I was afraid a little bit, that you will bd going down the glorious return lane. Yes, it is terrible what's happened with Drake, but that doesn't make him innocent.
Actually I think it came up before because...well...it was pretty known stuff and could have easily be connected with this, but they made the deal to not speak about it and you'll have the centerpiece of the series.
Christy Carlson Romano
Didn't know her before...Even Stevens was not a thing around here(but I get it...8 year old Achernar would have crushed on her hard).
For visualising, I remembered that stupid MDE World Peace skit Jews rock. There's a moment when they show the "big people" and as outrageous(I loved it...most unhinged stuff on TV in the recent times) as it was, they couldn't care less. They only cared when the drama started and their money source was in danger.
Modern managerial/bureocratic/clown(name it what you will) systems are such a bullshit. On paper, everyone above you is responsible, but in truth, the system is only there to protect the top people from the backlash. I don't know the degree of separation between those guys and the happenings, but I would have been too livid seeing, that the guys who earned the most money on this are acting like they have no connection to that. I believe that some of them didn't know the stuff going on, but those paychecks must have been nice. (Don't work at multinationals, kids, I'm telling you, there's a lot of bullshit going on...problems and crap never has an owner)
Also nice touch on the predatory nature on these 'true crime' style of channels. Hate them. ('300 korean kids drowned in a capsized ship...here are the last moments they recorded'...like Jesus dude)
We only heard about the things going on in the industry, it would be nice to hear something from Christy on her own terms, even if it is very unlikely. If there should be some closing words, they would be either "Stay away from the media" or "Never meet your heroes". Somber stuff.
MDE World Peace was the most transgressive piece of television media to come out in recent memory and it's ashame it only got one season. IMO Sam Hyde is a comedic genius in the best way. A lot of people want to think they're the heir apparent to Andy Kaufman but Hyde is the only one who can legitimately make that claim.
I 100% agree about over-bloated managerial systems being horrible and arranged in such a way that the people at the top are either insulated or kept ignorant of the problems at the bottom. I've worked for multinational fortune 500 companies (I agree, avoid at all costs) and I've worked for companies with a grand total of 12 employees, and if I've learned anything it's that the smaller a company is, the better you'll often be treated. As I tell people, I like having a personal relationship with the guy who signs my paycheck because, when it comes down to brass tax, you'll be a person to them rather than an easily disposable number... didn't always save me in the past, but, at the same time, I understand that business is business. I digress. The point is that I also believe that there was probably some level of ignorance at the top brass of Nickelodeon about what was going on, but I'm not sure many of them would have cared so long as the gravy train kept on rolling. Also, Brian Peck clearly had friends in high places that knew him and kept him safe. It's also why he got a job at Disney Channel immediately after Nickelodeon. Which, yes, bring to mind that one must wonder what skeletons they have in their closet. Maybe there will be a future production where Romano and other Disney Channel stars air their dirty laundry... but apparently it won't be on Investigation Discovery.
After all the things that have come out-- from Nickelodeon alums, Disney alums, and child moviestars... I'm completely in favor of simply banning underage actors. No minors in TV, film, or music recording, ever. Yes, it would make movies weird. We'd probably end up with some strange digital kabuki for representing children in entertainment media-- but would it really be any weirder than all the shows with adults portraying high-schoolers, that we already know and accept? It'd be a weird joke for a while, and then we'd all get used to it. And it would be way better than the exploitation landscape we've had for... longer than I've been alive. I mean, this has been going on since at least Shirley Temple.
I don't see that happening - there's simply too much money in child actors and, as you said in your other comment, it's always going to attract a certain personality type - but it's not a bad idea. I thought the same thing myself, in the vein that in certain cultures, women were not allowed on stage and all female parts were played by men (Kabuki theater is one example, I believe Greece, Rome, and China were the same, and even in Shakespeare's time this was the norm), so to could it just be considered culturally unacceptable for children to be featured in entertainment.
