Christy Carlson Romano says she rejected documentary from Quiet on Set network: 'These are trauma tourists'

Christy Carlson Romano is an advocate for protecting child actors and entertainers — and she has no interest in watching Investigation Discovery's Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, which publicized allegations of abuse and a toxic work environment at Nickelodeon.

The former Disney Channel star, who led series like Kim Possible and Even Stevens in the early 2000s, said on this week's upcoming episode of the podcast Mayim Bialik's Breakdown that ID previously approached her about appearing in a documentary 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," Romano said. "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?'"

Representatives for ID didn't immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly's request for comment on Romano's remarks.

In a wide-ranging conversation about child acting with Blossom stars Mayim Bialik and Jenna Von Oy, Romano said that she views Quiet on Set as exploitative and hopeless. "[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."

She added, "I felt like there's no hope being inserted into the narrative."

Romano also said the documentarians' outside perspective gave her pause. "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."

Romano hasn't watched Quiet on Set because "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."

Romano is pushing for concrete changes for young performers in the entertainment industry, because she believes that child actors will remain part of Hollywood for the foreseeable future. "The way that I have come to understand how we can move through this, rather than cancel it all, throw it all out, which now you and I know will not happen," she said. "Until they create a function of AI that can replace minors on set, there will continue to be even in the non-union space, all sorts of child laborers who are also performers.

"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's guns on set, or if there’s animals on set," she continued. "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? 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 underserviced as union workers, personally."

The full conversation between Romano, Bialik, and Von Oy will premiere Tuesday on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown.

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