A Tale of Two Studios: The Orange Years, the Dark Ages, and The Importance of Women in Leadership
It’s a wild time to be an 80s and 90s kid. The documentaries talking about “historic events” that I lived through are making it very clear that I likely have more years behind me than in front.
Still as a lover of documentaries and SNICK, I was excited about Nickelodeon: The Orange Years. Since I was already sick to my stomach, it was a good time to watch Quiet on the Set. After some reflection, I want to talk about the one thing that seems to be left out of the conversation despite being fundamental to both films: the importance of women in leadership.
A Tale of Two Studios
Nickelodeon: The Orange Years addressed the time the studio was founded through its heyday in Orlando, Florida. And in this day and age, who would have believed Florida would be the good guy?!
The Orange Years covered my favorite programs, Clarissa Explains it All and Are You Afraid of the Dark? I was a total SNICK kind of a gal (which I watched in my dad’s waterbed before going outside to play with the neighbor kids). The Orange Years ended as Geraldine Laybourne left for greener pastures and the studio moved to California. It’s a good stopping point, but it wasn’t until I watched Quiet on the Set that I realized why “The Orange Years” are the Nick Golden Years.
The trauma that followed in Quiet on the Set was tremendous, though, it was a better documentary in general, in terms of pace, flow, and tension. One of my bigger critiques was that they seemed to ambush Marc Summers who wasn’t even at Nickelodeon during the Schneider years. I was hopeful that they were using his interview to highlight the differences in leadership, but according to his interviews about it, that wasn’t the case.
Aside from that awkward moment, the content was horrifying but somehow validating.
“It’s…inappropriate”
There was something wrong with the Nick shows my little sister started watching in the late 90s and early 00s. I couldn’t put my finger on how they had changed since the ones I watched in the early 90s, but I just kept telling her they were “inappropriate” and changing the channel. For years, I had no idea why I felt that way. It was the same when I told my daughter she couldn’t watch a few other Nick shows recently. Something just seemed…off.
Through Quiet on the Set I felt validated at calling out the low-grade racist and misogynist stereotypes that made me uncomfortable. But it exposed to me the widescale sexual humor that I hadn’t watched the shows long enough to notice.
I’m not trying to be a prude or a stick in the mud, certainly as a 13-year-old guarding what my sister watched I wasn’t. Something just felt wrong. As a child who grew up in an abusive household and around sexual predators, I knew to trust my gut and back away from certain content, even if I couldn’t tell you why.
Quiet on the Set articulated that wrongness: an adult who writes sexual content for children to perform and be broadcasted for an audience of children to watch is fucking creepy. Schneider and others repeated assertions that these jokes went over the kids’ heads made it worse: if they don’t understand what they’re doing, they’re not consenting to be in your kink scene. Schneider had children performing non-consensual sexual humor that adults wrote for them and filmed and made money off of. The guy is a walking red flag factory.
Leadership Failures
This is such a failure in leadership. And I’m not saying that Dan Schneider is responsible for any of the assault that happened to the children he was working with, but he’s also not not responsible. As the show runner and the Golden Boy, he was in a position to set the tone for what was appropriate behavior. When you tell other adults that reenacting porn ejaculation shots with and on children is funny, you’re going to get a certain kind of person working for you. Maybe those people never cross the line from delayed adolescence to sexual predators, but it’s a lot shorter of a leap than if you didn’t create a climate welcoming to that group.
Dan Schneider gets dragged a lot in Quiet on the Set, and I think some of that is unfair. A documentary needs a good target, a hook to keep your story around. But Dan Schneider wasn’t leading Nickelodeon. He was a symptom of a bigger lack of leadership and willingness to sacrifice children’s wellbeing for profits. The missing piece in the documentary was a much broader critique of leadership and a discussion about how the studio losing Gerry Laybourne shaped everything that made the Orange Years turn into the Dark Years.