I brought up this in passing in the comments on an earlier essay in this series, and I almost made a comment to the same effect here, but more tongue in cheek than as a serious suggestion. There are definitely some merits to it. It's interesting that we're willing to make an exception to the otherwise very strict (cultural and legal) rule against child labor for the sake of what's an arbitrary suspension of disbelief issue in entertainment media. Like you said, there's lots of things that are already jarring and unrealistic there, and it's not that hard to imagine an alternate history where people got used to more theatrical rather than "realistic" conventions. AFAIK there's a lot of child roles played by full grown adults in stage theater, and no one bats an eyelid there.
On the other hand...meh. I do think we'd lose something valuable, it's kind of heavy-handed, and I'm not really a fan of banning something because of the bad apples. There's a lot of bad child performances, and a lot of their dialogue isn't especially childlike to begin with. With the right actor and role you do get a certain charm and magic you just wouldn't get with an adult, though. My two cents, anyway. Of course you could say it's not worth it anyway, and that's fair enough. Instead of going so draconian, maybe a rule like having a parent or other representative around at all times, and/or enforcing that more strongly if it's a rule already?
Plus, even if all the actors are, say, 18-21, they're still very young people who directors and other bigshots have a lot of power over. Yes, it's obviously even worse if bad things happen when even younger minors are involved, but in the end I sadly think the whole Hollywood/big studio system is rife with opportunities for all kinds of abuse of power as it is. You'd have to raze the whole thing, not just get rid of the child actors.
Still, it's a fun "what-if" and food for thought, if nothing else.
I was thinking a good example of a medium where children are pretty much nonexistent in acting roles is anime. I used to watch a lot of it and child actors are basically unheard of. Goku from Dragon Ball is voiced by the same woman who's been doing his voice in Japan since the series started airing, which makes it incredibly difficult to take seriously (more so than Dragon Ball already is) when the yoked giga-chad Goku is voiced by someone who is audibly a granny, but it's industry standard over there. It's easier to get away with in voice acting but still an interesting cultural practice.
I think a lot of it comes down to how the parents themselves handle their children. Elijah Wood, who came within millimeters of saying the quiet part out loud when Corey Feldman was going on his crusade against minor abuse in Hollywood, said the only reason he wasn't predated on was not for a lack of effort by malicious actors, but because his parents basically never let him out of eyesight, refused to let him go alone anywhere, and were extremely vigilant about who was around him and where he went. Listening to the interview with Joe, Drake's dad, it sounds as if he tried to do the same thing but, due to not having sole custody of Drake, couldn't be 100% thorough. I'm not blaming Drake's mom for what happened, but she was the one who Peck was able to get on his good side, while he worked to cut Drake's father out of the picture. I really don't see any other solution than extreme and attentive parental involvement.
Well, yeah, there's not much point in putting up with child actors when you're doing animation. I'm sure it's a lot of extra hassle for what's a pretty negligible gain to verisimilitude in that medium, even if big studios like Disney and Ghibli sometimes go the extra mile and do it anyway. And not just anime. I get the sense there's a lot of adults voicing young characters in Western animation and games too. I'm more familiar with the latter, so look at, say, the Psychonauts games, with the middle-aged Richard Horovitz voicing a 10-year-old without anyone thinking that's weird. Of course that whole setting is so unrealistic it's stupid to expect any kind of believability there to begin with.
Still, I think my favorite example here is The Last of Us, where we have a guy pushing 40 voicing a guy in his 50s, and a woman in her late 20s playing his 14 year old surrogate daugher. Still, it worked very well, and Johnson's performance was pretty well received even if she played a character half her age. Of course it's easier with women and girls, but I think you'd be hard pressed to argue The Last of Us would have been better if Ellie had been voiced by an actual 14 year old.
For some reason the Japanese are also so much better than the West at doing convincing child characters (even boys) with adult voice actresses. I have no idea why, but the difference is pretty staggering in every case I've seen (heard? :)). That makes it even less necessary to hire real kids. The one counterexample I can think of is the Boku no Natsuyasumi games, where they did insist on a real kid, at least for the first three. Now that I think about it, I wonder if that series might merit a writeup of its own. It's very different in a (mostly) good way.
