Lifestyle
'Quiet on Set' explores allegations of abuse, toxic behavior at Nickelodeon
Bryan Hearne, a former cast member of All That, speaks in the docuseries Quiet on Set.
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Bryan Hearne, a former cast member of All That, speaks in the docuseries Quiet on Set.
ID/Warner Bros.
For those with fond memories of watching kid-centered Nickelodeon television series like All That, The Amanda Show and Drake & Josh, the Investigation Discovery series Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV may come as a jarring shock.
Already, the four-part docuseries has generated headlines by featuring former star Drake Bell recounting publicly for the first time his stories of being abused about two decades ago by Brian Peck, a dialogue coach and actor employed by Nickelodeon. Peck pleaded no contest to two charges and was sentenced to 16 months in jail back in 2004, but the identity of the performer he was convicted of abusing was not revealed in court.
But the program also spends lots of time digging into the work of show creator, showrunner, executive producer and performer Dan Schneider, who built a kids TV empire in the late 1990s and early 2000s at Nickelodeon. Schneider, who helped create, write or produce shows like All That, The Amanda Show, Kenan & Kel and iCarly, is credited with discovering young stars like Amanda Bynes, while defining the shape of kid-oriented television during that time.
The dark side of creating kids TV
Nickelodeon and Schneider’s success was rooted in creating shows which seemed like they were built just for kids, starring kids, presented at a time when young people had a lot fewer entertainment options. It was a golden age of children’s TV, featuring young performers who would go on to become stars as adults, including Kenan Thompson, Ariana Grande, Nick Cannon, Victoria Justice, Miranda Cosgrove and Jamie Lynn Spears.
Quiet on Set asserts the behind-the-scenes reality could be harrowing, presenting interviews with former staffers from the shows, plus parents, performers and journalists to detail assertions that Schneider became a more toxic boss as his influence grew. The docuseries presents allegations he devalued female staff writers, played favorites among the young actors while excluding performers of color, disrupted sets with bursts of anger and insisted female staffers give him back massages during production.
Former Nickelodeon star Alexa Nikola speaks during the docuseries Quiet on Set.
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Former Nickelodeon star Alexa Nikola speaks during the docuseries Quiet on Set.
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Schneider doesn’t offer a new interview on camera, but appears in archival footage and photos. The show also features text statements in which he denies some allegations, insisting what he did on shows was scrutinized by dozens of adults — including programming executives — and that he never considered gender in hiring decisions.
The program also shows a statement from Nickelodeon at the end of every episode which stated it “investigates all formal complaints as part of our commitment to fostering a safe and professional workplace. [We] have adopted numerous safeguards over the years to help ensure we are living up to our own high standards and the expectations of our audience.”
Kids TV with adult innuendoes
Among the most jarring sequences in Quiet on Set: scenes with young actors from Schneider’s shows which seemed silly on the surface, but also evoked troubling sexual innuendoes in programming aimed at children – including a young Ariana Grande squeezing a potato suggestively to try and produce juice from it, or a moment where a blob of goo spurts onto the face of Jamie Lynn Spears.
The documentary also recounts how some staffers who worked at Nickelodeon were later convicted of molestation, including one man who met child actors as a production assistant and Peck, who played characters and worked with kid performers on Schneider-led shows.
“The bad just doesn’t go away,” says the mother of one child performer targeted by a man later arrested on molestation charges involving a different youth. “The bad stays for a lifetime.”
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But the most emotional moments of the show comes as Bell relates his story. He says Peck convinced him to drop his father as manager and then involved himself deeply in the young performer’s life. Eventually, Bell said, Peck began abusing him sexually, creating a situation the young performer felt he couldn’t escape from.
“The abuse was extensive and it got pretty brutal,” Bell tells the camera at one point, shifting in his seat. “I really don’t know how to elaborate on that on camera….Why don’t you think of the worst stuff that someone could do to somebody as a sexual assault, and that’ll answer your question. I don’t know how else to put it.”
Bell, now 37, also speaks about problems with self-destructive behavior as he grew older. He pleaded guilty in 2021 to a felony charge of attempting to endanger children and a misdemeanor charge of disseminating material harmful to juveniles, connected to an incident in Ohio involving a teenage girl.
Fans who grew up with these shows and stars, enjoying their kids-running-the-asylum vibe, may be particularly troubled to hear that performers were exposed to these kinds of predators and toxic work environments. It’s tough to imagine what these stars’ bright smiles and sunny attitudes onscreen might have been hiding, though some have spoken out in the past, including former iCarly co-star Jennette McCurdy who wrote the searing memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died.
