Note: this is Part One of a two-part series on Quiet on the Set.
The new five-part series Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV is among the most talked about documentaries of the year. An inside look at Nickelodeon, the media corporation whose shows are aimed mostly at children and teens, Quiet reveals that its most successful producer Dan Schneider created an atmosphere of extreme misogyny that also enabled the sexual exploitation of child actors. Schneider has never been charged with the latter, but has admitted to the former. He left Nickelodeon in 2018, after twenty-four years, in the wake of #MeToo, amidst accusations of having created sexualised and toxic workplaces on sets. His many popular shows, such as All That and The Amanda Show, created child celebrities like Keenan Thompson, Amanda Bynes, and Ariana Grande who went on to fame as adults. Nickelodeon remains a juggernaut in the entertainment industry, an increasingly rare entity in a field where production companies are either splintering into smaller ones or struggling to find their footing and eyeballs in an internet-dominated world.
As might be expected with a series that focuses on sexual exploitation, the conversations around it tend to replicate the salaciousness that Quiet wants to critique and, just as predictably, the word “trauma” is thrown around a lot. Most recently, Christy Carlson Romano, a former Disney Channel actor, spoke to Mayim Bialik (famous for Blossom) on the latter’s mental health podcast, Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, about how she would not watch Quiet, saying that the creators are “outsiders” and “trauma tourists” only interested in exploiting the “trauma porn” that’s inherent to a story about sexual exploitation.
Trauma, as a word and a concept, does a lot of heavy lifting these days and has become an easy way to explain, and explain away, a vast number of conditions and issues. In the case of Quiet, it occludes the very real problems around labour that, ironically, are actually raised by Romano but which get drowned out in a discussion about “trauma.”
But, first, a look at the series.
According to former writers, staff, and child actors Nickelodeon’s success came about within an environment of extreme misogyny and the sexual exploitation and abuse of children. Among several explosive accusations is one that Schneider compelled female employees to give him neck massages on the sets. At one point, he made Jenny Kilgen, one of two female writers on the first season of The Amanda Show, lean over a table while pretending to be anally penetrated as she pitched a story about high school. He also made both women (the other was Christy Stratton) split one salary in half, while the male writers got full salaries.
It is unsurprising that such an atmosphere resulted in highly sexualised material even though the shows were ostensibly geared towards children. Female child actors were often the brunt of sexually suggestive and pornographic jokes that they were too young to understand. In the show Victorious, Ariana Grande simulates the kinds of sexual acts more familiar to viewers of porn: squeezing a potato and hoping for its “juice,” lying on a bed and pouring water on herself, and gagging while sticking her finger in her mouth (as described by Complex and seen here and in the documentary). In the sitcom Zoey 101, Jamie Lynn Spears had green goo squirted onto her face, a scene that appears to have repeated itself in various iterations across various shows. Nickelodeon’s few Black child actors found themselves at the intersection of sexualisation and racism. As a thirteen-year-old, the actor Bryan Hearne, now thirty-five, was made to wear a leotard to play a rapping foetus and endured someone referring to him as “charcoal” as they coloured him to match the suit. He was also cast as a teen who sold cookies to another, in a scene that unavoidably and stereotypically referenced drug dealing. In another sketch, he had to lie covered in peanut butter while dogs licked it off him, a situation that was physically uncomfortable and scary. According to testimonies, all of this happened on a set where adults stood by and laughed knowingly at the antics and appeared to be uncaring about the overt misogyny and racism.
Many child actors come from poor families and feel an enormous pressure to keep their parents and siblings afloat and, inevitably, this means that most of them are unable or unwilling to speak out about their discomfort in certain scenes or as they experience outright sexual exploitation. And, just as inevitably, this leads to instances of predation as it did on the sets of Nickelodeon. For instance, Jason Handy, a production assistant on All That and The Amanda Show in the early 2000s, sexually assaulted a young female guest star and sent explicit material to another child actor. Nickelodeon’s dialogue and acting coach Brian Peck raped the then-teen actor Drake Bell over a period of time.