While it's of course frivolous next to a topic like abuse, that's another thing that both fascinates me and makes me a little apprehensive about child acting: like I said before, you're basically asking a child do an actual adult job, often with a lot of adult money involved, and that has to seriously clash against the natural inclination of a kid to just be a kid sometimes. Even at the best of times it has to be a very strange world.
Also, if you're going to go to the trouble of having child actors with all the drawbacks that entails, I wish they'd at least let them improvise more of their dialogue and interactions more often (and/or contribute script revisions?). Just about the one thing they know better than adult professionals is how kids actually talk to and relate to each other, haha. But that's another discussion...
You hear that story over and over, with nearly every former child star who came out the other side as a reasonably sane and functional human being. They had aggressively hypervigilant parents. Those seem to be the minority in the industry.
The industry already *has* a system of child safety advocates and things, just because of this problem. They continually weasel around it. Quite a lot of the parents involved are basically pimping out their kids anyway, so leaving it to them clearly isn't good enough.
It's not just a "few bad apples"-- the problem is that the lure of fame and fortune is a frigging *magnet* for bad apples. Normal, sane, well-adjusted parents don't do that to their kids. They say no.
Great article. While no solution to the kafkaesque windings of corporate showbiz can be seen (yet) I'm left to think over "trauma tourists". The tendency to gawk at something awful is probably rooted in biology; you want to KNOW what went wrong so it does "HAPPEN TO YOU". After that though so much true crime is just using the worst days of people's lives as cheap fodder for entertainment. Anyway, I condone and wish to advance the Carthage-ing of Hollywood.
"After that though so much true crime is just using the worst days of people's lives as cheap fodder for entertainment." That's so eloquent and succinct I'm probably going to have to crib that in the future for the inevitable article on true crime (there's one case in particular I'm already working on, exploring not just the case itself but the complicated and often exploitative coverage by the true crime media complex and its deleterious knock on effects). With credit, of course. The thing is it is human nature to be beguiled by traumatic and awful events and that in and of itself isn't a problem, but when those events are sensationalized and exploited by wine aunts who make a podcast and act like they're summarizing a slasher movie rather than talking about someone (or someones) who were murdered, most of whom have living relatives that are still grappling with the effects of what happened, it just comes off as... tasteless, y'know? Again, I have a whole series coming at some point about it where I get into it more.
Be my guest! It's a very ghoulish racket. We still love the penny dreadfuls, we just make miniseries and podcasts now too. Looking forward to the article/series.
You are my favorite discovery on Substack. I originally was introduced to the platform through the essays of Rod Dreher. There are so many talented people writing on Substack . I love it !
My favorite genre is long form non-fiction both books and longer articles from magazines. Anybody remember magazines? Back when Vanity Fair was worth reading, I was guaranteed to stop everything on the day my monthly copy of Vanity Fair was delivered by the mailman. I digress :)
You write well actually very well. Have you thought about submitting something to www.longreads.com ? Your work would fit right in. I can't wait to read your next article. FYI, I worked a 12 hr shift and came home and couldn't wait to eat my egg and bacon sandwich and read your latest. Keep going !!!
PS My youngest daughter gave me Jeanette McCurdy's book for Christmas. It is excellent and I highly recommend that anyone with an interest in child abuse read this book. What Jeanette experienced at work was far less abusive than what she experienced at home. It's amazing she survived. She is strong but she made some mistakes along the way. Now she primarily hurt herself unlike Drake who apparently hurt others but traumatized brains don't process information like normal people. It is not surprising to me that Drake turned around and did a version of the same scenario to someone else. Those paths are well trodden and breaking new mental ground is difficult.
Like I said in the afterword, I really wanted to write about McCurdy's experiences with Nickelodeon but so much of her book has nothing to do with Nickelodeon and more to do with her private life because... yeah. That poor woman went through a lot. I remember thinking while I read it, "Okay, things cannot possibly get worse for her", and yes, somehow, they always did. She succumbed to her own vices, yes, but given what happened to her, it's understandable why she ended up being so vulnerable to them.
