Trivia / Sam & Cat

• Acting for Two: Sam's twin Melanie from "iTwins" returns in "#Twinfection".
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Mostly averted with Ariana Grande - she only sings in "#MagicATM", "#StuckInABox" and "#GettinWiggy" (and it only counts as a sort-of musical number in the first-named), as well as rapping with Sam and their charge at the beginning of "#BabysitterWar," but her other known talent comes up when she makes convincing baby noises in "#DroneBabyDrone."
  • Played straight with Cameron Ocasio who started as a model before getting into acting in real life, his character Dice is a hair model on the show. Cameron has named doing magic tricks as a hobby in interviews way before this show started, and guess what? Dice also enjoys magic. He also has a job as a dancer in #SecretSafe, showing Cameron has quite some dancing skills as well
• Creator Backlash: Jennette McCurdy has made it no secret that filming the series was a miserable time for her (and seemingly much of the crew) for a MASSIVE list of reasons. Between the retooling of the series, Ariana frequently missing work due to her singing career taking off, being promised and eventually denied a directing role, and her mother, the whole reason she agreed to the spin-off in the first place, becoming effectively comatose and eventually dying of cancer during filming. Hearing the series was cancelled was something she could barely keep her glee for when the news was dropped (which also got soured when Nickelodeon attempted to pay her $300,000 in hush money to never speak about her experiences with producing this and iCarly and the blame for the series being cancelled being twisted around to a pay despute).
• Dawson Casting: Barely averted by Ariana at the start (when she was 19); a different matter at the end, since she was 21. On the other hand, Jennette was 20 when production started and 22 by the time the plug was pulled. Which led to this statement from Jennette...
  The reason Sam & Cat ended was because of adults being stuffed into cookie cutter kids' network characters created for tweens.
• Dye Hard: Cat. Confirmed by Word of God. If Life Imitates Art, she's a natural brunette.
• Executive Meddling: This show turned from a completely new vehicle for Jennette McCurdy, into a Spin-Off that also happened to feature Ariana Grande. The speed this change happened can be shown with the surprise from the dual fandoms of the parent shows. It originally had a sane 20 episode first season ordered...until it turned out to be the only thing on the network's Saturday night lineup with a pulse. Forgetting that Jennette and Ariana aren't Charlie Sheen with the insane 100 episode deal his show Anger Management had, the network ordered twenty more episodes... onto the first season (the most a kid's sitcom usually gets in a year is 26, but since both stars are over 20, the show isn't tied down by the traditional California child labor laws which would never allow this). This meant no breaks for Jennette, who then had to deal with her mother's death from cancer and a built-up rebellion period, or Ariana, as her musical career was built up and the long process of becoming Cat Valentine had to be cut down to being fit with a wig so she could keep her natural hair color for her musical performances, and because dyeing her hair red for three seasons for Victorious completely damaged it. Neither actress was even able to get a contract re-negotiation for the extra twenty episodes either. Tensions seemed to have built on the set due to the arduous and grinding shooting schedule due to the physical comedy and special effects the show employs, and after the network over-reacted to Jennette's ex-boyfriend releasing racy pictures of her and a circuit of podcast interviews where she admitted some pretty questionable things such as the network driving her to become a country singer, something she never wanted to pursue at all, behind the scenes rancor built up to the point where Jennette refused to attend the Kids' Choice Awards because of how the network treated her at the expense of her well-being. The network put the show on hiatus with a passive-aggressive statement that the season had been "tiring" and promised the show would return, but the show limped towards the end, finishing with 36 episodes and its unexpected finale disappointingly leading into the network's Follow the Leader attempt at a sports awards show the night after the ESPY's, along with Ariana and Jennette remaining silent on social media about the last episodes. Coincidentally the show had an episode with an homage to Laverne & Shirley featuring the stars of that show in a cameo, the first time Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams shared a soundstage in years (and the last time with Marshall's 2018 death).
• Fake Brit: In-universe, when Cat dons a British accent to play Abraham Lincoln in "#BrainCrush." And no, it doesn't make sense in context.
• Hostility on the Set: One-sided example. Jennette McCurdy revealed in her memoir that she resented Ariana Grande during production of the show due to the fact Nickelodeon gave her the freedom to not always be on set while working on her music career and do work outside of the network, while forcing Jennette to turn down similar opportunities.
• Lying Creator: In order to appease angry shippers of iCarly, upset over the implied hookup between Freddie and Carly, Schneider told fans that there may be shipping moments for Seddie in Sam and Cat. Though whether or not he was truly lying or if he couldn't do it is unknown, considering the show was supposed to go on for another season, only for production troubles to put a premature end to the show, not to mention that the show didn't even manage to finish the first order of episodes.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: Frequently done with sent-in photos of fans of the show, which are put in various places, ranging from a photo on a desk to the bottom of a coffee mug. Doubles as a Freeze-Frame Bonus.
