How early 2000's children's television paved the way for our present nightmare

New documentary Quiet on Set shows the early stages of sexualisation and exploitation of children to satisfy adults' malaise

Has modern media destroyed the minds of millions of children these last two generations? I think there is an argument to be made that it has.

I often see non-trans related phenomena that offer glimpses into how we got to the point we are now, with almost all institutions in the English speaking world wholeheartedly adopting the insane delusion that children should be allowed to access sex change procedures. Last year, I wrote about one of my subscribers who had told me about her child and the push to put him on drugs to control his normal childhood behaviours. The rush to medicalise normal childhood was the predicate for the rush to chemically and surgically erase puberty.

This week I watched a very grim series on the child stars of early 21st century Nickelodeon, and the humiliations and abuses that were inflicted on them by predatory adults as payment for their fame and public adoration. Exploitation of children with big talent and bigger dreams is nothing new. In the Dickens novel Nicholas Nickelby, the child star The Infant Phenomenon, “had been kept up late every night, and put upon an unlimited allowance of gin-and-water from infancy, to prevent her growing tall.” And that was the 1830’s!

But by the early 2000’s, the child fame industry created content which erased child-adult boundaries  in ways that I don’t remember seeing when I myself was a child watching child actors in films and television shows. 

A good example of this was the over-the-top awards ceremonies, the kiddie Oscars if you will, but there is none of the elegance and poise of the grown up award shows. Quite the contrary, they are an unwatchable series of dumb jokes, slime pranks, burping challenges, hideous sets, and hugely fake enthusiasm. Despite this low-brow vibe, the shows featured hosts who — to my huge surprise — were big name, A list celebs like Robert de Niro and Jamie Foxx. These awards are voted on by actual kids (it is claimed), so the appearances of highly esteemed actors is testament to the huge purchasing power of the kid demographic. It was the golden era of the brat. 

But it also put the kid stars on a par with seasoned and sophisticated actors in ways which not even the most gifted and mature kid actor could ever live up to. I found myself uncomfortable at watching goofy and desperate-to-please child stars, barely out of elementary school, mingling so freely with sophisticated professionals decades their senior — on a seemingly equal footing. 

The first decade of the 21st century was a particularly execrable time for popular culture, a turning point when the previously un-doable suddenly became the norm. Levels of crass were dialled up to a thousand across all cultural output. So it’s no surprise that the “cultural juggernaut” television shows of the Nickelodeon cable television empire were vile in every possible way. I’ve never watched any of them, because at the time I was in my twenties, working and socialising with other adults — but Quiet on Set makes it very clear that this was not the Sesame Street and Mr Rogers of yesteryear — shows I had watched as a child that were fun but very age appropriate. In the 1970’s, kids were just kids. By the early 2000’s, they were tiny adults in compromising positions. 

The man behind this bonanza of poor taste was called Dan Schneider. Schneider, who at the time resembled a human-sized slug wearing a Beatles wig, was the king pin whose summary judgment of you could make the difference between kiddie fame or boring obscurity. He was also a — and I believe this is the technical term — fat fuck who relished in the humiliation of others. In one episode, Schneider proudly tells an interviewer that he loves when the cast — all kids — gets “sassy” with him, because he has all the power over the script and therefore “can put them in any horrible predicament I choose.”

 His target demographic: ages 6-14. His product: reprehensible. 

It was middle school girls having viscous liquids squirted on their faces, boys and girls sucking on things, lingering feet shots. In a particularly creepy sequence of clips from a show called Victorious, a very young Ariana Grande sucks on her own toes, lies back on a bed and squirts water all over herself, rubs her hands up and down a potato and makes loud sighing noises while yelling “give up the juuuuice.”

The paedophilic slant of all this is patently obvious, and yet at the time millions of American children consumed this garbage regularly. They aspired to be like the kids on the shows. The trashy and value-free messaging imprinted on the psyches of countless children, who are the same generation of the young adults that we now see screaming about zi/zir pronouns on TikTok. Has there ever been a generation of young people as deeply betrayed by adults as this one? 

The documentary names two men who worked closely with children on the Nickelodeon sets who were convicted of child sex offences while working there. This should come as a surprise to no one — adults who seem especially keen to spend time “having fun” with children not their own, are walking red flags. Nor should it surprise the viewers that the network and its execs did nothing to protect the kids. “Children are just a dollar sign when they show up on set,” said one former child actor. Of course they are. 

That calculus — while mercenary and terrible — is somehow less loathsome to me than the calculus the parents in the documentary made when they put their children into the meat grinder of Nickelodeon. These parents were looking to heal their own wounds and live out their fantasies through their defenceless children, who want nothing more than to please them and, by extension, the predatory adults in the industry.

One mother of a plain and charmless pre-teen girl brought her to Nickelodeon because her own mother had quashed her dreams of child stardom. The reason? Because in the 1940’s or ’50's, the woman’s mother had been an office worker in a famous LA studio, and she had seen the predations and dangers of the place. She wanted to protect her own children and refused to let them join the business. But the Boomer mother interviewed for the documentary had rejected her mother’s sound advice out of resentment, and in doing so put her child in harms way. The girl who — sorry to be unkind — had absolutely zero sparkle or charismatic beauty, was soon picked out by a child molester assistant who groomed her, eventually sending her a photo of him masturbating. Thankfully, her mother removed her from the business before further harm could be done. But the girl went through this before even reaching high school. 

“I wanted nothing more in life than to get on stage” said Drake Bell, one of the network’s biggest stars and also the biggest victim, enduring multiple rapes starting when he was 15 years old, from his show’s dialogue coach.

There are also children who want nothing more in life than to be the opposite sex. Just because a child yearns for something does not mean it’s in the child’s best interest to get it. 

Yearning and longing and dreaming are key activities for children and adolescents. They help us begin to form our identities and set very early goals for what we want when we are old enough to get it. We cycle through things that provoke these feelings in us. One day it could be a pink tutu, the next, a desire to befriend dolphins. One week the object of our intense, ardent, affection could be an A-list Hollywood actor, the next our female best friend. The picking up and the discarding of passions is a process we must go through, but not in a space where those passions result in actions done by us or to us, that are set in stone and cannot be left behind. 

These passions and innocent fantasies are the childish things that adults used to be expected to put away. American culture has developed so far away from that sound principle, which states children are children and must learn from the adults, not befriend or perform for them or offer them some sort of catharsis. The lack of this distinction between what is for children and what is for adults creates a society that can be sold on the idea of trans children. Horrors ensue. 

So many American children suffer deep psychological enmeshment with the adults in their lives, because traditional values have been not just abandoned, but are at this stage at risk of becoming illegal in many places.  Of course, traditional parenting was far from perfect, and children have been treated cruelly in many times before our own. But we have messed with the seasons of life, and many boundary violations have occurred as a result.

Those who would mess with the traditional adult-child relationship only ever have malevolent or deeply foolish motivations for doing so. Quiet on Set is just further proof of that.