As for Drake, that is the dirty little secret that I feel like no one want to address. Very often those who were victimized as children end up being victimizers later in life. Obviously not all, but a large percentage of them. I was fortunate and blessed enough to not suffer anything of the sort, but reading on the topic from people who have, and talking to people in my own life who experienced abuse, breaking the cycle of abuse, whether it be sexual or physical, takes Herculean personal effort. That being said, I don't think we as a society or culture address the cyclical nature of it enough as one of the root causes of abuse.
Thanks Readicat, it's comments like yours that honestly make the effort that goes into writing worth it. I've always said that my aim is to bring back the kind of long-form essays and non-fiction that I grew up reading on Blogspot and Wordpress back in the early days of the internet, and I'm glad that there's still an audience for that kind of content. Personally, I love a good deep dive on a niche subject. I haven't heard of longreads.com but I'll look into it. Thanks again, I hope you continue to enjoy what I put out.
Another banger here. And to address the voyeurism aspect and whatnot... I honestly have no answer, lol. But as someone who approach this from a fiction/culture analysis I found this very fascinating. Not in the voyeuristic sense, but in the sense of understanding the source of the entertainment that the people of my generation (inc. yours truly) grew up with and why they're the way they are. I mean let's be honest, it's really hard to pinpoint that kind of thing when it comes to TV Shows because they're collaborative efforts. With books, there's only one guy you have to worry about (usually).
At the risk of going way off topic, it reminds me of the book Degenerate Moderns where it turns out the people who wrote the things that justify sexual degeneracy tend to be sexual degenerates themselves (funny that). There's also Faith of the Fatherless which looks into famous atheists writers (like Nietzsche) and it turns out they have bad/weak/absent fathers. But I digress.
Thanks Michael. I don't think there is a singular answer, but, like you said, it's worthwhile to explore the larger scene of the production of these media artifacts and the people behind them. I don't want to say Schneider is "misunderstood" because most people get the salient point (i.e. he was not the best person), but very few bother to do the legwork to get more than a surface level understanding of the entire story. One of the best examples is the numerous accusations that Schneider would regularly yell or get verbally aggressive with his staff, which is not good, but I've read accounts from many who worked with him that said he was no more belligerent than is industry standard. Filming a show is stressful work, a tight schedule must be maintained, and going over schedule often results in costly extensions that, ultimately, fall back on the director. Again, I'm not trying to spin apologia for Schneider - I think that yelling at your subordinates regardless of your line of work is largely intolerable - but if you read accounts that are both against and for him you can synthesize the most likely true story between them that what happened on his sets - at least when it came to his aggression - is not atypical of any production. Again, I must stress - not okay, but also, if we're going to make it a sticking point against Schneider, it should be a sticking point on everyone in the industry who acts that way. Which is kind of my point that it's not a Schneider-exclusive problem, it's an industry-wide issue, and if we treat Schneider's exile from the industry as "Yay! We beat the bad guy and now everything is okay!" the cycle of on-set abuse will only continue.
There's a larger discussion to be had about the fascinating relationship between art vs. artist in collaborative mediums (television and movies) and those with only a single or a few creatives (comics and literature) that, one day, I'd like to dig into. It reminds me of the drama surrounding fan conventions where, when someone in the higher up ranks gets exposed for being a sex pest and the whole convention gets cancelled. Conventions take hundreds, if not thousands of people to get off the ground, and are the culmination of an exorbitant amount of effort, time, and sweat from all of them - should the entire convention be written off because one person in a position of power behaved poorly when so many other people were responsible for bringing it about?
Also, I'll need to look into those books. They sound like things I should read. I've always been of the opinion that many people's worst shortcomings can stem from bad/weak/absent parents of either sex. Not to self-report but I've read enough true crime content to notice a trend in serial killers and abusive/controlling/negligent/sexually promiscuous mothers.
I was afraid a little bit, that you will bd going down the glorious return lane. Yes, it is terrible what's happened with Drake, but that doesn't make him innocent.