• Prop Recycling: Don't you think "Clarice" looks a lot like those Fresno Girl dolls?
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • This is one of the only reasons the episode #StuckInABox happened; Ariana Grande was so busy performing concerts that week of filming that it was an excuse for Jennette to film an episode with her being mostly absent.
  • As Quinton Reviews notes in his "The Collapse of Sam & Cat" video, despite Dice being a main character who frequently instigates the show's plots, many episodes - particularly in the later parts of the show - either write him out about midway through or otherwise only give him a minor role afterwards. This is because the show's legendarily Troubled Production often led to shooting going far over schedule and child labor laws thus necessitating Dice's (child) actor being on the set for less time than the other (adult) actors.
• Role Reprise: Several actors from previous Nick Verse shows return to reprise their roles in the series.
  • Eric Lange returns as Erwin Sikowitz from Victorious in #MommaGoomer.
  • Abbey Wilde reprises her role as Stacey Dillsen from Zoey 101 and iCarly in #MadAboutShoe.
  • Nathan Kress reprises his role as Freddie Benson in #TheKillerTunaJump from iCarly, while Elizabeth Gillies and Matt Bennett return as Jade West and Robbie Shapiro, respectively, over a year after Victorious ended. Mary Scheer also reprises her role as Marissa Benson for her brief cameo.
  • In #SuperPsycho, Noah Munck and Reed Alexander reprise their roles as Gibby and Nevel, while Danielle Morrow reprises her role as Nora Dershlit, all from iCarly.
  • Jessica Chaffin returns as Coco Wexler from Zoey 101 in #FirstClassProblems.
• Screwed by the Network: Just one season of 40 episodes ordered, before being put on hiatus^note And it didn't even reach that far, with only 36 actually being made.
• Star-Derailing Role: For Jennette McCurdy, as this show was meant to be a star vehicle for her, but she found herself in the shadow of her co-star Ariana Grande. Following the show's cancellation, while Ariana's music career took off, Jennette's acting career started to fade. Jennette would quit acting in 2017 and switch to writing and directing, not reprising her role as Sam in the iCarly revival on Paramount+.
  • While the effects weren't as immediate, it also proved to be the beginning of the end of Dan Schneider's run on Nickelodeon; he's had a few more shows afterwards, but of those, only Henry Danger managed to gain success, and even then, it finished its run without him after Nick chose not to renew their contract with him following allegations that surfaced in 2018.
• Troubled Production: Where to begin? Originally, the show was envisioned as a star vehicle for Jennette McCurdy titled Just Puckett (about Sam becoming a school counsellor), but eventually Nick insisted on including Ariana Grande in the show as well. Eventually it was retooled as an iCarly and Victorious spin-off (with the original concept being retooled for a failed Gibby pilot). Then, Nick doubled its episode order, causing the producers to scramble to get additional episodes written and filmed. Jennette McCurdy started to publicly butt heads with the network while Grande's real-life music career took off resulting in her being too busy with filming, in turn leading to Jennette having to turn down multiple projects and the team having to constantly work around it. Already exhausted and desperate for a break, the atmosphere of the series got worse by the day as Jennette grew more and more bitter (between coping with the passing of her abusive mother, alongside being constantly screwed over between the series retool and a promise to be given a chance to direct being shot down by "someone here who didn't want her to direct") and Dan Schneider's years of emotional abuse accusations finally catching up to him (the final episodes forced him to film in a "small, cave-like room off to the side of the soundstage"). After one of the producers was claimed of sexual harassment, Nick realized just how massive a disaster the series had become to produce and, in spite of some of the highest ratings the network had around the time, decided to pull the plug on the show.
• Uncredited Role: The staff at Robots, per the usual for voice-over roles in the Nick Verse, have uncredited voice actors.
• Unfinished Episode: When it was abruptly cancelled, four episodes were left unfilmed, cutting its 40 episode order down to 36. Nothing is currently known about these scripts.
• What Could Have Been: Jennette and Ariana said in an interview that they were offered the chance to sing the theme song, but both refused. They did jokingly sing it during one of Ariana's livestreams, but they had to look the lyrics up online.
  • The show was also meant to be paired with another iCarly spin-off, Gibby; that pilot was filmed but not picked up.
  • Dan Schneider has also said that Victorious was intended to run concurrent of Sam & Cat as well; S&C would've essentially focused on Cat's domestic life with Victorious following her at school. The crossover potential was also obvious (and teasingly hinted at in "#GoomerSitting").
  • And now the whole show is an example of this. Nickelodeon executives have come on record saying that the show was approved for a second season that never came and they never filmed the last four episodes promised for the first season.
  • As mentioned above, according to Jennette's book, I'm Glad My Mom Died, the show was initially supposed to be a star vehicle for her called Just Puckett. It would have been about Sam working as a school counselor.
• You Might Remember Me from...: If only PeezyB was into orange soda again.