Even Stevens star Christy Carlson Romano has shared her thoughts on the recent documentary, Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV.
The docu-series, which aired last month, explored the makings of several Nickelodeon kids television shows, with a particular focus on Dan Schneider’s time as a producer and show runner.
The series detailed the alleged patterns of abuse which were reportedly happening at the time within Nickelodeon, and featured interviews from former child stars who appeared on the network’s various shows.
One of the series’ most prominent moments was when Drake Bell revealed that he had allegedly suffered sexual abuse at the age of 15, by dialogue coach Brian Peck.
Now, Romano – who played Renee ‘Ren’ Stevens on Even Stevens – has weighed in on the heavily reported documentary, calling it “extremely triggering”.
Speaking on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast, the 40-year-old actor said: “I’ve made a choice for several reasons to opt out of watching that imagery.”
She revealed how the network who aired the documentary, Investigation Discovery, even approached her for a similar subject, but she declined: “I’ve chosen not to speak about this with anybody, including ID, who originally came to me looking to see if I’d be interested in a doc like this.”
She explained: “I don’t know if it was this doc. But I was approached when I first started advocating three years ago for my own YouTube channel with my own experiences that I did in different and separate episodes, so to speak.”
Romano, who also voiced the titular character on Disney Channel’s Kim Possible, continued: “I started to be approached by many reality-show-type producers, and they were like, ‘Hey, how do we do this?’ and I would combat them with saying, ‘Hey, guys, the only way we would do this is if we talk about how do we fix it?’”
She elaborated on how her background informs her opinion: “I actually have a degree from Columbia in film, and you know, we know that the art of montage and the collision of images is going to incite a certain kind of emotion.”
She added: “That is what documentary filmmaking in social movements is meant to do. And so we’re so manipulated by media, and we have so many little cut-downs of misinformation and things being thrown, that the echo chambers, to me, are not helpful.”
“These are people who don’t belong to our community,” she explained. “These are outsiders. And maybe they, maybe if they knew where to put money towards [fixing] a problem, they would, but again, a lot of this has been perceived in a way that’s – it’s outside baseball. It’s not inside baseball, it’s outside baseball. These are trauma tourists.”
Meanwhile, Bell has called Nickelodeon’s response to the documentary “pretty empty”. He said: “If there was any truth behind them actually caring, there would be something more than quotes on a page by obviously a legal representative telling them exactly how to tailor a response.”
