Mayim Bialik Speaks Out About Abuse & Harassment Amid ‘Quiet on Set’ Allegations

Former Jeopardy! host Mayim Bialik has shared her thoughts on Investigation Discovery’s Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV docuseries and its allegations of horrific abuse.

On the latest episode of the Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast, the Big Bang Theory alum spoke with her former Blossom co-star Jenna von Oÿ and former Disney Channel star Christy Carlson Romano about their experiences as child actors, as well as industry-wide abuse and harassment.

“Women being berated in the writer’s room is something that was just like — I’m sorry — it was considered in — I mean, I hate to say it, — it’s considered par for the course,” Bialik said when touching on allegations made in the ID doc by a couple of women writers against Nickelodeon producer Dan Schneider.

“I will say I do not believe that happened in our writer’s room [on Blossom], and there were things that we all thought were okay to even joke about which now we’d be mortified,” she added.

Von Oÿ shared how the claims made in Quiet on Set were “things that I heard about other sets during our time.”

The ID series documents children’s TV shows from the late 1990s and early 2000s, mainly focused on Nickelodeon, with former child stars speaking out about their alleged experiences of abuse, sexism, and racism.

Carlson, who starred on Disney Channel’s Even Stevens, said she hasn’t been able to watch Quiet on Set because she found it “extremely triggering.”

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“I think we’re all kind of living with a little bit of survivor’s guilt,” she noted. “That could have been any one of us, and we all kind of need to grieve together, I think at this point and sort of come together to try to figure out what now.”

Bialik added, “You’re watching what the entire culture was like. This is not what what happened because ‘Nickelodeon this-that.’ Of course, it touched me personally. Of course it did.”

However, she also tried to find the positive, saying, “But what it also reminded me of is how far we had to come to get to a place where people like Christy get to advocate and we know what she means when she says, the mental health of children on set matters and there are things that we can do to make sure that there are no exceptions. ‘You don’t get to push that child.’”