Trailer for the series "Quiet on the set: the dark side of children's series"/Discovery
For several years now we have been learning from time to time that everything we grew up with was actually more rotten and darker than we wanted it to be. Britney Spears? A captive of her abusive father. "The Seventies Show"? The coolest character in the cast is played by a horrible rapist. Michael Jackson? Oh oh oh
This month, those born in the 1990s and 2000s discovered some more dark secrets behind their childhood nostalgia: according to the documentary mini-series "Quiet on the Set", some of Nickelodeon's children's and youth series were created in a work environment for which "toxic" would be too mild an adjective. At the head of those series was usually one man named Dan Schneider - a man whose name is not widely known, but in Hollywood he was powerful enough to do horrible and terrible things without anyone batting an eyelid.
"Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Children's Series" (which will air next Sunday on Discovery Plus Israel, for Yes subscribers) is a "talking heads" series, which consists mostly of people telling the camera about their experiences from working at Nickelodeon, interspersed with clips and archives that make it clear to us how much This sick guy has been under our noses all this time. As an effective piece of journalism, it does the job: it's been two weeks that the Internet is like a concoction. "Quiet on the set" and the secrets revealed in it were the talk of the day.
Dan Schneider, Kel Mitchell and the children from the cast of the comedy series "Game Shakers", 2015/GettyImages, Eric Vitale/Getty Images
The series begins in the 1990s, when Nickelodeon's executives realized the light bulb: let's not try to educate the children who watch us. Let's just have fun with them. It started with the sketch show "All This", a kind of version of "Saturday Night Live" for ages 6-13. She saw children as stars to be nurtured and as an audience to be taken seriously, and among others personalities like Keenan Thompson (later the oldest star of "Saturday Night Live" itself) and Amanda Bynes passed through her in their youth. For children who exhausted the didactic and polite children's series at a fairly early stage, a program like "All This" and the other wild products of Nickelodeon were a kind of gift.
And at the head of "all this" was Dan Schneider, the great villain of "Shut up on the set". There is no room for complexities, nuances or empathy here: according to the series (and I personally choose to believe its version), Schneider is Harvey Weinstein for preschoolers, as horrible as that may sound. And while Weinstein was a predator behind the scenes, the vulnerabilities attributed to Schneider also reached the works themselves. According to testimonies presented in the series by screenwriters and workers on the set, Schneider denigrated his facts, and also created content that put the girls and boys in his series in situations that today seem illusory - sexual jokes, challenges that hurt and hurt the talents whose voice has not yet been changed. When I saw these series on rebroadcasts of the Nickelodeon channel, which had just arrived in Israel for the first time in 2003, it was, for me, the height of comedy. Today it is percolating.
"Quiet on the set" makes clear in retrospect how crooked everything we grew up with was. But that's not the only thing she teaches us: it turns out that in three different cases, pedophiles worked on the set of Nickelodeon who managed to hurt children who appeared in small roles in the series. The series builds all of these with the expertise of a "true crime" series of the kind we see on our screens every month, making this sequence of horrors momentarily an addictive piece of television. And yet, at first, apart from the new perspective on the series that raised me and the demonization of a man I didn't actually know until that moment, I didn't get anything new from it.
Then came Drake Bell.
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Horrifying testimony. Drake Bell, "Quiet on the Set"/Discovery
Most of the interviewees of "Quiet on the Set" are not stars: I recognized one of them from the episode of "Close Up Cheerleaders", a few others went on to a career of guest and supporting roles, some of them just visited the entertainment industry and stopped after the trauma of working with Schneider. Drake Bell is the only interviewee a true Nickelodeon star has ever had. His testimony is appalling.
Along with his father, Bell recounts his early days as a tiny actor who enjoyed the glamorous job, with guest appearances on "Jerry Maguire" and "Seinfeld." Very quickly his testimony becomes more and more gloomy, when Brian Peck enters the picture: an actor and acting teacher who worked in various Nickelodeon series and was one of the most important people in Bell's life, in the days before the hit starring him, "Drake and Josh".