Actually I think it came up before because...well...it was pretty known stuff and could have easily be connected with this, but they made the deal to not speak about it and you'll have the centerpiece of the series.
Christy Carlson Romano
Didn't know her before...Even Stevens was not a thing around here(but I get it...8 year old Achernar would have crushed on her hard).
For visualising, I remembered that stupid MDE World Peace skit Jews rock. There's a moment when they show the "big people" and as outrageous(I loved it...most unhinged stuff on TV in the recent times) as it was, they couldn't care less. They only cared when the drama started and their money source was in danger.
Modern managerial/bureocratic/clown(name it what you will) systems are such a bullshit. On paper, everyone above you is responsible, but in truth, the system is only there to protect the top people from the backlash. I don't know the degree of separation between those guys and the happenings, but I would have been too livid seeing, that the guys who earned the most money on this are acting like they have no connection to that. I believe that some of them didn't know the stuff going on, but those paychecks must have been nice. (Don't work at multinationals, kids, I'm telling you, there's a lot of bullshit going on...problems and crap never has an owner)
Also nice touch on the predatory nature on these 'true crime' style of channels. Hate them. ('300 korean kids drowned in a capsized ship...here are the last moments they recorded'...like Jesus dude)
We only heard about the things going on in the industry, it would be nice to hear something from Christy on her own terms, even if it is very unlikely. If there should be some closing words, they would be either "Stay away from the media" or "Never meet your heroes". Somber stuff.
MDE World Peace was the most transgressive piece of television media to come out in recent memory and it's ashame it only got one season. IMO Sam Hyde is a comedic genius in the best way. A lot of people want to think they're the heir apparent to Andy Kaufman but Hyde is the only one who can legitimately make that claim.
I 100% agree about over-bloated managerial systems being horrible and arranged in such a way that the people at the top are either insulated or kept ignorant of the problems at the bottom. I've worked for multinational fortune 500 companies (I agree, avoid at all costs) and I've worked for companies with a grand total of 12 employees, and if I've learned anything it's that the smaller a company is, the better you'll often be treated. As I tell people, I like having a personal relationship with the guy who signs my paycheck because, when it comes down to brass tax, you'll be a person to them rather than an easily disposable number... didn't always save me in the past, but, at the same time, I understand that business is business. I digress. The point is that I also believe that there was probably some level of ignorance at the top brass of Nickelodeon about what was going on, but I'm not sure many of them would have cared so long as the gravy train kept on rolling. Also, Brian Peck clearly had friends in high places that knew him and kept him safe. It's also why he got a job at Disney Channel immediately after Nickelodeon. Which, yes, bring to mind that one must wonder what skeletons they have in their closet. Maybe there will be a future production where Romano and other Disney Channel stars air their dirty laundry... but apparently it won't be on Investigation Discovery.
Excellent article and series. Trauma tourism is apt, I think. Looking forward to the next one!
After all the things that have come out-- from Nickelodeon alums, Disney alums, and child moviestars... I'm completely in favor of simply banning underage actors. No minors in TV, film, or music recording, ever. Yes, it would make movies weird. We'd probably end up with some strange digital kabuki for representing children in entertainment media-- but would it really be any weirder than all the shows with adults portraying high-schoolers, that we already know and accept? It'd be a weird joke for a while, and then we'd all get used to it. And it would be way better than the exploitation landscape we've had for... longer than I've been alive. I mean, this has been going on since at least Shirley Temple.
I don't see that happening - there's simply too much money in child actors and, as you said in your other comment, it's always going to attract a certain personality type - but it's not a bad idea. I thought the same thing myself, in the vein that in certain cultures, women were not allowed on stage and all female parts were played by men (Kabuki theater is one example, I believe Greece, Rome, and China were the same, and even in Shakespeare's time this was the norm), so to could it just be considered culturally unacceptable for children to be featured in entertainment.
