The Dark Side of Children's Television

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. If you were a kid in the '90s or the early 2000s or raised kids during those decades, you're probably familiar with Nickelodeon. The television network, of course, ran numerous hit shows, including All That, The Amanda Show, Drake & Josh, and iCarly, just to name a few. The popularity of those shows catapulted their child stars to ultimate levels of fame.

Now decades later, those kids have grown up, and they're telling their stories about abusive conditions that they faced as child actors. The explosive documentary series, Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Children's Television, chronicles the exploitative working conditions that women and children experienced while working on Nickelodeon's greatest hits, at least that's what they allege. Much of the series centers on Dan Schneider, the executive producer and screenwriter who created hits at the expense of the children he employed, the documentary says. Here's 45 seconds.

Speaker 1: In the early '90s, Nickelodeon was kid everything, and you better hope that your house had cable.

Speaker 2: Wasn't there to educate you. We were there to have fun, to get slimed, to be entertained.

Speaker 1: This is when Dan Schneider arrives. Nickelodeon's golden boy. He created these shows that were hugely successful for them.

Speaker 3: No one had ever really done something starring kids for kids.

Speaker 1: He launched the careers of child actors who became major stars. For 20 years, he shaped children's entertainment and culture, but that marked one of the darkest chapters.

Brian Lehrer: With us now to talk about this dark chapter of children's television is one of the featured reporters in the docuseries, Kate Taylor, senior correspondent at Business Insider. Kate, thank you for coming on today. Welcome to WNYC.

Kate Taylor: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Start us off by introducing us to Dan Schneider and his role at Nickelodeon. Why was he the central focus of this docuseries?

Kate Taylor: Dan Schneider is someone who really had a larger-than-life impact and personality at Nickelodeon starting in the late '90s. He became their golden child in a lot of ways where he got his start as a teenage actor himself on Head of The Class and then in the .90s, he started as a writer on All That. Then eventually he got a chance to have his own show, The Amanda Show, the first show he created, starring Amanda Bynes, who went on to become hugely famous herself. From The Amanda Show, Dan Schneider had this series of hit after hit at Nickelodeon that really helped it compete with the Disney Channel in a way that previously it had not been able to do.

Brian Lehrer: Two of those former child actors featured on Quiet On Set were from the show that you just mentioned, All That. Here's what they had to say about their experience filming the on-air dares segment of that show. We're hearing here from Kyle Sullivan and Brian Hearn.

Speaker 4: The on-air dares were the Fear Factor of Nickelodeon.

Speaker 5: We would be standing in these tube chambers. It was like this ominous thing that was deciding, who is it going to be?

Speaker 6: Will it be Brian, Kyle or Jessy?

Speaker 5: Then it would be lights, and then it would shine on all the cast members, and it would stop.

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Speaker 6: Those were particularly traumatic, and they were designed to be. The whole idea was that you would have to do something scary on camera, and they got pretty scary.

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk more about the on-air dares and the broader working conditions for children on set? If that was happening in front of the camera, what was it like behind the scenes?

Kate Taylor: The on-air dares are a really good example of something that, at the time, was seen as normal, where you had kids getting a bunch of sugar dumped on their face, for example, or having to go into a pool full maggots, things that felt really familiar to Fear Factor at the time. When you look at this now, especially when you're thinking about the fact that these are children, it raises a lot of issues of can kids actually consent to undergo these things that are pretty horrific. It also highlights that behind the scenes, these kids were maybe being put in situations that they were not comfortable with, that they felt like they couldn't say no to.

Something that came up again and again in our reporting was that child actors and their parents felt like if they pushed back on the demands of Dan Schneider or other people who were running these shows, they felt it would limit their kids' possibilities. That, for a lot of these families, would have been a huge financial blow.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I want to invite some of you in here, maybe we have former child actors or parents of current child actors or former child actors or people who work in the entertainment industry around child actors listening in. What have you witnessed or experienced while working in entertainment with kids? Is this beyond what's alleged in this documentary about Nickelodeon? Is it safe to be a child actor? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Or maybe for some of you who grew up with Nickelodeon shows and feel nostalgic when you hear these show titles, or maybe your kids did and you were lurking and getting some pleasure from them too, and now as one person who grew up in that generation said to me, "My childhood was just shattered when I learned about this." Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for journalist Kate Taylor.