In many ways, a docuseries like this one is a natural progression from the revelations of toxic behind-the-scenes behavior in adult-focused TV shows, films and the music industry kicked off by the #MeToo movement. Similarly, there had been previous reporting about allegations against Schneider and issues at Nickelodeon shows, but the power of Quiet on Set lies in getting people to sit before a camera and speak on the record about their allegations in compelling ways.
One important question left is whether programs like Quiet on Set can change popular attitudes about how child actors are treated in the same way that other works have changed ideas about sexual assault, harassment and codes of conduct in the workplaces which fuel Hollywood’s dream factory.
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Nephi Craig’s mother is White Mountain Apache and his father is Diné Navajo. He grew up on both reservations.
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Nephi Craig, the founder of the Native American Culinary Association, credits eating, cooking and teaching about Indigenous food with saving his life.
Craig became addicted to alcohol and drugs at an early age. After his first DUI, the judge gave him the option of three months’ probation if he agreed to get a job or go to college. That’s when he enrolled in cooking classes at Scottsdale Community College.
Craig says he initially felt like an “oddball” in the classes because he was unfamiliar with terms like “bistro” and “vichyssoise.” But he also credits the classes with igniting his interest in cooking — and teaching him more about Native foods, including the tomato.
“[When] I came across this info that [the tomato] was native to the Americas, it just brought this really big smile to my face,” Craig says. “As a Native American in Arizona, you don’t really see yourself represented in really anything, let alone cookbooks and culinary school curriculum. So that was a neat point of validation for me that grew into many other interests.”
Craig eventually landed a job at one of Phoenix’s top fine dining restaurants, a goal he’d been working towards for years. But after a period of sobriety, a relapse ultimately cost him the job. He wound up in jail, where he worked in the kitchen and learned to design meals with whatever food was on hand.
“I was bunched in with the other Native Americans. And in jail, we call ourselves ‘chiefs,’” he says. “Banding together to feed, I think it was 7,800 inmates a day, was really eye-opening. It showed me that I was not above or below any style of cooking.”
Over the years, Craig completed nine rehabs and ran away from five others. Now sober, he works as the nutritional recovery program coordinator at the White Mountain Apache tribe-owned Rainbow Treatment Center in Whiteriver, Ariz., which serves people recovering from substance abuse. In 2021, he opened Café Gozhóó, a restaurant on the reservation that’s a place for the community to eat and talk. His new memoir is Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef.
Interview highlights
On the ubiquity of Native American food
For major American holidays like Thanksgiving, everyday staples like turkey, corn, squash and cranberries — those are all important Indigenous foods. And when people ask me what recipes or what ways do we prepare Native foods differently, or the question comes up, how come I haven’t heard of a Native American restaurant, or why are there no Native American cookbooks? I usually will say, “Well, you’ve been eating Native American foods and cuisine since as long as you can remember. It’s just that the stories are not told.”
All of American cuisine, every region in the United States is built on the landscapes or the ancestral terroir of Native American food and food traditions. So you can say Boston baked beans, barbecue in the American Southwest. … The hunting and fishing and agricultural bounty of the Northwest. All of these landscapes inform our diets as everyday Americans. So when we think about how we prepare different ingredients, I think it’s pretty straightforward and simple. We like to roast them, simmer them, turn them into pies just like everyone else sometimes. But Native foods have been there the whole time.
On why frybread isn’t Indigenous
It’s not an Indigenous food. It has this lasting legacy with us and when you study how foods were distributed once people were imprisoned, and foods that were distributed required a ration card, and you might get flour, some dried beef, maybe some rice and potatoes, maybe some coffee and sugar. Ration lists varied from place to place, but they were pretty much always going to contain flour and lard, and so frybread emerges, some say in the Southwest. And there’s big debates about where and who did it first, but if you look across all of Native America from Florida to New York to the Great Plains to the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, every tribe has frybread as a result of military food rations and that grows into these food traditions that are a part of our reality today. I teach it in a way that hopefully can promote responsibility and food choices, not to take it away, but to be aware.
On working at Mary Elaine’s, a high-end French restaurant in Phoenix
That place really built me up into a very strong, young chef. I was an entremetier on the meat station, which means I cook all the vegetables and do all the garnishes. And I became the saucier and the guy that cooks the meat on the meat station. And to be in Arizona, a very meat and potatoes state, it was the busiest station in that kitchen. And I realized how strong I was. And it was beautiful, best of everything. … So it really meant a lot to me. And when I lost that opportunity because of a relapse that crept in and took over, it was heartbreaking. I did not have the words to say it then, but it was a debilitating loss. That I took maybe five, 10, 15 years to process.
