In 2024, Bell’s Drake & Josh co-star Josh Peck confronted the same perception on his own podcast Good Guys. When guest Justin Sylvester joked that the “Nickelodeon money is coming through,” Peck replied, “That’s the funniest thing you’ve ever said.” He went on to drop the “fun fact” that “There’s no residuals on kids’ TV.” Sarcastically, he joked, “It’s fine, they only robbed me of my childhood!”
On The Unplanned Podcast, Bell (who was himself sentenced to two years probation for attempted child endangerment in 2021) said that adult guest actors on their show get residuals: “There’s people who said two lines on one episode that still get checks in the mail. Josh and I, not a dime.” The “only answer” as to why the rules were different for kids is because the industry is run by “a lot of evil, corrupt people,” he said. Perhaps because audiences don’t understand the business side of the industry, or perhaps because of that perception that everyone on television is wealthy, there hasn’t been as much backlash about child labor in Hollywood, Bell observed. “If we were making shoes, someone would’ve probably come in and saved us. But we weren’t, we were entertaining you.”
He said, “We’re putting in all of this work. This corporation is making billions with a ‘B’ off of us, and we’re being compensated for the week of work, cool, but that’s it. And forever, in perpetuity, it literally says in the contract, across universes and galaxies and planets.” He added: “If Elon [Musk] gets us to Mars and they show Drake & Josh, it’s impossible for me to get paid for it.”
Network execs “do everything that they do to us mentally and emotionally, and then throw us to the wolves. And we’re like, okay, cool. I got rent this month. There’s three channels doing Drake & Josh marathons. Netflix just bought it, it’s top 10 on Netflix, and I gotta figure out how to pay my rent this month.” Bell added, “And some fat cat with a cigar is just sitting up at the top of Viacom just going, ‘Heh heh heh,’ … getting high on child labor.”
