Christy Carlson Romano Addressed the 'Quiet On Set' Documentary

Trigger warning: This piece contains descriptions of sexual assault and abuse. While Investigation Discovery's explosive docu-series Quiet On Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV saw child stars exposing the entertainment industry, detailing sexual abuse, and explaining how major networks turned a blind eye to dark situations, Christy Carlson Romano explained that she won't be giving the show or the team behind it any of her time. 

Entertainment Weekly reports that while she is an advocate for child actors and entertainers, she chose not to participate in a project about it from Investigation Discovery. Romano still isn't sure if the team approached her about Quiet On Set specifically, but noted that she didn't see value in just exposing toxic work environments without offering a solution.

It's all set to go down on tomorrow's episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, a podcast hosted by Bialik that discusses mental health and emotional well-being. Romano led the animated series Kim Possible and starred in Even Stevens on the Disney Channel. Both shows aired during the early 2000s. 

"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," Romano 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?'"

EW notes that the team behind Quiet On Set hasn't responded to Roman's comments.

Romano went on to say that the production team's approach to the series was "exploitative and hopeless." She even called out the whole show as "trauma porn."

"[Fellow child actor] Alyson Stoner, who is a fantastic advocate in this space, has really impinged upon me the importance of understanding trauma porn," she 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. I felt like there's no hope being inserted into the narrative."

She also pointed out that the documentarians aren't child actors themselves and offered a view that wouldn't be genuine to the experiences that they wanted to cover.

"These are people who don't belong to our community," Romano elaborated. "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."

Romano finished by saying that she hasn't seen the show and doesn't plan on watching.

"I think that it's extremely triggering," she said. "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."

Unlike the team behind Quiet On Set, Romano shared ideas to improve working conditions for child actors, mentioning the Looking Ahead program and noting that television and movie productions have things like intimacy coordinators, animal wranglers, and firearms specialists, but nothing specifically aimed at protecting children.

"I look at this actually as labor, as a child labor issue, in that there is a union where the child laborers pay the same amount to be covered by the protections that an adult would have, with an intimacy coordinator on set, and if there [are] guns on set, or if there [are] animals on set," she said.

"All those things are called out. 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?" Romano added.

She continued, "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."

If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor. If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.

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