Nickelodeon Cuts Ties with Hit Maker Dan Schneider and His Creepy Fetish for Kid’s Feet

Nickelodeon Cuts Ties with Hit Maker Dan Schneider and His Creepy Fetish for Kid’s Feet

If you’ve never heard the name Dan Schneider, you may not have watched much television for children and young adults over the past 25 years, because Schneider has his hands all over Nickelodeon’s biggest hits since he created All That for the network in 1994, and followed it up with a string of hits like iCarly, Drake & Josh and Victorious. He’s also rumored to have had his hands all over the stars of those shows for about as long. Nick and his production studio, Schneider’s Bakery, have parted ways, and it apparently got more to do with his temper than the rumors that he’s a weirdo pedophile with a thing for feet.

We’ll get back to that. Here’s what Deadline said about the split.

Schneider has had well documented temper issues for years. I hear there was a flareup last week during a meeting he had with Nickelodeon executives where they indicated to him that Game Shakers was not getting renewed for a fourth season. Sources say that Schneider’s reaction was, at least in part, due to the fact that Game Shakers was about to wrap production on its third season the following day with a cliffhanger season finale, which would leave fans without closure.

I hear at the meeting Schneider also was told that, with his other Nick comedy, Henry Danger, on hiatus, another show (I hear it’s Austin & Ally creators Kevin Kopelow and Heath Seifert’s new Nick series, Cousins for Life),would move into the production space in the Nickelodeon-owned Burbank studios which has housed Schneider’s series exclusively for the past few years. Sources say that Schneider objected to the prospect of having to share the office and production space with the non-Bakery show.

Okay, so that all seems like normal Hollywood posturing. But along with that are rumors of his “treatment” of the young women who work on his shows. That can mean a few things, but it’s mainly that Schneider has a temper and Schneider allegedly has a thing for teenage girls.

Like there have been rumors for years that he’s the one who got Jamie Lynn Spears pregnant? The first one, when she was 16, not the one she’s having now ten years later. Of course, those are just rumors and Spears has always maintained the father is her then-boyfriend Casey Aldridge.

Schneider also had an odd fascination with the feet of the young women on his shows. There’s a lot of excuses for them to be barefoot. The thing is, feet aren’t that funny. Once you’ve produced thousands of half hours of television starring teens aimed a teen audience, some people are going to find whatever it is you’ve done creepy. But there’s not a whole lot of inherent comedy in the foot. Disney targets the exact same audience as Nick with their family sitcoms and none of them are constantly looking for excuses to get their teen stars barefoot.

Page Six’s sources, however, say that the first explanation is more likely the reason he was fired, that it was his temper that got him fired, not him probably breaking into Ariana Grande’s trailer to smell her shoes between takes.

“Schneider has had well-documented temper issues for years.” A source close to Schneider strongly denied he had been inappropriate with his younger stars, but did admit of his temper, “He could be an asshole.”

The network’s David Bittler described Schneider’s departure as a “mutual decision,” and other industry sources told us he took a $7 million payout to leave.

A source claimed Schneider had been the victim of false online smears, and that his exit comes amid a change of management at the network, a disagreement over the ending for “Game Shakers” and a fight over studio space.

$7 million is nothing to sneeze at. I can honestly see the rumors about Schneider going either way. It’s entirely possible that he just thinks jokes about feet are funny. He did think having Kel Mitchell talk about how much he loves orange soda all the time was funny, in a sort of “it’s not racist because it’s not grape soda, but get it?” kind of way. The man obviously knows how to make television that kids like, he’s made hit after hit for decades. And the internet is prone to making baseless accusations that anyone who works with or creates products for kids is a pedophile. But that dude also talks about teenage girls’ feet a lot.

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