I brought up this in passing in the comments on an earlier essay in this series, and I almost made a comment to the same effect here, but more tongue in cheek than as a serious suggestion. There are definitely some merits to it. It's interesting that we're willing to make an exception to the otherwise very strict (cultural and legal) rule against child labor for the sake of what's an arbitrary suspension of disbelief issue in entertainment media. Like you said, there's lots of things that are already jarring and unrealistic there, and it's not that hard to imagine an alternate history where people got used to more theatrical rather than "realistic" conventions. AFAIK there's a lot of child roles played by full grown adults in stage theater, and no one bats an eyelid there.
On the other hand...meh. I do think we'd lose something valuable, it's kind of heavy-handed, and I'm not really a fan of banning something because of the bad apples. There's a lot of bad child performances, and a lot of their dialogue isn't especially childlike to begin with. With the right actor and role you do get a certain charm and magic you just wouldn't get with an adult, though. My two cents, anyway. Of course you could say it's not worth it anyway, and that's fair enough. Instead of going so draconian, maybe a rule like having a parent or other representative around at all times, and/or enforcing that more strongly if it's a rule already?
Plus, even if all the actors are, say, 18-21, they're still very young people who directors and other bigshots have a lot of power over. Yes, it's obviously even worse if bad things happen when even younger minors are involved, but in the end I sadly think the whole Hollywood/big studio system is rife with opportunities for all kinds of abuse of power as it is. You'd have to raze the whole thing, not just get rid of the child actors.
Still, it's a fun "what-if" and food for thought, if nothing else.
I was thinking a good example of a medium where children are pretty much nonexistent in acting roles is anime. I used to watch a lot of it and child actors are basically unheard of. Goku from Dragon Ball is voiced by the same woman who's been doing his voice in Japan since the series started airing, which makes it incredibly difficult to take seriously (more so than Dragon Ball already is) when the yoked giga-chad Goku is voiced by someone who is audibly a granny, but it's industry standard over there. It's easier to get away with in voice acting but still an interesting cultural practice.
I think a lot of it comes down to how the parents themselves handle their children. Elijah Wood, who came within millimeters of saying the quiet part out loud when Corey Feldman was going on his crusade against minor abuse in Hollywood, said the only reason he wasn't predated on was not for a lack of effort by malicious actors, but because his parents basically never let him out of eyesight, refused to let him go alone anywhere, and were extremely vigilant about who was around him and where he went. Listening to the interview with Joe, Drake's dad, it sounds as if he tried to do the same thing but, due to not having sole custody of Drake, couldn't be 100% thorough. I'm not blaming Drake's mom for what happened, but she was the one who Peck was able to get on his good side, while he worked to cut Drake's father out of the picture. I really don't see any other solution than extreme and attentive parental involvement.
Well, yeah, there's not much point in putting up with child actors when you're doing animation. I'm sure it's a lot of extra hassle for what's a pretty negligible gain to verisimilitude in that medium, even if big studios like Disney and Ghibli sometimes go the extra mile and do it anyway. And not just anime. I get the sense there's a lot of adults voicing young characters in Western animation and games too. I'm more familiar with the latter, so look at, say, the Psychonauts games, with the middle-aged Richard Horovitz voicing a 10-year-old without anyone thinking that's weird. Of course that whole setting is so unrealistic it's stupid to expect any kind of believability there to begin with.
Still, I think my favorite example here is The Last of Us, where we have a guy pushing 40 voicing a guy in his 50s, and a woman in her late 20s playing his 14 year old surrogate daugher. Still, it worked very well, and Johnson's performance was pretty well received even if she played a character half her age. Of course it's easier with women and girls, but I think you'd be hard pressed to argue The Last of Us would have been better if Ellie had been voiced by an actual 14 year old.
For some reason the Japanese are also so much better than the West at doing convincing child characters (even boys) with adult voice actresses. I have no idea why, but the difference is pretty staggering in every case I've seen (heard? :)). That makes it even less necessary to hire real kids. The one counterexample I can think of is the Boku no Natsuyasumi games, where they did insist on a real kid, at least for the first three. Now that I think about it, I wonder if that series might merit a writeup of its own. It's very different in a (mostly) good way.
