Former Disney Channel star Christy Carlson Romano says she has not watched Investigation Discovery’s docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV and has not participated in similar ventures because the filmmakers are typically “outsiders” and “trauma tourists.”
The former Disney Channel star says on this week’s upcoming episode of the podcast Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown that ID and other filmmakers had previously approached her about appearing in documentaries about kids TV.
“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,” said Romano, who has starred in Disney series Kim Possible and Even Stevens in the early 2000s. “I don’t know if it was this doc [Quiet on Set]. 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?”
According to an Entertainment Weekly preview of this week’s Tuesday podcast, Romano went on to say that documentarians from outside the “community” – apparently the community of former child actors and advocates – are “outsiders.”
“These are people who don’t belong to our community,” she said. “These are outsiders. And maybe they, maybe if they knew where to put money towards [fixing] a problem, they would, but again, a lot of this has been perceived in a way that’s — it’s outside baseball. It’s not inside baseball, it’s outside baseball. These are trauma tourists.”
Referring to the Quiet on Set series, which focuses on allegations of abuse and a toxic work environment at Nickelodeon from the 1990s to the 2000s, Romano said she has not watched because “I think that it’s extremely triggering. I’ve made a choice for several reasons to opt out of watching that imagery. I know a lot of the details, I know a lot of the folks involved.”
Romano also went on to discuss how documentaries like Quiet on Set can themselves be exploitive.
“Alyson Stoner [the former child actor of Step Up and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody] who is a fantastic advocate in this space, has really impinged upon me the importance of understanding trauma porn,” Romano said. “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.”
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