Ariana Grande just addressed the claims made by former Nickelodeon stars in the ID documentary “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV.” Among the stars of “Quiet on Set,” whose five episodes debuted on Max and Discovery+ earlier this spring, was the singer-actor. The documentary series looked at unsettling moments that appeared to sexualize young Nickelodeon performers.
Quiet on Set drew in longtime Nickelodeon producer Dan Schneider, who created “Victorious” and “Sam & Cat,” as well as convicted sex offender Brian Peck.
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Ariana Grande Said Hearing About Coworkers’ Experiences Was ‘Devastating’
The “Wicked” actress called for therapists to be “mandatory” on kid show sets as she reflected on her time spent on the sets of “Victorious” and “Sam & Cat”. Grande said that hearing about the experiences of some of her coworkers was “devastating.”
In a recent episode of his podcast Podcrushed, Gossip Girl actor Penn Badgley openly discussed the docuseries with Grande.
“Obviously, my relationship to child acting has, and is currently, and has been changing,” she told Badgley and his co-hosts. “I’m reprocessing a lot of what the experience was like. I think that the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting.”
Grande pointed out that child and teenage actors will frequently do almost anything to make a scene memorable or to make viewers laugh. Reliving some of her Nickelodeon moments, she claimed, has changed her perspective on how she behaved and how her adult supervisors had told her to.
Ariana Said ‘I Think The Environment Needs To Be Made Safer …’
“I think the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting,” Grande said on her episode of Podcrushed. “And I think there should be therapists. I think parents should be allowed to be wherever they want to be, and I think not only on kids’ sets. If anyone wants to do this, or music, or anything at this level of exposure, there should be in the contract something about therapy is mandatory twice a week or thrice a week, or something like that.”
When the show first came out and the accusations were flying around, Grande claimed to be “reprocessing” her own “relationship to it a little bit now.” Given the new context, Grande has been “upset” when revisiting some of the sequences she taped as a teenager for the sitcoms in which she acted.
Ariana Grande Said ‘… I Guess I’m Upset, Yeah’
“Specifically about our show, I think that was something that we were convinced was the cool thing about us, is that we pushed the envelope with our humor,” said Grande. “And the innuendos were… it was like the cool differentiation. And I don’t know, I think it just all happened so quickly and now looking back on some of the clips I’m like, ‘Damn, really? Oh shit’…and the things that weren’t approved for the network were snuck onto like our website or whatever. I guess I’m upset, yeah.”
Ever since the docuseries on ID debuted, clips from “Sam & Cat” have gone viral. In them, Grande can be seen trying to milk a potato, sucking on her toe, and dumping water on herself while lying on the side of a bed. Some fans have spoken out about how Grande should probably be more disturbed by what she was told to do as a child star.
