Keke Palmer’s mom Sharon remembers Dan Schneider’s Nickelodeon sets as having a “weird” and “cultish” vibe.
“I honestly do remember you having a lot to say about the Dan Schneider sets,” Keke Palmer said at the top of Tuesday’s “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer” podcast with her mother. “I remember you feeling a way about Nickelodeon.”
The mother-daughter duo reminniesced on the podcast about Keke’s early career as the star of Nickelodeon’s “True Jackson, VP” in the wake of the “Quiet on Set” documentary that aired earlier this year. Sharon recalled the atmosphere and the other parents on set both being off-putting.
“My honest opinion is I thought the whole atmosphere of the Dan Schneider set was very weird, very cultish,” Sharon said. “The parents were very secretive, and I honestly thought they all took themselves way too seriously.”
Watch the full podcast below:
Sharon continued, “I always looked at you being at Nickelodeon as being a stopping station. You didn’t get your start on Nickelodeon or Disney. You were blessed and fortunate enough to work in adult situations and kid situations. My mentality about the entertainment business wasn’t that Disney Channel or Nickelodeon was the end all to be all, but a lot of the parents did.”
Palmer’s read of the set aligns with what other subjects discussed in the ID docuseries. The project leveled a number of abuse allegations at ex-Nickelodeon writer and producer Schneider. A number of “All That,” “Drake & Josh,” and “The Amanda Show” stars were interviewed about troubled run-ins with members of the staff.
Perhaps the darkest of the docuseries’ unveilings was Drake Bell’s recounting of the sexual abuse he endured at the hands of Brian Peck, an acting coach on set. Sharon said on her daughter’s podcast that she could unfortunately see how Bell’s parents didn’t see what was happening.
“When I saw the Drake story, it just broke my heart because I could see how his parents got trapped,” she said.
She expanded on the fact that Peck wanted to create space between Bell and his father and that there were people that popped up during her daughter’s early career – managers, agents, creatives — that wanted to put a wedge between them.
“In my experiences with you in this industry, I had moments where people tried to push us away from each other or try to come in between us,” Keke added. “You never would allow that kind of thing to go down. It created tension in our relationship – I definitely felt overly controlled and confined and almost like I was in a prison sometimes. But when I look back, I feel like you were really just being protective of me.”
Watch the full podcast with the mother-daughter duo in the video above.
