If you were a cool teen in the late-aughts, you were probably in your first relationship, while rooting for Blair and Chuck to get together on Gossip Girl. The rest of us were home alone on Gaia Online, discussing which of the two iCarly girls (played by Miranda Cosgrove and Jennette McCurdy) were going to end up with their one guy friend, Freddie (Nathan Kress).
I swear this wasn’t just me; there were dozens of us! Judging by the reaction to the latest episode of Paramount+’s iCarly reboot, in fact, there are several thousands of us! More than 10 years after Nickelodeon aired the original series finale—in which Carly gave Freddie one last kiss goodbye, before she moved out of the country—the lifelong besties have officially gotten together.
Season 3 of the revival, which premiered in May, opened with a three-episode arc about Carly reckoning with her true feelings for Freddie. Despite spending the entirety of their friendship confident that they were nothing more than friends, when Freddie gets engaged, Carly realizes she can’t take the thought of not being with him. After Carly stops ignoring her feelings for Freddie and instead tries to convince Freddie that he feels the same way, the pair admit their love for each other by the end of last week’s episode, “iMake New Memories.”
In “iGo Public,” which premiered Thursday on Paramount+, Carly and Freddie made it official, by publicly announcing their relationship to their friends, family, and online fans. My fellow former forum-dwellers and I promptly thanked the sitcom gods for finally smiling upon us.
The real-life fans promptly lost their proverbial shit on social media, because this is something the show has been building to for more than 15 years now. The dangling “will they/won’t they” carrot might exhaust another fanbase—but iCarly’s fanbase is nothing if not patient, especially three seasons deep into this twentysomething-skewing reboot.
There’s a ton of history behind the Carly and Freddie relationship, even if they’ve only just gotten together.
When the OG iCarly began, Freddie practically salivated over Carly. Her stance was that they were better off as friends, but we learn in the reboot that it took Freddie until after the show ended to agree with her. Instead of spending five seasons on Freddie swooning for a girl who didn’t like him, however, the Nickelodeon sitcom tried something else out. In Season 2, Freddie started dating Carly’s best friend, Sam.
Thus began a drawn-out battle between Carly-and-Freddie (Creddie) shippers and Sam-and-Freddie (Seddie) stans.
In Seddie’s corner was a delectable enemies-to-lovers storyline, in which the typically tough Sam softened as she learned how to be in a loving relationship. (Downloading all of the low-quality screenshots of Sam and Freddie’s first kiss available on the Seddie-themed iCarly forum I frequented crashed my computer.)
But what Creddie had going for it was two childhood friends catching feelings for each other as they got older, which is what happened later on in the Nick show. If the network hyped the hell out of the episode in which Sam and Freddie shared their first kiss, Nickelodeon practically took out billboards to advertise the one where Carly and Freddie finally locked lips.
While choosing between Team Creddie and Team Seddie felt like a requirement for people who liked iCarly a little too intensely (*raises hand*), the show itself didn’t lean too much into the love triangle. Part of what made the show refreshing in a landscape of sitcoms for young teens at the time was that Carly, Freddie, and Sam rarely fought. Maybe Sam was a little peeved when Carly started dating her ex-boyfriend, but they didn’t dwell on either the relationship or the jealousy. Instead, they were too busy shoehorning in really gross jokes about people’s bare feet.
The show ended with each member of the trio leaving town and staying single. Yet they all still had unresolved feelings for each other, because this was a sitcom for horny middle schoolers, and crushes don’t die that fast.
When Paramount+ launched nü iCarly in 2021, Carly’s friendship with Freddie had evolved once again. Sam now lives a life on the road and is no longer on the show, so Freddie is her closest friend by default. (Sorry to Carly’s cool new roommate, Laci Mosley’s Harper.) Meanwhile, Freddie is now twice-divorced, which is weird, but we did get a great new character out of it: his very precocious adopted step-daughter Millicent. It also means that we have confirmation that, yes, Freddie fucks, which makes it easier to take him seriously as a love interest.
Most importantly, Carly and Freddie are now in their twenties and looking for more serious love. They started reconsidering whether they could be together from Season 1, with the romantic tension building up until the big moment. Season 2 opened with Carly pretending to date Freddie for social media because of some convoluted reason that was retconned by the end. One episode even saw Freddie and Carly accidentally sharing a honeymoon suite, replete with aphrodisiacs strewn across the king-sized bed. A more serious show would have ended that episode with them having sex, but iCarly is absolutely unserious, so that episode ended with Carly and Freddie rebuffing a threesome request from Carly’s wacky friend who appears once and never again.
But now that Carly and Freddie are actually a couple, surely there will be more intentional honeymoon suite adventures to come. I kind of hope we don’t see those on-screen, both because I am #TeamSeddie forever and because I’d like to keep this series a little PG-13. Even though the characters are the exact same age that I am, it’s nice to enjoy an adult romantic relationship without all the attendant complications sometimes. After all this time, that’s what Creddie deserves.
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