On selling his prized Japanese knives for alcohol
Addiction strips away everything slowly. It’s this terrible, terrible affliction that just causes you to devalue yourself and all of your belongings. … These knives were special because I had got them on a trip to Japan in 2007, where I prepared a seven-course tasting menu of Western Apache cooking and cuisine at the Imperial Hotel of Osaka. So I cherished these knives because they were like samurai swords. They were made by a knife maker whose ancestors made samurai swords and were samurai. And I brought them back to the States with me and I still have one of them with me, but I sold those other ones and it was terrible.
On experiencing sexual abuse as a kid
I included this part of my life not as the sole cause of addiction and dependency but a contributing factor. … I never told anyone about the sexual assault I encountered when I was 10 years old. I was just a little kid. My worldview was that it happened to me and it was my fault. My worldview is that no one’s going to believe me. So I just kept it in. And when I kept it, it festered and grew into this rage and anger and shame. And so when I talk about sexual abuse in my story, it’s not to point the finger at it, but I had to really take a long time to come to terms that I was a victim of that, and it doesn’t determine who I am.
On seeing a lot of alcohol addiction on Native reservations
As Indigenous people, we experience oppression differently. We experience being an American citizen differently. We experience capitalism, imperialism and colonialism differently. The systems that enable those three monsters were not designed and built by us. And as Native American peoples, we’ve inherited a legacy of historical trauma and colonial violence. So it’s not that we are different biologically, it’s that we have a different legacy in encounters with colonial violence in America. That’s what I feel is one of the root causes of this multi-dimensional monster that is addiction.
On why he has a Mormon name (Nephi)
All my life, I always encounter these really big, complicated web of American history and our lifelines as Native American people. So how my family encounters organized religion and the LDS Church is when they were small, my dad is out in the Navajo Nation, there were Mormon missionaries trying to convert people all over the Southwest and on the Navajo Nation, and the same thing in Whiteriver on the Apache rez. And so my parents were both placed on the placement program, which is where in the ’50s and ’60s and into the ’70s, young Native American kids were taken from their homes and placed in Mormon homes in Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, anywhere there was a high population of Mormon families. And my parents were essentially raised in the Mormon church in a Mormon community till they graduated high school. And that’s a big part of our life. And so when the three of us, me and my brothers come, into the picture, they decide to name me Nephi. … It’s a lot of complicated elements in how identity forms and for me that’s one dimension of how it contributes to substance use but also freeing myself from it, too.
Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
A gold-colored item embossed with the word “President” sits on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 10, 2025.
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The New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan has spent the past 11 years covering President Trump through three political campaigns, his first, and now second, term in office and the ongoing war with Iran. Swan says aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, he can’t remember a time where Trump looked “as stuck as he looks right now.”
“It’s pretty clear he realizes that this war [with Iran] has not gone well, has not played out the way that Netanyahu pitched him or that Trump himself thought [it] would play out,” Swan says. “Trump is someone who is naturally given to hubris, but I think we saw a very extreme version of that with this war.”
Swan and his co-author Maggie Haberman spoke with more than 1,000 sources for their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book paints a picture of an unrestrained president remaking the American government and its international relations in profound ways.
Swan notes that the president, who sat for an interview for the book, has been particularly fixated on becoming a “great man of history” during his second term. During one interview, Trump showed Swan and Haberman a document that compared him to notorious historical figures like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
“[The list had] nothing to do with morality, all just about pure power projection. And Trump was relishing being in their company,” Swan says. “Maggie and I talked about it afterwards, and it really occurred to us that when you look at it through that lens, his second term makes a lot more sense.”
Swan says the president’s fixation on power is reflected in his decisions to go to war in Iran and implement regime change in Venezuela. But he also sees it manifested in Trump’s White House decor, which leans on what Swan calls the president’s “inner Louis XIV” style.
“He’s gilded almost every corner of the Oval Office,” Sway says. “The history of the Oval Office in the White House has been of modesty when it comes to design and decoration, reflecting the fact that America is a republic, not a monarchy. Trump has no use for that history.”
In a post on Truth Social, Trump referred to Regime Change as “mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things [Haberman] has written about me for so many years.”