At some point, Peck began to systematically sexually assault Bell. Bell refuses to explicitly explain to the camera what happened there, and insists on letting us guess the worst on our own. The courage Bell shows in choosing to sit in front of the camera and tell his story in impressive detail is impressive, and his father's testimony about those years, which is presented at the same time as Bell's, is heartbreaking. To the same extent, it is sad to see the hesitation with which the creators choose to talk to him about the sexual abuse that Bell himself was accused of a few years ago - these accusations are presented casually in the last minutes of the fourth episode of the series, and Bell answers them with concise politeness.
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The undisputed villain. Dan Schneider wins Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards/GettyImages, Frazer Harrison/KCA2014/Getty Image
In general, it is interesting to look at "Quiet on the Set" precisely through everything that does not appear in it. For example, Amanda Bynes, who is presented here as an especially important presence-absent: Bynes was so dominant in "all of this" that she finally got a sketch show dedicated only to her - "The Amanda Show". It was also created by Dan Schneider, who sponsored Baines. For several years she was a star, and rightfully so: to this day, when you see films and series with her participation, it is evident that she was simply always bursting with laughter. And she, like other stars of Nickelodeon's series, appeared in sketches that today seem more disturbing than funny (in one of them she is in a hot tub with Schneider, in another she is aggressively washed by a water hose after playing in the mud).
Bynes retired from the entertainment world in 2010, after her huge role in "Comes Easy". The series does not pretend to understand exactly why it did this. Those who see the videos she uploads to social networks can guess for themselves: Bynes has been dealing with her mental health for many years. In the past it was thought that she would be a great comedic actress. Today she tells her followers in a muted tone how excited she is for her official certification as a manicurist. Baines was not interviewed for the series, so there is no official hypothesis that explains why she really fell so hard.
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And this is where the internet and its pests came into the picture. The sensational nature of "Quiet on the set" aroused in the viewer the desire to understand for herself who is the hero and who is the villain here. Following the series, a new narrative was established (not necessarily through her fault): the actor Jerry Trainor, who played Carly's older brother in the series "iCarly", was seen as a saint who protected the young actors in the series from the creepy Schneider; Drake Bell's mother, who did not stand up to Brian Peck as a wall unlike his father, is a scoundrel worthy of Twitter's wrath. Amanda Bynes' parents are criminals. Dan Schneider is the monster from Loch Ness. None of them got the opportunity to give their side.
It's not really urgent for me to hear what Dan Schneider has to say in his defense (several times in the episode, an information slide is shown with Schneider's response to some of the accusations, and just from the wording it's clear that this man is not clean-handed). It's not really urgent for me to clear Mrs. Bell's name. But it's clear to me that this fish stinks from the head, and this head does not belong to Schneider, or to some pedophile production assistants: the "Nickelodeon" body is presented in the series as a big, dark monolith, without any senior person to hang the accusations on. Schneider is a terrible and terrible person, but is it possible that he is a scapegoat that "quiet on the set" is satisfied with, simply because it is more difficult to point the finger at people stronger than him?
No complexity. Drake Bell with Dan Schneider, Kids' Choice Awards 2014/GettyImages, Frazer Harrison/KCA2014/Getty Image
There's something jarring about watching a docu-series, and it's a jarring that many of us enjoy and don't want to admit it. Toxic management, sexual assaults and the silencing of complainants with the claim that "you're alive, we're laughing with you" are common in every organization, from the glittering sets of Hollywood to the remote branches of Gush Dan supermarkets. It's addicting to deal with these sick evils when they happened to the stars we grew up with, and it's easy to do so when everything is simply divided for us into heroes, villains and victims.
Days after watching the excellent "Quiet on the Set", it seems that she indicated to me a little too clearly who entered each slot. It is possible that the fifth episode of the series - which will air in the United States next week, on the exact day that its four predecessors arrive in Israel - will give a perspective that will deepen what has been presented so far in a too superficial way. Until then, this is essential viewing for anyone who wants to know just how messed up this land has been all this time.
"Quiet on the set" will air on Discovery Plus for Yes subscribers on Sunday, April 7, 2024.
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Drake Bell
Dan Schneider
Nickelodeon
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