Dear God, not one other one. Years after #MeToo, and with Weinstein and so many others unmasked and handled way back, you might need naively hoped to not must tune in to any extra diligent retrospective exposés of how horrible males within the movie and tv trade ruined the careers of harmless colleagues. But right here we’re once more with Quiet on Set: The Darkish Facet of Children TV. You might be forgiven at this level in case your rage is freighted with fatigue. However there’s needed work nonetheless to be performed.
Nickelodeon dominated US kids’s tv in the beginning of the millennium, with a lot of its hottest reveals created and produced by one man, Dan Schneider. Awards got here his means, together with private stardom not normally afforded to kids’s TV showrunners. This meant he grew to become untouchable. Since his departure from Nickelodeon in 2018, a gentle drip of accusations about poisonous working environments on Schneider productions have painted him as a capricious and intimidating presence.
Quiet on Set provides to the case towards Schneider, laying out a protracted listing of allegations, together with humiliating feminine workers and sustaining relationships with youngster actors who have been both not sympathetic sufficient, if the kid didn’t win his favour, or too pleasant if the kid did. Kids have been requested to carry out materials laced with what now appears like startlingly crass sexual innuendo.
The “in plain sight” moments within the sequence are clips from Nickelodeon reveals, which beneath Schneider’s reign repeatedly featured underage performers in bikinis or leotards, or having jets of water or skinny stripes of goo squirted into their faces. Women’ naked ft have been a disturbing recurrent theme, and on one event a 16-year-old Ariana Grande pretended to “milk” a potato with two palms. If there wasn’t already a stack of documentaries displaying this sort of factor on nationwide tv lower than 25 years in the past, we might be asking how on earth these things was broadcast.
Equally, it’s onerous to explain the allegations made about Schneider by two feminine Nickelodeon writers as surprising, when the skilled dynamic they recall shall be depressingly acquainted to so many ladies, inside and with out showbusiness. Having landed their dream job in 1999, Jenny Kilgen and Christy Stratton not solely discovered themselves closely outnumbered by males in writers’ room; they are saying the person operating it made certain they felt marginalised by plaguing them with sexist pranks, dares and the type of “jokes” that aren’t humorous if you’re the goal. How this occurs and the way it makes the victims really feel is one thing that, whereas such behaviours persist in society, can’t be highlighted sufficient and Quiet on Set does a sturdy job of doing that.
Schneider has responded to the sequence through a YouTube interview through which he admits to, and apologises for, making feminine workers uncomfortable, together with asking them for massages, whereas additionally in search of to partially excuse himself by citing the pressures of the job. One line of defence put ahead by Schneider, concerning the crassly sexualised gags in his reveals, does have some advantage: he shouldn’t have performed it, he says, however no producer has the ability to air no matter they need on a community resembling Nickelodeon. His bosses and their bosses, and their bosses, didn’t object.
British viewers will see Quiet on Set as if by means of a thick pane of glass, faraway from the affect it has had on US audiences: loads of British youngsters who grew up with satellite tv for pc/cable TV could have watched Sam & Cat, iCarly or Zoe101 sooner or later within the 2000s, however Nickelodeon had a completely totally different forex within the US. Within the period earlier than kids have been in a position to curate their very own display time through YouTube and TikTok, Nickelodeon was the default. It was what malleable younger People watched en masse.
However even with out the sensation of a valuable shared cultural historical past having been besmirched, Quiet on Set works as a case research of energy within the leisure world, and the way a enterprise traditionally unhealthy at safeguarding performers has generally been appallingly unhealthy at defending its most weak expertise. The darkest moments are available later episodes of the sequence, protecting one thing worse than the emotional abuse and creepy display aesthetics for which Schneider was culpable: talking publicly for the primary time, the actor Drake Bell describes how he was bodily assaulted on a Nickelodeon set when he was 15 by Brian Peck, a dialogue coach later imprisoned for sexual abuse of a minor.
Something that makes that much less more likely to occur once more is invaluable. Quiet on Set has, commendably, performed its half.
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