Sam & Cat & the Techno-Hype of the ‘10s

Those who were attentive to children’s television in the late ‘00s and early ‘10s are likely to remember Dan Schneider’s Nickelodeon sitcoms iCarly and VICTORiOUS--the former one of the bigger hits of those glory days for original basic cable programming drawing in as many as 11 million viewers at its peak (numbers a Big Four network would have been happy to see in their own prime time programming). Of course, even those hits ran their course, and a predictable recourse on Schneider’s part was pairing two particularly well-received characters, Sam Puckett from iCarly and Cat Valentine from VICTORiOUS, in a spin-off show, Sam & Cat (2013-2014).

I suspect that for most the show is memorable merely as a minor element in the Schneiderverse that added a little more iCarly and VICTORiOUS content, and a footnote in the careers of the personages involved. However, recalling Sam & Cat a few years on it interests me as a time capsule from the prior round of techno-hype. After all, wacky as the adventures of the two leads could be, the show was never presented as science fiction in the manner of, for example, Schneider’s superhero-themed sitcom Henry Danger. It was set in the "mundane" present. But all the same visits to a restaurant with robot waiters were a regular feature of the episodes (the eatery "Bots" appeared in 21 of the 35 episodes), while one episode revolved around the chaos that ensued when a drone delivery went very badly (the drone carrying off a baby the two leads, who make their living with a babysitter service, were watching for a client). That was a reflection of how near at hand the technologies were thought to be, an impression which itself seems to have furthered the impression--inspiring a restauranteur in the Chinese metropolis of Ningbo to use robot waiters himself.

Of course, eight years after the show’s end what was supposed to be just around the corner remains remote--our restaurants still reliant on human servers to the point that robotized service remains sufficiently a novelty to bring in tourists and, when one shows up in your town, warrant mention in the local news, while you are very unlikely to see a drone bringing you your next retail order (and that in spite of two years and counting of pandemic-related disruption and a flood of inflationary cheap credit that gave business ample incentive and opportunity to aim for more automated operations. Just as the technology was "not yet there" in 2014 it does not seem to quite be here in 2022 either, with the result that Sam & Cat unintentionally looks a bit like The Jetsons has to later viewers, yesteryear’s vision of tomorrow.