Parents or some sort of guardian were required, I presume are required, to be on set with children. Where was parental supervision in the cases that the docuseries reports on regarding Nickelodeon? Why wasn't that enough to protect kids from this kind of, I guess you'd call it degradation that the documentary alleges and documents?

Kate Taylor: I think that some of the most disturbing allegations that we hear in the documentary are instances where parents did try and stick up for their kids, but were basically ignored. Where we have one actor who was a kid whose mother tried to say, "I'm uncomfortable with this. I don't think that my son should be in these tight outfits. I think that the sketches that he's being put in are really putting him in a racist situation." Where this child actor was Black. His mother said, "I think that this is uncomfortable. We shouldn't be doing this." What ended up happening was he essentially got fired or was not back to return to All That.

You also see in the situation of Drake Bell, who was one of Nickelodeon's big stars at the time, who went on to co-star in Drake & Josh. His father expressed concerns to production about a dialogue coach who he felt was spending a lot of time with his son, who was he felt physically a little bit too physically affectionate with his son on set. He said in the docuseries that his concerns were essentially dismissed and we now know-

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in for just a second because we have a clip of Drake Bell from the documentary and you'll tell me if this is exactly what you're describing here. Here is Drake Bell talking about this dialogue coach named Brian Peck, who worked on numerous Nickelodeon and Disney Channel shows.

Drake Bell: The abuse was extensive and it got pretty brutal. Why don't you do this? Why don't you think of the worst stuff that someone can do to somebody as a sexual assault, and that'll answer your question.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Was that new revelation from Drake in this docuseries?

Kate Taylor: Yes. Drake had never spoken about this publicly before. It's really, really heartbreaking to think about where the abuse that he was suffering as a 15-year-old was juxtaposed with this really wild professional success. He speaks out in the docuseries about why this is the first time he is talking about this. A lot of that is because he went forward in this criminal case as a John Doe because he was very concerned about what the career repercussions would be if he came forward as the survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of this dialogue coach, Brian Peck.

Brian Lehrer: This series gets so specific, it names names. Their dialogue coach, Brian Peck, Dan Schneider, we talked about before, and we have to say, these are very serious allegations against individuals. Have they responded?

Kate Taylor: Brian Peck pleaded no contest at the time when this case was going forward when Drake was still anonymous. He has not responded to our request for comment, but Dan Schneider, who is the person behind a lot of these shows who the docuseries lays out these allegations related mostly to a toxic workplace environment, and putting child actors in uncomfortable situations, has responded in a nearly 20 minute long YouTube video.

Brian Lehrer: How much in that YouTube video, which I haven't seen, I presume you have, did he defend himself? How much did he apologize? How would you describe it?

Kate Taylor: The YouTube video is really interesting because in some cases, he does confirm a lot of our reporting about things we heard. In some cases, he apologizes for these things such as expecting or asking people who worked for him, especially women to give him massages.

In other cases, he denies that he was responsible for things. In the example that we provide of two female writers on The Amanda Show were expected to split a salary. He says in the video, essentially, that was not his decision. It was a mix of both saying and confirming that he was responsible for some things and in some cases, apologizing for those things and denying responsibility for other things.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take some phone calls from people calling in with child actor experiences. Michael in Miami, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hi, thanks for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for making it.

Michael: Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Michael: I've worked on Broadway shows and on set with kids for years and years, 10 years on different productions with Disney and other major producers. I have not witnessed what she's talking about in the form of direct abuse, but I have no doubt that it's very possible, just the way the power structure existed in that system and how often the parents are separated from the kids with a kid being overseen by some sort of adult minder, or what they call them wranglers.

In the Broadway space, the big thing that I've seen is that transition from kid actor to adult actor, whether there's-- not counting abuse in any way, but the fact that these kids are trained to be kids. They're brought in because they're cute, or they're brought in because they have a certain personality trait, and then suddenly, they move into being an adult actor, and suddenly, they're not getting roles or they're not getting auditions because their entire world and their entire life has been focused on this one skill set, which doesn't actually help them to be an adult actor.

