How the Quiet on Set Filmmakers Finally Exposed the Dark Side of Nickelodeon

A few years ago, filmmaker Mary Robertson says she and her team started to notice a spate of videos online. They were compilation videos made by amateurs on social media, featuring clips from shows that aired on the kids channel, Nickelodeon, in the 2000s.

The clips featured then-teenagers like Ariana Grande and Jamie Lynn Spears engaging in acts that appeared to be of an “arguably sexual” manner, Robertson, the founder of the production studio Maxine Productions, tells me. In one, Grande pours water on herself while laying upside down in a bed. In another, Spears is squirted in the face by, let’s just say, a viscous liquid. The clips had aired without a fuss at the time, but now that people were seeing them online, they were beginning to reexamine them.

“[They] were saying, did I grow up watching all this sexual innuendo but didn’t know it because I was a kid?” Robertson says. “And if that’s the case, how much of this was actually on these shows that I was consuming so regularly? What adults shaped this? What adults said no to it? What adults said yes to it? If these videos were made, what does that suggest about other improper, uncomfortable, and potentially illegal behavior behind the scenes?”

So, Robertson and her colleague, journalist and documentary filmmaker Emma Schwartz, began digging. The result is Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, a four-part documentary series that premiered on Investigation Discovery last month and immediately went viral. The allegations uncovered by Robertson and Schwartz include a heartbreaking interview with former Drake and Josh star Drake Bell, who revealed for the first time that he had been the victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of actor Brian Peck, who worked alongside Bell on popular kids shows like The Amanda Show. Other revelations include allegations of emotional abuse and sexual harassment against Dan Schneider, a Nickelodeon mainstay who worked on or created several shows for the network including All That, The Amanda Show, and Drake and Josh.

People online and in the media are now calling for more accountability for those who perpetrated the alleged abuse and more generally, for better protections for child actors. In response to the series’ popularity, the filmmakers gathered some of those who spoke out for the series for a new episode, which premiered on Sunday, April 7. Hosted by veteran journalist Soledad O’Brien, the episode features new interviews with participants like Bell, who credited Robertson and Schwartz with making him feel comfortable enough to finally share his story. Although, Bell said, it “boggles” his mind that the dark side of Nickelodeon had not been interrogated by the public sooner.

Ahead of the new episode’s premiere, Robertson and Schwartz spoke to Glamour about the power of interrogating pop culture and what they think needs to be done to protect children in the entertainment industry.

As you mentioned, these rumors surrounding Nickelodeon were circulating for years prior to Quiet on Set. What made you want to dig deeper?