Special Edition: New Doc Reveals Psychological, Sexual Abuse On Iconic Nick Teen TV Shows

"Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV" is a powerful refutation of Nickelodeon's ability to protect its young TV stars.

It’s very seldom that I send out an early morning newsletter. But the review embargo just lifted on this documentary and I suspect people in the industry will be talking about it all day today.

One of the often-repeated observations about Hollywood is that it is an industry driven by relationships - at least on the creative side. 

For a business that can pour tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into a project, a surprisingly large percentage of the decision-making process involves deciding whether the project involves people you want to work with. Have you worked with them before? Do they have a good reputation? Are previous co-workers willing to vouch for them? Are they bad-mouthing them?

In theory, basing part of the decision about whether to move forward on a project around relationships makes sense. Movie and television production is a high-pressure, sometimes ephemeral process and it helps a lot to work with people you trust and who you know have your best interests at heart.

The dark side of being part of the relationship business is the nature of the process provides the perfect platform for evil to grow. Someone capable of psychological or sexual abuse in the workplace is more than capable of using their power inside the industry to threaten retribution as a way of encouraging silence. Faced with the possibility of a ruined career, many people just swallow the abuse, stay silent, and pray that somehow it will eventually come to an end.

It's been no secret in the TV industry that the teen TV producer Dan Schneider's sets at Nickelodeon had a lot of problems. For years, it was common to hear comments from people inside the industry that he was a difficult, perhaps abusive boss. And there were always hints of something else, other things that seeped deep into the DNA of Nickelodeon's handling of its teen stars.

Those stories are at the heart of the new four-hour, two-part documentary Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV, which premieres Sunday, March 17th on Investigation Discovery.

The documentary's first two hours recount Schneider's rise to success from a small role in the 1984 movie Making The Grade to a five-year stint as the overweight, acerbic Dennis Blunden on the hit ABC high-school comedy Head Of The Class. In 1988, he co-hosted the Kids Choice Awards and met Nickelodeon executive Albie Hecht, who hired Schneider to write on a new sketch series the network was developing called All That. He was soon head writer and executive producer of the series and that success led to The Amanda Show, Drake & Josh, iCarly, Zoey 101, Victorious, Sam & Cat, Henry Danger, and Game Shakers.

But as Quiet On The Set lays out in painful detail, as Schneider's success grew, so did his unsettling behavior. From his uncomfortable and repeated requests that someone massage his shoulders while on set to a series of sexualized and frankly disturbing videos that featured members of his casts, the documentary paints a picture of show sets that allowed (and tacitly encouraged) increasingly inappropriate behavior.

Former cast members talk about the pressures they felt to perform scenes that made them uncomfortable while their parents were encouraged not to push back against behavior they felt was degrading or unnecessary. Hearing adults now in their thirties and forties still wrestling with the emotional consequences of that chaotic pressure cooker brings home every concern viewers likely had about the impact these shows had on young performers.

Things were apparently only marginally better on the set of Schneider's WB comedy What I Like About You, which starred The Amanda Show's star Amanda Bynes. Schneider clashed with co-creator Wil Calhoun, and was eventually banned from the writer's room (a move Schneider says was merely the result of his decision to focus on writing other TV shows) And then there was the strange and still confusing effort to help Bynes win a court battle in which she sought legal emancipation from her parents. A move that seems fraught with opportunities to cross over the line when you are also functioning as her long-running boss.

Hour two draws to a close with interviews from the two lone female writers on The Amanda Show. According to the women, they faced an escalating series of requests from Schneider, all in the name of "having fun." Culminating in a request by Schneider that one of the women bend over a table and simulate being sodomized while pitching a story. 

If there is one throughline in all of these stories, it's that it highlights the dangers of a relationship-driven industry. People are afraid to complain because they worry they'll lose their jobs or be black-balled in the industry. And the financial incentives of Hollywood ensure that if someone is making the studio enough money, behavior that would otherwise be a career-killer can be overlooked (see Michael Weatherly).

This incentive system, along with Nickelodeon's perplexing inability to crack down on inappropriate behavior despite a series of complaints, helped foster an environment that is the center of the most chilling part of the Quiet On Set.

In 2004, Nickelodeon dialogue coach Brian Peck was arrested and charged with sexually abusing an unnamed 15-year-old child actor. He was eventually sentenced to 16 months in prison and registered as a sex offender.

Hour three of Quiet On Set focuses on an interview with Drake & Josh co-star Drake Bell, who reveals he was the previously unnamed actor. He progressively walks the viewers through the process of how he was carefully manipulated by Peck, who used his connections on the show and in the business to distract the attention of anyone in a position to ask questions. He manipulated Bell's father out of the picture after he began to question Peck's motives and eventually manipulated Bell into a place where he didn't know who to trust. Bell loved what he was doing and Peck convinced him that if anyone learned the truth, he would never work at Nickelodeon again.

Bell never specifically discusses what happened, but he asks the interviewer to imagine the worst, most degrading sexual acts someone could do to another person.

It is a stunning interview and I was left with this complicated mix of sadness for Bell and admiration for the amount of strength it must have taken to decide to sit in front of a camera and recount such a horrific story. The actor says he's never been able to shake the aftereffects of that abuse, but for all of his personal issues in the years since, I don't think I could have handled the situation with the strength and clarity he manages to show over the course of the hour.

While Quiet On Set makes a point of not just stating that Schneider wasn't implicated and in fact seems to have been supportive of Bell after the fact, the underlying tone also makes the point that the network's infuriating lack of oversight helped make these situations possible. Shockingly, it's not until several other Nickelodeon employees are charged with sexual abuse that the network begins to run background checks on every employee on the lot.

Hour four wraps up Schneider's troubled stint at Nickelodeon, as his behavior seems to have finally begun to reach the point where the network attempted to half-heartedly rein him in. He was at one point reportedly barred from the set of a show he created and was showrunning, although he claims in a statement to producers that he wasn't banned, he just chose to work remotely from an office. And finally, in 2018, Nickelodeon abruptly announced that it would not be extending its production deal with Schneider and his company Schneider's Bakery. And according to press reports at the time, gave him a multi-million payment to essentially go away.

As powerful as Quiet On Set is to watch, it's also clear producers were unable to get cooperation from several high-profile people. While Jeanette McCurdy wrote quite powerfully in her autobiography about an abusive producer nicknamed "The Creator" who certainly resembles Schneider, she hasn't acknowledged the connection publicly and apparently declined to participate in the documentary. As did any of the major cast members of iCarly or Victorious, although by all reports I've heard, the atmosphere on those shows was as troubled as on any of Schneider's earlier shows.

But the biggest absence is any comment (other than a brief written statement) from a Nickelodeon executive. This is legally likely a smart move because any explanation of why Schneider's behavior was allowed to continue for more than a decade would just invite a series of lawsuits from the producer and/or various parents and actors on the shows.

Still, it's troubling to see that none of the network's higher-ups felt bad enough about the consequences of the situation to even offer up an anonymous mea culpa.

Perhaps the Nickelodeon executives - like many of the now-grown actors - are mindful of the fact that Hollywood is all about relationships. And few people are willing to be the public face of such a troubling legacy and share some of their most troubled memories with the world.

Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV is a must-watch documentary for anyone who grew up on these shows. And with any luck, the success of the documentary will convince a few more reluctant voices to add their stories to the public record.

Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV premieres Sunday, March 17th on Investigation Discovery.

Have feedback about the story? Have a story about Nickelodeon you'd like to share? Email me at rick@allyourscreens.com or contact me on Signal at 612-207-2018. Anything you share will be considered off-the-record unless you say otherwise.