Predictably, the internet has burst into flames over all this and there’s been much discussion of what could have been done and what might be done in the future. Some of the conversation is happening among former child actors. When Romano appeared on Bialik’s podcast, they were joined by Jenna von Oy (who played Blossom’s best friend). According to Bialik and von Oy, they worked with adults who appear to have been more thoughtful and professional than most of those on the sets of Nickelodeon but even they endured sexual humiliations that could have been prevented under different conditions. For instance, as barely pubescent teens, they each had to kiss co stars with no idea how to go about it, and with no one to help them navigate their subsequent feelings of shame and bewilderment. 1These are complicated waters to navigate. It should be noted that Bialik’s politics around gender are strange and contradictory. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal she wrote, in an op-ed for the New York Times, “I still make choices every day as a 41-year-old actress that I think of as self-protecting and wise. I have decided that my sexual self is best reserved for private situations with those I am most intimate with. I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy.” As many readers pointed out, this implied that women were to blame for whatever happened to them. Yet, during the podcast episode, she criticises those who blamed Drake Bell for being sexually assaulted by Brian Peck. I don’t want to reproduce her conservatism, nor do I want to leave uncomplicated the matter of teen sexuality and assume that we should only imagine minors as utterly sexless and without desires. At the same time, I don’t ascribe to the Libertarian view, held by too many, that there is no such thing as the sexual assault of minors (or, as some of them would have you believe, of adults either). If a child or teen—or adult—feels uncomfortable during any kind of encounter, real or simulated, their discomfort should be enough to bring it all to a halt. In the case of Bialik and von Oy, it appears that despite having strong parents around them, as they claim, they never felt they had anywhere to turn when matters felt out of control.
Bialik has a history of promoting bizarre, pseudoscientific theories and supplements and Romano’s response to a show she hasn’t watched is irrelevant because, well, she hasn’t watched the show. But the conversation does prompt questions about how we might think about what happens behind the scenes with child actors and how best to create better working conditions for them.
Is Quiet on Set trauma porn, as Romano alleges? Yes, but so is nearly every documentary these days, and so is nearly every memoir or work of fiction about anyone who’s not white, straight, or marginalised in some way. As I’ve written here, here, and here, and elsewhere, trauma is the precondition for entrance into the public sphere: to be taken seriously as a non-white person, a woman, and a queer person, you have to first present your Trauma Passport; without it, you simply don’t count as human. The problem with Quiet on Set is not that it’s trauma porn, but how that aspect of the show, even the critique of it as trauma porn, is likely to muffle and even obscure the very real labour problems with the entertainment industry, especially the conditions faced by the most vulnerable, like child actors and women. And while Romano’s responses to a show she hasn’t watched need not be taken seriously, her thoughts on what needs to be done for child actors are noteworthy, relevant, and worth taking up in larger conversations.
Where much of the public discussion so far has been on the level of personal relations and on whom to blame, Romano correctly shifts it to a question of labour. As she puts it, “I look at this actually as labour, as a child labour issue, in that there is a union where the child laborers pay the same amount to be covered by the protections that an adult would have, with an intimacy coordinator on set, and if there’s guns on set, or if there’s animals on set, all those things are called out.” She goes on to point out that “they’re labourers, but they’re child labourers” and advocates for a system that places staff responsible for the safety of children on every set, much like the newer intimacy coordinators on sets.
This is not a new idea, but a major problem for actors of any age today is that the industry changes so quickly that laws can barely catch up, and the adults ostensibly in charge of navigating the workplace on behalf of their young charges often have or acquire the means and resources to keep money, education, and any kind of outside assistance or support away from child actors. The Coogan Act, named after the child actor Jackie Coogan who sued his parents for squandering his money, was established in 1939. Yet, even now, as we’ve seen with, for example, Britney Spears, child entertainers are vulnerable to financial exploitation. Laws also state that child actors can only work for so many hours and must continue their education, but Quiet reveals how easily those rules can be ignored—especially when greedy parents and careless overseers are involved.
To complicate matters, the rise of channels like YouTube and a surplus of reality shows on such venues has meant that children are often corralled into roles as performers without the protections afforded to conventionally understood child actors. If the “set” is your living room and the director is your own mother, who is there to see to your interests? In 2015, Utah-based mommy vlogger Ruby Franke began documenting her experiences as a co-parent to six children on her YouTube channel 8Passengers. By 2020, five full years after the show began, thousands of people signed a petition asking for an investigation into the clearly documented abuse of the children, which included forcing one of them out of his bedroom and making him sleep on a beanbag chair, and withholding food from another child as punishment. Franke pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse in December of 2023: she and her business partner Jodi Hildebrant were only arrested after her “emaciated” (as described by the police) 12-year-old son escaped and begged a neighbour for food and water. The child also had open wounds on his body, and marks around his ankles and wrists indicated that he had been restrained with duct-tape. Franke had two million viewers before the show was finally taken down in 2023. It took nearly a decade for any kind of “system” to point out what Franke was really doing to her children and, in the meantime, she acquired enough money and power to continue to document, for the world, the abuse she was perpetrating upon her children (the first petition went nowhere as police claimed they found no evidence of harm to the children). Over the course of ten years, millions of people literally watched in avid fascination as a woman sold her abuse as just another set of parenting strategies. A major problem, now perhaps to be rectified by new legislation, is that the children in these situations have historically not been seen as performers with rights (Fortesa Latifi at Teen Vogue has been documenting the new laws which aim to legally define the children as performers and guarantee that they at least get a cut of the profits made off their backs).