I see a lot of depression. I see a lot of spiraling of these kids. The parents have great intentions. They want to have the best opportunities for these kids, but I don't think they realize that what they're training these kids to do don't necessarily support them after they are no longer a kid.

Brian Lehrer: Based on that observation, do you think there's no way to be a child actor and transition to adulthood in a psychologically sound way, or are there ways that are sometimes employed in best practices?

Michael: I have a lot of parents who, just because of my experience in the business say, "Hey, is this a good idea for my kid to be in the show?" I have two kids myself who are both wanting to be performers. I didn't allow them to go into professional acting as kids. I said, "If you want to do that after you're in high school, and you know who you are." I don't think there's a healthy journey. I think there's possibilities. We can thread the needle in many ways, but I think the world is counted against you. I think there's too many obstacles. I think that the the kid mindset is so based on pleasing other people that suddenly they can't please people at all. An adult profession is so independent, while a kid profession is so reliant on adults.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, we really appreciate your call and telling us about your experience, and what this look like to you in the case of so many children. Kate Taylor, senior correspondent at Business Insider, that's such a even more global critique than anything we see in these stories of abuse in the documentary Quiet on Set. Have you thought about it at that level?

Kate Taylor: Completely. I think that that's something that even before Quiet on Set when I was first starting my reporting on Dan Schneider back in 2022 when I first wrote an article on this, it's hard to realize a lot of these issues are universal to children working in entertainment, while also trying to think about how can we produce results and how can we pinpoint exact issues that happened. How universal do you want to be, versus how specific do you want to be to find specific people who might have been really not only not helping the environment, but making the environment worse and worse than maybe the wider critique of the space could be? I think it's really interesting.

I think also when we consider what we want to take away from the documentary, a lot of what I want people to take away is to think about, how do we not have another documentary like this in 20 years talking about things like child influencers, or kids who are on TV shows today? How do we apply these lessons and fix things for kids who are kids right now, so we don't have to look back on this in 20 years and question why we weren't making changes?

Brian Lehrer: How do we?

Kate Taylor: Oops, sorry, what was that?

Brian Lehrer: How do we?

Kate Taylor: I think it's really difficult. Something I've thought about a lot is the idea of more regulation and creating better laws to protect. When we think about kids working in other industries, we don't tolerate child labor. I think that having this be something that is a kid's entire life, and to have a child be a primary breadwinner often is a first step in creating a really dangerous environment. I think that it's something that I would also really like other former child actors to be taking the lead on when they think about how could I have been supported better.

For the parents, something that I've thought about a lot is, not all these parents have a great understanding of the business, how to keep their kids safe, how to think about the financials, how to have their kid go from a child, a minor to an adult themselves, and how they can set them on the best track for that in a way that they feel like they are financially stable, and they can leave this industry or stay in this industry without a huge expectation that if they do not want to do this anymore, it could put their family in debt in a very real way.

Brian Lehrer: Melinda on Long Island, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in, Melinda.

Melinda: Hi, Brian. My kids did a lot of film and TV work when they were little, we were hoping to jumpstart the college fund. My husband and I had both worked in professional theater, so we had a good sense for what we were getting into. I did have a situation on a Nickelodeon shoot where my son was asked to do something he wasn't comfortable with, and we didn't do it.

My question is, these parents that got into these bad situations with their kids, and got in so deep, where was their union rep? All of these kids had to be SAG members to do this work. Where was the union rep, and why weren't they reaching out to them? Those were the people that were there to advocate for you and wear the bad hat and be the person who would speak up. Where were they? Why weren't they in the mix?

Brian Lehrer: It's a great question. We got a text from the listener who said, "Nickelodeon was non-union in those days." Can you shed some light, Kate?

Kate Taylor: I think that that was part of it, that I don't believe all of these kids would have been covered by the union. More than that, I think that your example is actually really helpful, where I think that a lot of the kids who had the hardest time who we spoke with, their parents are not people who have any background in show business, who don't necessarily know who to go to for help, where we heard from people who parents would go to their agents, or to be specific their child's agents. These are the people who normally should be like, "If you're uncomfortable, let's connect you to the union rep. Let's connect you to legal representation. Let's fix this situation for you."

For people who don't have a background in show business, don't know how these structures are supposed to work. When the agent say, "Listen, this is how it works, we have to let this go. You want to not get a reputation for being difficult." These parents can hear that and say, "Okay, well, I guess that's just how it works. I don't have any information about the structures in place here."