Women in Leadership
I tell my students all the time that if bad men were the only problem, we’d all be fine. There are enough good men out there to off set the baddies. Unfortunately, there are also lousy women (and probably lousy nonbinary folks too, since Jerk knows no gender). But there is a host of literature on the role of women in leadership.
Decades of research show the ways in which women increase fairness and productivity in the corporate world. In the areas that are most necessary to working on a set and with children, women also score the highest on honesty, resilience, fairness, communication, and problem solving. Men didn’t stray too far behind on a lot of those skills, though the gaps are bigger when it comes to honesty and inspiring others. Women are consistently better leaders in times of crisis (probably because we have to deal with things).
In more recent studies, these gaps have widened, particularly on leadership, communication, and resilience. By 2023, women were better on all measures. Many of these things stem from nurture rather than nature, so men can pick them up, but the data shows they just aren’t. Women are consistently higher in empathy, communication, and cooperation. The movement on the numbers shows that women are actively getting better and men are getting worse.
One of the things I noticed quickly was that The Orange Years focused on the many women in leadership at Nick both in executive levels and in creative talent. Quiet on the Set starts with Schneider conning two women into sharing one salary and forcing one of them to give a presentation while pretending to be anally raped. In case you thought the gender issue didn’t matter to workplace culture. Oh, and he regularly chose women employees to give him massages while he worked. Seems totally normal.
Not.
Self-Awareness is for other people
Women in leadership don’t get to opt out of the social elements of work. We aren’t afforded the socially awkward, tortured genius, Sheldon Cooper/Tony Stark paradigms. Can women be lousy leaders? Absolutely, but social conditioning puts a lot of guardrails on how we get to suck at leadership. Men get to be awful any way they want as long as they’re good at something.
This was never more evident than when Dan Schneider reached out to Giovonnie Samuels to ask for her support post-Quiet on the Set. It was such peak “white guy who has never faced consequences and doesn’t understand why people are being so mean to him he was just having fun and why don’t they understand me” behavior that I might have to use it in class on gender politics. Bro was genuinely surprised to learn that she found him scary and he made her comfortable. I don’t think he was just acting his way out of trouble. I think that men like him who exhibit the kind of career commitment punch-down and toilet humor and are repeatedly rewarded for being awful, naturally sink to their lowest expectations and don’t develop empathy because they don’t need to. Empathy’s for chicks who don’t get why shock jocks and edge lords are so cool (they’re just fucking not. Get a personality already).
Why are we surprised?
The stories from the adult women Schneider sexually harassed, underpaid, and humiliated read like any other guy who has a chip on his shoulder because he’s not as hot as his high school classmates and needs to take that out on someone. Yet again, the leadership at Nickelodeon let him.
Two of the three presidents after Gerry Laybourne were men. Do I think that they allowed Dan Schneider’s behavior and passed the buck off to legal for a memo that said “we handled it” just because they were men? No, but if Schneider were a woman they never would have tolerated that. Men tolerate other men’s bad behavior, especially when it’s in their interest to do so.
Women in high places are not enough to stop the Dan Schneiders of the world or protect the Drake Bells of the world. One of the president’s during the Schneider reign of terror was a woman. But it’s worth addressing the leadership culture women bring to the table and normalizing women in leadership to create climates in the workplace where predators are not allowed to flourish. A children’s studio with multiple sexual predators all in such a short time all clustered around one show runner who jumps to the defensive “you’re overreacting” when called on his own sexually explicit humor he’s asking minors to preform? And all the men in “leadership” turn away.
It's not enough to just fill leadership roles with women without giving them the power to reshape the culture. But, I don’t believe for a minute Gerry Laybourne would have let that shit slide.
(And if she or anyone who worked at Nick during the Orange Years reads this, thanks for the memories. As a tween in a tough family spot, Nick was a great place for me. And I recently watched Clarissa with my 11-year-old who loves her, too. )
