1. After she spent three years as mischievous younger sister Megan on Drake & Josh, Nickelodeon wanted to give Miranda Cosgrove her own show. And the initial conceit might sound surprising to loyal viewers.
“My original idea was that she play a ‘normal’ girl who, in a twist of fate, gets cast to star in her favorite TV show,” creator Dan Schneider revealed on his blog in 2009. “I even wrote the script. I called it Starstruck. The pilot I wrote (and turned in to Nickelodeon) was about Carly, a regular girl who gets cast to star in her favorite TV show.”
2. While the network loved the idea for Starstruck, Schneider’s plot for the show shifted after a conversation with his wife and his good friend, The Big Bang Theory executive producer Steven Molaro.
“I decided that it would be MUCH COOLER for Carly to create HER OWN show,” he explained, “a show she could run herself, her own way, and do whatever she wanted to do — A WEB SHOW.”
3. Carly was not the first name Schneider had in mind for the main character. It was actually Sam, while the original name for Sam’s character was Kira.