Disney alum Christy Carlson-Romano calls Quiet On Set producers “trauma tourists”

Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV has got a lot of people talking, including other child stars outside of the series. Though the subjects of the film like Drake Bell, Giovonnie Samuels, and Bryan Hearne have praised co-directors Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz for their handling of the subject matter, Disney Channel alum Christy Carlson-Romano has a different take. In a new episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast (via Entertainment Weekly), she condemned the Investigation Discovery docuseries for being made by “people who don’t belong to our community” and calling them “trauma tourists.”

“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,” the Even Stevens alum said. “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. 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?’”

Carlson-Romano has her own podcast network, PodCo, that employs many kids network alums, including rewatch podcasts for Wizards Of Waverly Place and Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide. On her own podcast, Vulnerable, she’s hosted fellow former child actors speaking to their experiences in the industry, like Alyson Stoner (who has their own series on the perils of child stardom called “Dear Hollywood” on YouTube). On Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, Carlson-Romano credited Stoner with emphasizing to her “the importance of understanding trauma porn.” She continued, “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.”

Carlson-Romano isn’t entirely wrong in her assessment of the docuseries. Though there are moments of genuine vulnerability in Quiet On Set (most notably Drake Bell’s story of being sexually abused by Brian Peck), parts of the documentary rely heavily on stringing together clips of seemingly innuendo-filled images from Nickelodeon shows to make the argument that Dan Schneider was having child actors do inappropriate things. Of course, Schneider’s response was that the clips being taken out of context were vetted by many levels of adults and were never intended to be sexualized. Your mileage may vary as to whether you believe his explanation. But there’s no doubt Quiet On Set sensationalized the subject in a manner befitting a conspiracy theory YouTube channel without proving anything concrete about the person who made those shows.

As for what can actually benefit child actors, Carlson-Romano said, “I do work with the Looking Ahead program, which is part of the Actors Fund. It’s only 50 percent funded by SAG, which is, I think, they need more, they’re underfunded, right?” She went on, “I had mentioned to one of the producers in the advisory committee, I said, ‘Why don’t we have all the [assistant directors] say “Minors on set,” like we have a gun, when they say “Guns on set,” and they say “Alligator on set” or whatever it is, to phrase it from a top-down scenario to understand that, yes, they’re laborers, but they’re child laborers. There is a difference.’ So I find, I do truly feel, and this may incite a little bit of backlash, but I do think they’re being under-serviced as union workers, personally.”

Unsurprisingly, there are different opinions within the former child star contingent about how best to protect child performers now and how to advocate for survivors of abuse within the community. Some of that looks like infighting: Alexa Nikolas, who was once a guest on the Vulnerable podcast and was interviewed for Quiet On Set, has called Carlson-Romano out for being a “phony” after she felt that PodCo “clickbait[ed]” her trauma. By the same measure, some individuals have criticized Nikolas and her organization “Eat Predators.” Given the level of interest in and the perceived salaciousness of child star stories, there are no doubt a lot of “trauma tourists” who would like to appropriate those stories. Someone outside the community may well be able to be objective and bring together these disparate thoughts, feelings, and ideas under one umbrella. But there’s no doubt the subject needs to be handled with sensitivity, not sensationalism, and that’s something Quiet On Set didn’t always accomplish.