Christy Carlson Romano Said She Won't Watch "Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV" — Here's Why
Former Disney Channel star Christy Carlson Romano explained why she has refused to watch Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV.
Christy spoke on an episode of the podcast Mayim Bialik's Breakdown with host Mayim and special guest Jenna von O? about her perspective on the documentary and how she feels the filmmakers are "outsiders" and "trauma tourists."
You might remember Christy as a young Broadway star, Ren from Even Stevens, or the voice of Kim Possible on the Disney Channel.
/ ?Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection, Disney
Currently, Christy owns PodCo, which features several podcasts including Vulnerable, Ned's Declassified Podcast Survival Guide, Wizards of Waverly Pod, and Full House Rewind.
Likewise, Mayim and Jenna were also young actors on the '90s sitcom Blossom.
"I think that it's extremely triggering. I've made a choice for several reasons to opt out of choosing to watch that imagery," Christy said, explaining her opinion about the Investigation Discovery docuseries.
Christy claimed that filmmakers had previously approached her to appear in documentaries about child actors.
"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."
"I don't know if it was this doc [Quiet on Set]. 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. 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?'"
"These are people who don't belong to our community," she said. "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 outside baseball. It's not inside baseball; it's outside baseball. These are trauma tourists."
Christy explained why she thinks documentaries like Quiet on Set can be exploitative and are not helpful.
"Alyson Stoner [another former child actor], who is a fantastic advocate in this space, has really impinged upon me the importance of understanding trauma porn," Christy said. "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."
"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."
Despite her reservations about these types of documentaries, Christy said Quiet on Set does reveal that there's "an ecosystem that is heavily flawed and under-matured."
Christy said elsewhere in the podcast that she also knows several actors involved in the docuseries. She and Mayim avoided naming anyone in particular, but one story in the docuseries that involved Christy's known colleagues surrounded Drake Bell.
In 2003, voice coach Brian Peck pleaded no contest to performing lewd acts with a teenager, which resulted in a 16-month prison sentence. In the Quiet on Set docuseries, Drake revealed he was the teenager involved in the case.
Christy has worked with Drake on her show, Christy's Kitchen Throwback, but she also has a relatively well-known working relationship with another person mentioned in Quiet on Set.
According to the docuseries, several people, including James Marsden, Rider Strong, and Will Friedle, wrote letters of support at the time. Both Rider and Will were actors on Disney. Will and Christy worked on Kim Possible and the I Hear Voices podcast.
On the Feb. 19 episode of the Pod Meets World podcast, Will addressed his involvement in the case. "[Peck] asked us to support him and go to court with him, which a lot of us did," Will said. "And we're sitting in that courtroom, on the wrong side of everything — of course, having no idea of this — filled with child actors. To the point where the victim's mother turned and said, 'Look at all the famous people you brought with you. And it doesn't change what you did to my kid.'"
Will added, "I just sat there wanting to die, where it was like, 'What the hell am I doing here?'"
While she doesn't clearly state it on Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, it seems Christy's relationship with both the actors and survivors involved and her perspective on the unhelpful nature of "trauma porn" documentaries have given her pause on watching the series.
Listen to the full episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown here.
