Madelyn Pugh Davis and Bob Carroll Jr. wrote or co-wrote nearly all the I Love Lucy episodes.

Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin caught the essence of the Tracy-Hepburn relationship in Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike.

Now comes Memphis native Dan Schneider and Nickelodeon star Amanda Bynes. Hey, it's possible.

Bynes, 16, is a six-year TV veteran. She first performed on Nickelodeon's sketch show All That at age 10, and by the time she was 12 was hosting her own sketch comedy series, The Amanda Show. The girl clearly is going places.

So after The WB network signed a development deal with Bynes, it needed a show to build around her.

Schneider got the gig because he was there at the creation, so to speak.

"I had written pretty much everything Amanda had said from the time she was 10 until she was 15," he said recently. He was the creative force behind both of Bynes's series. He also wrote Big Fat Liar, in which she co-starred with Frankie Muniz. Now he has co-created What I Like About You with Friends veteran Wil Calhoun.

In the series, Bynes plays 16-year-old free spirit Holly Tyler, whose father takes a job in Japan. Holly decides to stay in New York and move in with her straitlaced sister Val (Jennie Garth).

Val doesn't necessarily welcome her sister. Holly wants to prove she can be the perfect roommate, but generally makes any situation she's in worse, usually by falling over something, blurting out something, running into (or through) something or maladroitly orchestrating something.

It's not the most original concept in the world, and you can see most of the jokes and gags in the pilot coming. But Bynes has that unidentifiable something that makes her leap from the screen. She is a true TV presence, charming, likable and - something rare on TV - a gifted physical comedienne.

"She's game for anything," Schneider said. "On All That and The Amanda Show, this girl's been run over, I've thrown her off buildings, I've put her in macaroni and cheese. There isn't anything physical this girl hasn't done on the set, so she's ready for it. . . . That's going to be a mainstay of the show. You don't see a lot of physical comedy on sitcoms anymore. Occasionally you do - Kramer on Seinfeld did a lot of it - but in general, you don't. And everybody laughs at a good pratfall."

He and his producing partners spotted her talent early on. Bynes had just completed a comedy camp in Los Angeles when Schneider and his producing partners saw her perform a standup routine she had developed at the camp.

"She was just on fire. She was great. She had this natural charisma on stage. You know, she was the size of an avocado, but she was hysterical, and she just totally won over the audience," he said.

Schneider, 36, came to national attention as one of the students in the sitcom Head of the Class, which ran 1986-91. He has acted since, but writing and producing are his fortes these days. And not just any kind of writing and producing. He's made his mark writing for kids.

"I think I'm one of these arrested adolescents. I was always the sort of guy in high school who was cutting up, doing impressions of teachers, never quite doing what I was supposed to do, a little irreverent, and I really haven't changed much," said the White Station High School graduate. "I also have nine nieces and nephews, so I spend a lot of time hanging out with kids. . . . I also try to surround myself with writers who are stuck in adolescence like me."