Brian Lehrer: Here's one more clip from the documentary. This is a montage. From a viewer standpoint, many people who enjoyed shows like iCarly and Victorious are looking back at some of the scenes in those shows, and now noticing deeply inappropriate jokes hidden in plain sight. Here's what some former staff members had to say about some of those scenes.

Staff Member: A kid show should be exactly what it is, a kid show. Sometimes there were scenes where there was a prop that was like--

Speaker 7: What's he doing?

Staff Member: That can be a sexual innuendo.

Speaker 8: Those are good ones.

Speaker 7: Hmm.

Speaker 9: Dan went overboard and just zoomed in too often on the feet.

Speaker 8: Wow, they're really soft.

Speaker 9: Zoomed in too often on the tongue-licking things, or something that just went too far.

Speaker 10: Was anyone able to say anything or was that like--

Staff Member: Oh, no, no. It's Dan's baby.

Brian Lehrer: This brings up the caller Melinda's question again, doesn't it? Who was there to say anything?

Kate Taylor: I think that for Dan Schneider shows, that was part of the reason that he became a real focus of this, is because based on the people we spoke with, many people felt that Schneider was both very uniquely powerful at Nickelodeon, where he was able to get away with jokes that other showrunners might not be able to get past standards. His jokes were pretty uniquely bizarre. Looking back at them now, I think that we can say many feel pretty specifically sexual.

Brian Lehrer: I want to acknowledge before we run out of time that while we've been talking overwhelmingly about child actors in the context of this documentary, it wasn't just the children who suffered in the series. We meet women who worked as writers for the Amanda Show. Would you just tell that story a little bit?

Kate Taylor: Yes. The Amanda Show was the first show that Dan Schneider created for Nickelodeon. Because it's starring a young Amanda Bines, it's something that I would've imagined would've had some women in the writer's room and that you would really be encouraging women to be involved in the creation of this. In fact, the two writers who worked on the first season of Amanda Show described their experience as incredibly disturbing, where they were expected to give Dan massages, they were expected to humiliate themselves in front of the rest of the writer's room, and they had to split a salary despite not having worked together previously.

In the end, after a season, you have one of the writers file a complaint saying that this is a toxic workplace and that she faced sexism at work in large part because of Schneider. Something that really surprised me when I first uncovered this was that even though this was so early on in Dan Schneider's career at Nickelodeon, it does not seem to have slowed down his rise to power at all at the network.

Brian Lehrer: You know what, we're going to close with a former child actor calling in to say that he had a good experience as a child actor, but interestingly in a different context. Michael in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Michael: Hey, thanks for threading me into the segment. First of all, I wanted to say thank you to the people who did the documentary. I did watch Quiet on the Set, and I found it quite disturbing. I'll just say that I thought it was well done and thank you. I had an experience on Sesame Street, in the early years of Sesame Street. It wasn't until I watched Quiet on Set and even heard this segment that I realized we had no union rep, there was no adult supervision. My parents never visited the studio, but we were treated beautifully. It was union wages, everybody on that show, Mr. Hooper, Willy, Gordon, Matt Robinson, all the adults were wonderful around us. They were as wonderful in real life as they seemed when we were kids. It was great.

Brian Lehrer: Got little public broadcasting.

Michael: There are other not-for-profit models that should be taken into consideration when we're looking at the things that happen in for-profit models.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much for that story. Any contrast that you would leave us with? I don't know if you've reported on anything like that, Kate.

Kate Taylor: I haven't, but I think that that is something even at Nickelodeon, some of the former child actors who I spoke with said, "I look back at this as a generally positive experience." Some of them I reached out to again after they watched the documentary and they said, "I'm revisiting this with new eyes now." I think that it can be easy to see these things as black and white, but I hope everyone walks away knowing that a lot of former child actors see things in shades of gray. What I hope we take from this is thinking about how we can make everyone safer and look to shows that have done that successfully.

Brian Lehrer: Kate Taylor, senior correspondent at Business Insider, and a featured reporter in the new docuseries, Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Children's Television. Thanks so much for sharing it with us.

Kate Taylor: Thank you so much.

 

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