The first two seasons of Nickelodeon's beloved live-action comedy series iCarly will be leaving Netflix in the U.S. during early February 2022, What's on Netflix is reporting.
Netflix licensed the first two seasons (which turned out to be a repackaging of seasons 1-3) of iCarly and added the series to the platform's programming library on February 8th, 2021. However, all 64 episodes from those seasons are set to expire on February 8th, 2022 - exactly a year after they were licensed - with no current plans to add seasons 4 through to 6, which are available to stream exclusively on Paramount+ along with the revival series.
Over the past few years, Netflix has licensed quite a bit of Nickelodeon content, including TV movies Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling and Invader ZIM: Enter the Florpus in 2019, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra in 2020, followed by iCarly, Big Time Rush and The Loud House Movie (produced by Nickelodeon for Netflix) in 2021 as part of ViacomCBS' strategy to expose Nickelodeon franchises to new audiences - something the company has been open about. During a interview with The Hollywood Reporter in July 2021, Brian Robbins, President & Chief Executive Officer of Nickelodeon, and Chief Content Officer of Kids & Family for Paramount+ talked more about ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish’s strategy to license to third-party outlets in a bid to expose content to bigger audiences before ultimately taking it back as an exclusive:
"That’s been my strategy from the start. There’s two great examples of that. Avatar: The Last Airbender was a series that ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon and was never a huge show, but had an amazing following. We licensed that show to Netflix and it exploded. Then we put this spinoff of Avatar, The Legend of Korra, on Paramount+, and it crushed it. That led us to our new relationship and bringing the creators of Avatar back to Nickelodeon to form Avatar Studios. We are now on our way to a full-fledged franchise strategy, creating films and spinoffs out of Avatar.
"The second example, which actually has paid off this month, is iCarly. We knew we were going to do a reboot of iCarly, it just took us a while to put it together. Once we knew we had it going, we licensed just a season or two of iCarly to Netflix and it exploded with new kids discovering it for the first time, and fans who grew up on it rediscovered it. The demand for the new show was at such a fever pitch by the time [the new show] launched that it propelled iCarly to be, if not the most successful show on Paramount+, one of the most successful shows."
Robbins also confirmed that series such as Avatar: The Last Airbender and iCarly would eventually be taken off of Netflix and become Paramount+ exclusives, adding "[y]es. And it’s not like this is some secret that we’re pulling the wool over anybody else’s eyes on other services. They’re happy to have the content and they understand the strategy. We’re very upfront about it."
When iCarly first came onto Netflix in the United States back in February 2021, it managed to gain ground in Netflix’s top 10s. In fact, it managed to spend 42 days in the overall top 10s (tracking both movies and TV shows) and 59 days in total in just the TV top 10s. In addition, since the kid’s top 10s were introduced later in 2021, the show has featured for 12 days.
The February 2022 removal date only applies to the United States for now. A number of other Netflix territories are also streaming iCarly including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and the United Kingdom. In all of those cases, Netflix is only streaming the first season. In the UK, it used to stream all three seasons until 2015. The first season was then re-added back in 2019.
Stream all episodes of iCarly on Paramount+! Try it FREE at ParamountPlus.com!
