When viewers of a certain age picture the heyday of kids’s television, what first involves mind is usually slime. Over the past few a long time, radioactive-colored goo showers have turn out to be a rite of passage on Nickelodeon, spraying game show contestants, celebrities, and even politicians. As Marc Summers, the host of Double Dare—which in the ’80s helped cement Nickelodeon’s association with slime—puts it in a brand new documentary exposing the sinister underbelly of the youngsters’s channel: “Nickelodeon wasn’t there to educate you. We were there to have fun, to get slimed, to be entertained.”
Not to fret: The slimings were all in good, if not clean, fun. It’s the other programming airing on Nickelodeon in the ’90s and 2000s that has been shrouded in darkness: the work of TV show producer and showrunner Dan Schneider, who reigned supreme on the network during its peak popularity.
Schneider, the comedic mind behind giant hits corresponding to All That, Kenan & Kel, The Amanda Show, Drake & Josh, iCarly, Sam & Cat, and Zoey 101, catapulted a generation of kid actors into stardom. But there was no shortage of trouble behind the scenes, as revealed by Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, a four-episode Investigation Discovery project that began airing Sunday (and is out there to stream on Max). The exposé of the toxic workplace culture that staff say Schneider cultivated illustrates how much society in the ’90s and aughts—and even today—has refused to have a look at entertainment-industry child mistreatment and abuse head-on. Finally, nearly seven years after the #MeToo movement exploded, it ought to be inconceivable to disregard what has been hiding in plain sight all along—including sometimes on television itself.
The biggest bombshell in Quiet on Set took place behind the scenes: Former child actor Drake Bell, one in every of the celebs of Drake & Josh, says he experienced repeated sexual abuse by the hands of Brian Peck, a Hollywood vocal and acting coach who worked on a few of Schneider’s sets, starting when Bell was 15 years old. “It just got worse and worse and worse and worse, and I was just trapped,” he says in Episode 3. “I had no way out.”
Bell is careful to say that he doesn’t blame Schneider for having Peck on set, that Schneider couldn’t have known. All That solid member Kyle Sullivan says in the docuseries that Peck used to brag about being pen pals with serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Peck was one in every of three later-convicted child molesters present around Schneider’s shows. He was convicted in 2004 after pleading no contest.
Beyond Bell’s harrowing story, the series, directed by Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz, shines a lightweight on a slew of other credible claims concerning the environment and leadership style Schneider encouraged. There were loads of blatantly sexualized moments that made their way onto his shows, including kids wearing skimpy and tight clothing, using age-inappropriate language (an Amanda Bynes character was named “Penelope Taint”), and simulating massaging phallic objects. Schneider’s writing also put child actors in compromising positions, and one Zoey 101 scene mimicked a “cum shot” on a lady’s face (that was apparently jokingly known as such on set on the time). As Double Dare’s Summers, clearly in disbelief, watches a chronic scene in which Ariana Grande, because the character Cat Valentine (of Victorious and later Sam & Cat), fondles a potato, he asks an off-screen Quiet on Set staffer, “That aired on Nickelodeon?”
It’s no wonder, given what Quiet on Set reveals that children in show business are subjected to, that stars, including on Nickelodeon, seem liable to fighting mental illness and substance use as they grow up. Bell speaks of enduring as much. Bynes has too. And in 2022, Jennette McCurdy, who played the endearingly brash Sam Puckett on iCarly and Sam & Cat, released a No. 1 New York Times–bestselling, beautifully written memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died. Large swaths of the book concentrate on her traumatic experiences on Schneider’s shows, though she only ever mentions him by the moniker “the Creator.”
Beyond the overtly sexual moments, there have been other physical and psychological ways young solid members of Schneider’s shows say they felt tormented. One iteration of All That, the groundbreaking children’s sketch show, featured a recurring segment called “On-Air Dares.” In various installments over the course of years, select tween and teenage solid members were subjected to challenges that seemed way more sinister than silly. They included taking a shower stuffed with live worms, being suspended and dunked the wrong way up right into a vat of pet food, slathering their body in peanut butter to be licked by a pack of dogs, and placing a live scorpion in their mouth. These stunts aired on television sans mass outrage. Essentially Fear Factor, which was popular around that point, but for teenagers. The only issue? Due to the facility differential, kids can’t consent to potential harm or humiliation in the best way adults are free to.
All That solid member Bryan Hearne, who in 2003 performed the peanut-butter dare, says he and his colleagues didn’t feel secure speaking up for fear of losing their jobs—and that once they did raise alarms, they weren’t heard. Meanwhile, it seemed as if even supportive and vigilant parents of Schneider’s actors could do only a lot. For example, Bell’s father, Joe, says he spotted Peck’s behavior a mile away, but Peck manipulated his way into getting closer to Drake regardless. Other parents interviewed in Quiet on Set, just like their kids, didn’t wish to cause a scene and jeopardize their families’ good standing with Schneider and the network.
Schneider said, in an announcement to Quiet on Set producers, “Everything that happened on the shows I ran was carefully scrutinized by dozens of involved adults.” That ought to be cause for much more concern. In teaching our youngsters about potential abusers, the “stranger danger” warnings we’ve historically focused on don’t work; reasonably, they risk leaving children more vulnerable to predatory adults they do know and feel secure around. And yet, we’re still unflinchingly placing kids in TV studios and in front of other cameras without proper protections in place—and now even in their very own homes with parents dead set on being influencers, as if the youngsters are merely props, not people. (Schneider can also be extensively described in the docuseries as having been verbally abusive and sexually inappropriate toward adults on his sets, particularly women.)
In 2014, for Schneider’s massive artistic contributions to Nickelodeon’s continually soaring profile, he was honored on the Kids’ Choice Awards with the network’s first lifetime achievement accolade, surrounded by a lot of his former child stars. Four years after that now-haunting scene, Nickelodeon, which told Quiet on Set producers that it has “adopted numerous safeguards over the years,” parted ways with Schneider following a few internal investigations into his behavior.
By now we’ve heard countless credible #MeToo stories across other areas of Hollywood and across other fields entirely. With Quiet on Set’s release, the youngsters’s-TV version of this reckoning might finally stick. Schneider can not hide behind an ominous nickname or the paywall of extremely thorough Business Insider reporting; his purported misdeeds are laid bare in the medium that gave him money, power, and fame. The docuseries makes plain, hopefully once and for all, the very real, non-stranger danger that lurks around children’s show business. We must fully face the deep-seated issues which have plagued Nickelodeon, a supposed shelter for teenagers. Don’t change the channel.
Credit : slate.com
