QAnon is a conspiracy theory, but the predation at Nickelodeon was very real

After decades of speculation about network kingmaker Dan Schneider’s reign of terror over Nickelodeon, the Investigation Discovery documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV finally blows the lid off the network’s rot. Streaming service documentaries are a dime a dozen these days, and the sheer volume has diluted the wow factor of plenty of those that theoretically should pack a punch. But Quiet on Set starts with the banal — for Hollywood — but slow-walks into a moral inferno that would make Dante blush.

TikTok zoomers and millennials who followed the blind items over the years will be familiar with Schneider’s proclivity for filming close-ups of the feet of his actresses. Amanda Bynes, Schneider’s former star creation who is now more famous for her tragic mental breakdown than her early and undeniable promise, is captured snuggling and hot-tubbing with Schneider on camera. But the mic drop comes at the second half of the four-episode run.

In the first half, Quiet on Set reveals that production assistant Jason Handy was fired and then eventually convicted of lewd acts after sending an inappropriate picture to a prepubescent girl acting for the sketch comedy show All That. But the second half drops the mother of all bombshells, that the marquee star of the network at the time, Drake Bell, was repeatedly and violently assaulted by Nickelodeon acting coach Brian Peck.

Though Peck was convicted in 2004, because Bell was a minor at the time, his identity was concealed, as were the bevy of Hollywood stars who wrote letters in Peck’s defense, which led to him serving just 16 months in prison.

Alan Thicke called Peck an “honorable, respectable, intelligent human being,” and James Marsden, who was 30 at the time, said, “what Brian has been through in the last year is the suffering of a hundred men.”

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Nickelodeon would go on to fire a third employee convicted for inappropriate contact with other minors, and while Schneider has never been accused of directly abusing the children on set himself, he was eventually let go by Nickelodeon after an investigation amid the #MeToo movement. Softening the blow was a reported $7 million payout.

QAnon is a conspiracy theory, Comet Ping Pong is just a pizza joint, and the “Storm,” which purports to save us all through a mass arrest and execution of the powerful pedophiles around us, is not coming. But the ring of abusers and their protectors at Nickelodeon was very real, and Quiet on Set shows us the destruction, addiction, and intergenerational trauma left in its wake.