“Quiet on Set”: Exposing Humanity at Its Worst

Think Tank #83

People can’t look away from a wreck.

The entertainment industry has been capitalizing on this for years—it’s essentially the entire point of reality TV. People love to hate (why do you think so many people watched Real Housewives or Keeping Up With the Kardashians?) almost as much as they love a fucked up story (how else could Dateline have aired for 32 seasons?).

Quiet On Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV combines both of these elements, creating a perfect shock-value TV show. It’s about Nickelodeon, for one, meaning that it targets basically everyone who was alive and semi-conscious in the nineties to early 2000s. And its subject matter is appalling enough to shock the conscience of even the most jaded non-psychopath watching the show.

The show is about Drake Bell being sexually assaulted by dialogue coach Brian Peck while he worked for Nickelodeon. At least, that’s why everyone tuned in. The story is disgusting—not only because Brian Peck is an absolute monster, but because he basically got away with it. Watch the show to learn what actually happened. Give Drake Bell his payday. The guy deserves it.

In fact, if the show was made into one hour and thirty minute documentary, it could’ve been a great piece of journalism. If tactfully done, it would’ve been a harrowing exposé of the extent of the industry’s corruption.

Unfortunately, though, the whole thing is just crass, revealing almost as much about the “dark side” of television as Bell’s own story.

For one, a docu-series is way more profitable than a plain ol’ documentary, meaning that the makers of the show expanded its scope, focusing not only on Drake Bell but on Nickelodeon as a whole. If this was warranted, it would be fine, but it wasn’t.

I assume this wasn’t hard to accomplish. After all, whenever someone’s making money, everyone else wants a piece of the pie, no matter how insignificant their claim to it is. Thus, the entire first episode-and-a-half of the series was essentially just a poorly-done smear campaign against Dan Schneider by unknown former child actors presumably looking for some easy money.

The first one and a half episodes featured a former child actor claiming psychological trauma from wearing a nose costume onstage and an adult woman complaining that there was actually hard work to be done at her glamorous, competitive, highly-sought-after job (these were only two of the numerous harrowing stories that were mentioned—my heart bleeds for all of them).

Then, episode 2 just casually transitioned from accounts of literal “torture” (give me a break) via Nickelodeon’s ‘On Air Dares’ to Brian Peck’s charges of sexual assault against a minor. The juxtaposition was unbelieavable. How can you mention these two things in the same series, much less the same ten minutes of an episode?

I’m not feigning (much) superiority. I sat down and watched it, too. I remembered Drake & Josh from when I was a kid, and was dying to know what happened. I sat through the thing in giddy disgust, too—first at the pathetic greed of the actors trying to cash in on someone else’s trauma, and then in horror at Drake Bell’s actual story.

The voyuerism of television runs so deep. It’s already strange that a whole generation of people feels like they know this complete stranger because they watched him on TV when they were kids. And now, because none of us actually know him, we think it’s normal to view and comment on the worst thing that’s ever happened to him as our Monday night entertainment.

We’re all guilty. I’m writing about it. You clicked this article. We’re all sick fucks.

Drake Bell, I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry about the dozens of people who exploited your story for profit, and for my entire generation, for watching it on TV to satisfy our own curiosity as though it didn’t even matter.