While it's of course frivolous next to a topic like abuse, that's another thing that both fascinates me and makes me a little apprehensive about child acting: like I said before, you're basically asking a child do an actual adult job, often with a lot of adult money involved, and that has to seriously clash against the natural inclination of a kid to just be a kid sometimes. Even at the best of times it has to be a very strange world.
Also, if you're going to go to the trouble of having child actors with all the drawbacks that entails, I wish they'd at least let them improvise more of their dialogue and interactions more often (and/or contribute script revisions?). Just about the one thing they know better than adult professionals is how kids actually talk to and relate to each other, haha. But that's another discussion...
You hear that story over and over, with nearly every former child star who came out the other side as a reasonably sane and functional human being. They had aggressively hypervigilant parents. Those seem to be the minority in the industry.
The industry already *has* a system of child safety advocates and things, just because of this problem. They continually weasel around it. Quite a lot of the parents involved are basically pimping out their kids anyway, so leaving it to them clearly isn't good enough.
It's not just a "few bad apples"-- the problem is that the lure of fame and fortune is a frigging *magnet* for bad apples. Normal, sane, well-adjusted parents don't do that to their kids. They say no.
Great article. While no solution to the kafkaesque windings of corporate showbiz can be seen (yet) I'm left to think over "trauma tourists". The tendency to gawk at something awful is probably rooted in biology; you want to KNOW what went wrong so it does "HAPPEN TO YOU". After that though so much true crime is just using the worst days of people's lives as cheap fodder for entertainment. Anyway, I condone and wish to advance the Carthage-ing of Hollywood.
"After that though so much true crime is just using the worst days of people's lives as cheap fodder for entertainment." That's so eloquent and succinct I'm probably going to have to crib that in the future for the inevitable article on true crime (there's one case in particular I'm already working on, exploring not just the case itself but the complicated and often exploitative coverage by the true crime media complex and its deleterious knock on effects). With credit, of course. The thing is it is human nature to be beguiled by traumatic and awful events and that in and of itself isn't a problem, but when those events are sensationalized and exploited by wine aunts who make a podcast and act like they're summarizing a slasher movie rather than talking about someone (or someones) who were murdered, most of whom have living relatives that are still grappling with the effects of what happened, it just comes off as... tasteless, y'know? Again, I have a whole series coming at some point about it where I get into it more.
Be my guest! It's a very ghoulish racket. We still love the penny dreadfuls, we just make miniseries and podcasts now too. Looking forward to the article/series.
You are my favorite discovery on Substack. I originally was introduced to the platform through the essays of Rod Dreher. There are so many talented people writing on Substack . I love it !
My favorite genre is long form non-fiction both books and longer articles from magazines. Anybody remember magazines? Back when Vanity Fair was worth reading, I was guaranteed to stop everything on the day my monthly copy of Vanity Fair was delivered by the mailman. I digress :)
You write well actually very well. Have you thought about submitting something to www.longreads.com ? Your work would fit right in. I can't wait to read your next article. FYI, I worked a 12 hr shift and came home and couldn't wait to eat my egg and bacon sandwich and read your latest. Keep going !!!
PS My youngest daughter gave me Jeanette McCurdy's book for Christmas. It is excellent and I highly recommend that anyone with an interest in child abuse read this book. What Jeanette experienced at work was far less abusive than what she experienced at home. It's amazing she survived. She is strong but she made some mistakes along the way. Now she primarily hurt herself unlike Drake who apparently hurt others but traumatized brains don't process information like normal people. It is not surprising to me that Drake turned around and did a version of the same scenario to someone else. Those paths are well trodden and breaking new mental ground is difficult.
Like I said in the afterword, I really wanted to write about McCurdy's experiences with Nickelodeon but so much of her book has nothing to do with Nickelodeon and more to do with her private life because... yeah. That poor woman went through a lot. I remember thinking while I read it, "Okay, things cannot possibly get worse for her", and yes, somehow, they always did. She succumbed to her own vices, yes, but given what happened to her, it's understandable why she ended up being so vulnerable to them.
