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Dan Schneider, the children’s television producer and writer behind many of Nickelodeon’s biggest hits, released a video Tuesday in which he apologizes for some of his behavior at work, including requesting massages on set. The video comes after the premiere of a documentary series in which former employees denounced him as a boss and objected to the sexualized humor in his programs.
The four-episode series, “Silence on the set: The dark side of children’s television” included interviews with numerous former employees of Schneider’s shows and former child actors who criticized the way he treated them or described the environment on set as harmful.
Schneider declined to be interviewed for the series, which first aired Sunday and Monday. But he had the effect of bringing him out of relative obscurity to address the many complaints about the shows and the treatment of the people who worked on them. Schneider has rarely been in the public eye since parting ways with Nickelodeon in 2018, after an investigation by ViacomCBS, Nickelodeon’s parent company, found that many people he worked with viewed him as verbally abusive.
“Watching the last two nights was very difficult, I faced my past behaviors, some of which are embarrassing and which I regret, and I definitely owe some people a pretty strong apology,” Schneider saying in an almost 20-minute video posted on his YouTube channel. His comments were moderated by the actor known as BooG! E, who appeared on one of Schneider’s shows, “iCarly.”
In the docuseries, Jenny Kilgen, a former writer on “The Amanda Show,” Schneider’s first hit starring Amanda Bynes, said Schneider made sexual and inappropriate jokes in the writers’ room, even asking her if she had a past doing phone sex. . , and she asked him to give her a massage.
“Sometimes he would say things like, ‘Can you give me a massage, please?’ I’ll put one of your sketches on the show,’” Kilgen said in the series. “And he always presented it as a joke, you know, and he would laugh while he said it, but you always felt like not agreeing with Dan or standing up for yourself could get you fired.”
A statement included in the documentary said Schneider denied Kilgen’s claims.
The series, which was produced in collaboration with Business Insider reporter Kate Taylor, who had previously reported on Schneider, said Kilgen sued the show’s producer, alleging gender discrimination, harassment and a hostile work environment. The lawsuit was eventually settled.
In the apology video, Schneider called it “wrong” to have asked for massages and said, “I apologize to anyone I put in that situation, and I also apologize to the people who were walking through Video Village or wherever they were.” “It happened, because there were a lot of people who witnessed it and who also felt uncomfortable.”
Schneider also apologized for making inappropriate jokes in the writers’ room: “The fact that I participated in that, especially when I was running the room, makes me ashamed. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
In the docuseries, directed by Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz, former employees also recalled Schneider yelling at work (one former writer described him as “volatile” and could “flip at any moment”) and former child actors They opposed the extreme tasks they were asked to do in a “Fear Factor”-style television segment in which the actors recalled being asked to do stunts like drinking sugar and lying down covered in peanut butter while a dog licked them the body.
Schneider lamented both types of complaints, saying, “Watching that show, there were so many times I wanted to pick up the phone and call some of those people and say, ‘I’m so sorry.'”
Through clips from past Nickelodeon shows, including “Zoey 101” and “iCarly,” the series has aired objections to children’s television material that many saw as thinly veiled sexual innuendos and questioned how they made it to air.
Trying to defend himself against accusations that parts of his shows were inappropriate for minors, the former television producer said that adults now see jokes written for children “through their lenses,” but added that he would be willing to remove parts of show that they bothered people.
“If there’s something on a show that needs to be cut because it’s bothering someone, let’s cut it,” he said.
He also noted “many, many levels of scrutiny” at the network over the content of its shows, denying that it had unilateral power over scripts.
Much of the viral docuseries focused on three Nickelodeon employees who were convicted of sex crimes against children, including Brian Peck, a former speech coach. On the show, Jared Drake Bell, one of the stars of Schneider’s show “Drake & Josh,” detailed the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Peck, who in 2004 pleaded no contest to two felonies: oral copulation with a minor and lewd acts. and lascivious with a child.
Bell recalled in the series that Schneider offered his support following the revelations about Peck, and in Schneider’s video, the former producer recalled Bell’s ordeal as the “darkest part of his career.”
“When I watched the show,” Schneider said of his experience watching the documentary, “I could see the pain in some people’s eyes.”
Additional reporting by Shivani González.