Big news: Dan Schneider feels bad about the stuff he was accused of in Quiet On Set

The prolific Nickelodeon producer says he wishes he could go back and treat people differently

By Sam Barsanti  |  March 19, 2024 | 11:02pm
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Big news: Dan Schneider feels bad about the stuff he was accused of in Quiet On Set
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Dan Schneider and some of his actors in 2014 Image: Kevin Winter

Now that Investigation Discovery’s Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV has finished airing, a lot of people from the world of kids TV are popping up to share their reactions to the miniseries, including some cast members from Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide making jokes about the revelation in the documentary series that Drake Bell—who himself pleaded guilty to child endangerment in 2021—had been molested by former All That staff member and vocal coach Brian Peck when he was a child. But, in a surprising decision from literally everyone involved, former iCarly cast member BooG!E felt compelled to sit down with former Nickelodeon super-producer Dan Schneider (whose history of allegedly running toxic workplaces is a major aspect of Quiet On Set) so he could give his side of the various stories in a video that The Hollywood Reporter agreed to publish.

To be clear, Schneider does not face any accusations of sexual misconduct in Quiet On Set, but he is accused of making it a nightmare to work for him, particularly for women. Amanda Show writers Christy Stratton and Jenny Kilgen were apparently hired as a team to an otherwise all-male writers room and forced to split one salary despite not knowing each other beforehand, and Kilgen in particular said she was subjected to abuse and humiliated by Schneider—who would allegedly tell her to shout “I’m an idiot” or “I’m a slut” and would scream at her until she did it. She said she quit the show when he suggested to the rest of the staff that she used to be a phone-sex worker.

Regarding allegations like that, Schneider says in this new video that it “hurts really bad” to know that people had terrible experiences working for him, explaining that he was “green” and “scared” and “excited” when he was running all of these hit Nickelodeon shows, and he says that “it hurts my heart” that he didn’t make sure that everyone who worked for him had a similarly positive experience. He also says he now think that “no writer should ever feel uncomfortable in any writers room, ever” and that he should never have been involved with anything like that when he was in charge.

As for Brian Peck, Schneider took this video as an opportunity to distance himself from the now-convicted sex offender (he was released from prison years ago), highlighting how “devastated” he was when Drake Bell told him about being sexually assaulted and how he helped Bell’s mother write a statement for the judge during Peck’s trial—casually taking credit for how it was resolved by noting, “I did [write the statement] and he ended up going to prison and serving his time.”

Schneider also makes an effort to score points by saying that the revelation of Peck’s crimes was the “darkest part” of his career and adding that he doesn’t understand how Peck was later “hired on a Disney Channel show” (he voiced a character on The Suite Life Of Zack & Cody), with that distinction seeming important because it indicates that it was a different company than the one Schneider had worked with for so long and therefore had nothing to do with him.

But the meat of the video is about Schneider addressing allegations that he was particularly toxic toward the various child actors he worked with in his many years at Nick. Those allegations were around for a long time in the world of children’s television before Nickelodeon officially cut ties with Schneider in 2018, which was met with rumors about complaints about how he had treated the young actors on his shows (and prompted the resurfacing of some Twitter posts where he shared photos of his young stars’ feet). In 2022, Zoey 101 actor Alex Nikolas called Schneider a “creator of childhood trauma,” and Jennette McCurdy had plenty to say about him—referred to only as The Creator—in her memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died.

In the video, Schneider acknowledges that he should’ve treated people better and should not have included jokes that were “upsetting” to some people (Quiet On Set spent some time on a long history of what people called “cum shot” jokes in Schneider’s TV shows). Similarly, He also talked about allegations that he played favorites with Amanda Bynes, very much to the detriment of other child actors, and he defended an instance when he tried to help Bynes get emancipated from her parents when she was 16 or 17.

Schneider says that she had gotten into a fight with her father and had called him, and he was “immediately concerned for her safety.” That’s how he frames his relationship with her, one in which he was just protective of his young star, but Quiet On Set also had people noting a few instances where they were physically close, like her giving him a massage or him appearing in an Amanda Show sketch where they were both in a hot tub (her in a bathing suit, him fully clothed).

Overall, Schneider says in the video that watching Quiet On Set was “very difficult” for him and that he owes “some people” a “pretty strong apology.” He also says he could “see the hurt in some people’s eyes” and it made him “feel awful and regretful and sorry.” He says he wishes he could go back and “bring the growth and the experience” that he has had since then to “do a better job and never, ever feel like it was okay to be an asshole to anyone, ever.” That’s all well and good but, of course, he cannot do that.

 
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