As for Drake, that is the dirty little secret that I feel like no one want to address. Very often those who were victimized as children end up being victimizers later in life. Obviously not all, but a large percentage of them. I was fortunate and blessed enough to not suffer anything of the sort, but reading on the topic from people who have, and talking to people in my own life who experienced abuse, breaking the cycle of abuse, whether it be sexual or physical, takes Herculean personal effort. That being said, I don't think we as a society or culture address the cyclical nature of it enough as one of the root causes of abuse.
Thanks Readicat, it's comments like yours that honestly make the effort that goes into writing worth it. I've always said that my aim is to bring back the kind of long-form essays and non-fiction that I grew up reading on Blogspot and Wordpress back in the early days of the internet, and I'm glad that there's still an audience for that kind of content. Personally, I love a good deep dive on a niche subject. I haven't heard of longreads.com but I'll look into it. Thanks again, I hope you continue to enjoy what I put out.
An insightful and well-written climax to an excellent series. Thank you. Looking forward to your summation.
Thanks Mark, I'm glad you enjoyed.
Another banger here. And to address the voyeurism aspect and whatnot... I honestly have no answer, lol. But as someone who approach this from a fiction/culture analysis I found this very fascinating. Not in the voyeuristic sense, but in the sense of understanding the source of the entertainment that the people of my generation (inc. yours truly) grew up with and why they're the way they are. I mean let's be honest, it's really hard to pinpoint that kind of thing when it comes to TV Shows because they're collaborative efforts. With books, there's only one guy you have to worry about (usually).
At the risk of going way off topic, it reminds me of the book Degenerate Moderns where it turns out the people who wrote the things that justify sexual degeneracy tend to be sexual degenerates themselves (funny that). There's also Faith of the Fatherless which looks into famous atheists writers (like Nietzsche) and it turns out they have bad/weak/absent fathers. But I digress.
Thanks Michael. I don't think there is a singular answer, but, like you said, it's worthwhile to explore the larger scene of the production of these media artifacts and the people behind them. I don't want to say Schneider is "misunderstood" because most people get the salient point (i.e. he was not the best person), but very few bother to do the legwork to get more than a surface level understanding of the entire story. One of the best examples is the numerous accusations that Schneider would regularly yell or get verbally aggressive with his staff, which is not good, but I've read accounts from many who worked with him that said he was no more belligerent than is industry standard. Filming a show is stressful work, a tight schedule must be maintained, and going over schedule often results in costly extensions that, ultimately, fall back on the director. Again, I'm not trying to spin apologia for Schneider - I think that yelling at your subordinates regardless of your line of work is largely intolerable - but if you read accounts that are both against and for him you can synthesize the most likely true story between them that what happened on his sets - at least when it came to his aggression - is not atypical of any production. Again, I must stress - not okay, but also, if we're going to make it a sticking point against Schneider, it should be a sticking point on everyone in the industry who acts that way. Which is kind of my point that it's not a Schneider-exclusive problem, it's an industry-wide issue, and if we treat Schneider's exile from the industry as "Yay! We beat the bad guy and now everything is okay!" the cycle of on-set abuse will only continue.
There's a larger discussion to be had about the fascinating relationship between art vs. artist in collaborative mediums (television and movies) and those with only a single or a few creatives (comics and literature) that, one day, I'd like to dig into. It reminds me of the drama surrounding fan conventions where, when someone in the higher up ranks gets exposed for being a sex pest and the whole convention gets cancelled. Conventions take hundreds, if not thousands of people to get off the ground, and are the culmination of an exorbitant amount of effort, time, and sweat from all of them - should the entire convention be written off because one person in a position of power behaved poorly when so many other people were responsible for bringing it about?
Also, I'll need to look into those books. They sound like things I should read. I've always been of the opinion that many people's worst shortcomings can stem from bad/weak/absent parents of either sex. Not to self-report but I've read enough true crime content to notice a trend in serial killers and abusive/controlling/negligent/sexually promiscuous mothers.
"If there is a solution, it has to come from smarter individuals than I, and it has to come from within the industry."
What's wrong with the idea about the razing and the salting?