldn't track down the original, the team asked the artist who made it to build one as identical as possible to be in Spencer's living room. Similarly, the designers had the same couch from the original reupholstered and updated.
"They tried to do a lot of cute, little things for the fans from the original that stayed the same," Cosgrove says.
You can also see that the loft's upstairs, which Carly used as a studio to film "iCarly," has been updated but looks pretty similar to the original.
The new show will catch up with Carly, who's now in her 20s and hasn't kept up with her "iCarly" web show that she hosted with her friends Freddie and Sam (Jennette McCurdy) as teens.
"She hasn't done 'iCarly' in a long time, and she decides to start it up again in the pilot," Cosgrove says. "So we're exploring what her new show is. And even though it's 'iCarly,' it's not the same as it was before. So we've been exploring a lot of different things with that, just like what a 26-year-old would really be doing if they had a YouTube channel nowadays."
Cosgrove, who's also an executive producer on the show, says she's excited to see how Carly will navigate YouTube and Instagram given how much the internet has grown since iCarly went off the air.
Not revealed yet is Carly's apartment, which is also at Bushwell Plaza, the same building in Seattle that Spencer's apartment is in. In the upcoming project, she lives with her roommate and best friend Harper (Mosley). And it wouldn't be iCarly without Freddie nearby, though this time around it may not be great news for the character.
"He's gone through a divorce and he's moved back in with his mother," Cosgrove says. "So Mary [Scheer], who played his mom on the show is back and we all are living in the same apartment building together."
Another new addition to the show is Triplett, who plays Millicent, Freddie's snarky and social media-savvy stepdaughter whom he adopted.
"It's funny because it's a lot of the old because we do have like the little studio we used to film in and we have Spencer's apartment, but then we have a lot of new sets and new characters, so it's like half and half," Cosgrove notes.
The revival will explain everyone's backstory in the pilot, and she says it was exciting to think about what all the characters would have been doing over the last decade. Cosgrove doesn't answer whether the show will address Sam's absence on the show, but she does promise the return of some fan-favorite recurring characters. Nevel Papperman (Reed Alexander), Carly's pretentious nemesis is slated to return, and they recently did an episode featuring Nora Dershlit (Danielle Morrow), the stalker "iCarly" fan who appeared in the original.
Currently halfway through filming, Cosgrove says she doesn't know how the last four or five episodes will play out yet. She has her own curiosities she wants the show to address, like what happened with Spencer and Carly's mom. And she says Trainor is dying for Spencer's unseen friend Socko to finally appear.
What Cosgrove is clear on, however, is what kind of show she wants iCarly to be, especially since it took the team "a really long time to figure out."
"We really tried to make this show, along with the showrunner Ali [Schouten], as much for the fans of the original as possible, because it's not really a kid show anymore," Cosgrove says. "It's mainly made for the people who watched when they were little, they're now more in their 20s."
"We're getting to explore different things with [what] the characters go through that we would never have been able to do before, that's a lot more like stuff that's happened in our real lives and things that people in their 20s and 30s go through," she adds. "It's just been a fun reunion getting to see everybody, and I'm really excited for people to see it."
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Originally published: Friday, May 14, 2021.
Additional source: Variety, Vailskibum94.
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