The concept of trauma can explain what happens to children and adults in these contexts, and many of them will need years of counselling and therapy to make their way through a world that betrayed them. But “trauma” is a meaningless concept if it is not grounded in any meaningful, systemic consideration of the labour problems inherent to such shows. On the Bialik podcast, von Oy brings up the concept of “secondary trauma” supposedly suffered by people in contact with people who are traumatised by events: this does nothing but make “trauma” an overly elastic concept that blankets the whole world in a sense of suffering but does nothing to rectify matters and create change. Within this context of labour rights and needs, diagnosing the problems as simply a matter of “trauma” prevents us from tackling the real problems. In relation to Quiet, the trauma framework occludes the connection between the misogyny on set and the atmosphere that allowed adults to prey on children as sexual objects and compel them to bend to their desires.
What might a Marxist, left analysis be able to bring to such situations? How might we think about what people endure in the context of the material conditions of capitalism? There’s a segment of the left that doesn’t quite know what to do when bodies so clearly marked by their identities are also exploited as commodities, as products of exploitative labour conditions. “Class first” fails as a rubric because it pays no attention to the fact that identity is often what enables, even attracts, capitalist exploitation. Bryan Hearne’s experiences came about because he was a young, vulnerable Black child who, as he explains in the documentary, felt the weight of helping his family free itself from the poverty towards which it was headed. The racist comments about his skin colour reflect that his worth as a labourer was connected to his identity as a Black teen, and that identity—in a country that still operates on the principles of plantation politics and genocide—is a tool for capitalism. The women humiliated and exploited by Schneider were treated the way they were precisely because they were women: Schneider made it clear to them that he didn’t even think women in general could be funny, and literally thought of their labour as half as valuable as that of men. None of this is to echo the idea, held in many quarters, that “capitalism is racist.” Capitalism is fundamentally about the exploitation of the labour of the weakest: poor white Appalachians, battered by economic conditions, are as vulnerable as urban Black youth neglected by educational and other systems. If we think of the worker as someone who has rights then we have to consider how those rights are given or taken away based on the labourer’s gender and race, and other markers of identity. Consider, again, that Black actors were heavily tokenised at Nickelodeon and that two women saw their salaries literally halved because of their gender.
Trauma should be thought of as a labour condition, not as an internalised condition that might be mined for a memoir. Unsafe and out of date machinery is kept out of workplaces because of the potential danger they pose to workers and we have to think about misogyny and sexual assault, or even the fear of sexual coercion, in similar ways.
At the end of the episode, Romano is asked about her new and upcoming work (she is, among other things, a prolific podcaster), and she speaks of her latest “pivot” to a new podcast. Bialik is doubtless already planning her next few ventures. We are reminded of a long-term effect of children being forced into stardom early on: that they often have a hard time finding ways to thrive outside of the machinery of public attention.
I return to the children of Ruby Franke who only found release when one of them escaped. What happened on the sets of Nickelodeon remained mostly unseen behind the scenes. To some extent, perhaps, we can claim we didn’t know, although we should wonder about all the adults, including parents, who saw things and never spoke up. How do we explain that we watched the Franke children being abused for nearly a decade, leaving one of them to escape like a tortured animal from a zoo, desperate to find food and water, his body marked by the abuse he had endured from those whose primary job should have been to care for him and his siblings?
How do we forgive ourselves?
See also:
“Trauma and Capitalism or, Your Trauma Story Will Kill You.”
“An Interview with Yasmin Nair, Part Two: The Ideal Neoliberal Subject is the Subject of Trauma.”
“The Perils of Trauma Feminism.”
“On Hasan Minhaj, Trauma Passports, and Immigrant Fictions.”
For more of my work on trauma, see this.
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Image: Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656.