Interview highlights
On how Trump’s second term differs from his first
This term is unrecognizable from term one. And I still think a lot of people view [this] administration and government through the lens of the first term. It just couldn’t be more different. One of the ways in which it’s different is the team around him.
I remember in term one covering Trump, and you would have so many conversations with senior officials, including senior national security officials, and the overwhelming impression that you would receive from talking to these people was, A, they thought they were working for someone who was dangerous. And they saw their own roles as protecting the country and the world from the person that they were ostensibly working for. Those types of people don’t exist anymore in this administration. …
At a senior level, it’s really a group of people who believe in him, are loyal to him, in some cases went through the campaign with him. Many of them were radicalized on the campaign through the investigations and the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump. Many of them received some subpoenas themselves and viewed the stakes of the 2024 election as not so much about policy, but about staying out of prison.
So that’s the mindset of Trump and his inner circle. And it’s created a situation where there’s very little friction between a Donald Trump idea that might’ve just leapt straight from his internal monologue out of his mouth, with no filter, to an effort to make it actual American policy and execution.
On Trump’s meeting style
Meetings have no beginning, middle or end. There’s almost no delineation. And what often ends up happening is it’s essentially one meeting that just rolls throughout the afternoon with different people joining and leaving. And Trump [is] engaged or not engaged, people who have no business being in the meeting sometimes joining, whether it’s a pro wrestler, or a crypto investor, or foreign somebody from a golf monarchy, or a CEO. …
The New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are the authors of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
The conversations are non-linear. Trump will get fascinated about one thing that has nothing to do with the topic and that can derail a meeting. We have a scene in the book where he’s having a conversation, a very small meeting, which is highly classified about a defense program, and this guy comes in, just walks into the Oval, salt of the earth, kind of country looking guy, and he’s holding stone samples for the Rose Garden … and the two go off and sort of start conferring, looking out the window, talking about the paving and the stone and this and that, gets on the phone with another contractor. And before time’s up, the meeting’s ended, they haven’t actually resolved the issue they were going to resolve.
On the higher level of secrecy in Trump’s second term
When there are issues that Trump really cares about, or his team wants to keep secret, they can be incredibly secretive, to the point of great frustration across the government. And when it comes to the weightiest issues like the planning of going to war with Iran, we found that very, very senior people in the government were, A, completely cut out of the loop and, B, had no idea about what was being discussed in the Oval Office.
On Trump’s focus on decorating the White House
I traveled with President Trump to the Middle East, palace after palace. And it was really instructive to watch him with these Middle Eastern rulers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Emirates. He was just in a state of absolute pleasure, going from one palace to the next, admiring the marble, looking at most rarefied displays of state wealth on Earth. And that’s essentially what he’s trying to create at the White House. … He’s building this grand ballroom. He seemed to almost be competing with Melania as to who had had the better bedroom. They have separate bedrooms and he was taking objects that she had placed in the center hall of the residence and putting them in his bedroom.
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On the challenge of interviewing Trump
An interview with Trump requires an enormous amount of preparation if you want to hope to come out of it with any level of success. He’s a really difficult interview… He’s an overwhelming presence and you are confronted with a sort of tidal wave of words. Many of the words and the sentences are detached from reality or completely false. And you have to make judgments in real time about what you let go. You can’t fact-check everything. You just can’t. You can pick your moments.
I see my role in every interview as the representative of the people in that chair. You’re the one who’s lucky enough to be sitting in that chair interviewing the president of the United States. What would regular people want to know and want me to do in that situation? And I think that when you’re interviewing a president of the United States, you want to find the balance between letting them explain themselves and not cutting in every two seconds, but finding moments that are really important to puncture the bubble. Trump creates an unreality bubble. It’s the way he operates. … Tucker Carlson actually described it publicly as like being under a spell and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe a supernatural dimension to it, but I know what he’s getting at.
Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
The real spectrum of housing insecurity
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Who counts as homeless in America?
If you ask the Department of Housing and Urban Development, around 750,000 people are homeless in America. If you ask the Department of Education, that number shoots up into the millions. What does this discrepancy tell us? And how do our cultural ideas about homelessness shape who we see as homeless, and who gets help? To find out, Brittany talks with Dr. Margot Kushel, Director at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, and Dr. Molly Richard, assistant professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences.
Want more deep dives on cultural taboos? Check out these episodes:
The truth about men on the ‘down low’
Why can’t we be normal about polyamory?
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This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from Josephine Nyounai. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
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