Former Nickelodeon game show host Marc Summers shared this week that he was less than pleased with the interview tactics of producers behind ID’s Quiet on Set docuseries, about toxic workplace culture at the popular kids’ network in the 1990s and 2000s.
Summers, who used to host the game show Double Dare on the network, said on the Elvis Duran and the Morning Show Friday that when he was invited to sit down to interview for the docuseries, he wasn’t told the show would center allegations of sexual exploitation, abuse, racism and discrimination.
“I got called by these folks saying they wanted to do a documentary on Nickelodeon—and so I said sure,” he said. “They asked me what I thought of Nick, and the first 10 to 12 seconds, from what I understand, in this documentary is me saying all these wonderful things,” he said. “They never told me what this documentary was really about,” he continued, adding “They did a bait and switch on me—they ambushed me.”
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Summers said he only realized it wouldn’t be a documentary solely about the history or popularity of the network, which he discusses in the footage used at the start of the series, when producers showed him one of many clips from the series that show the perceived sexual innuendo in some of Nick's kids’ programming at the time.
“They showed me a video of something that I couldn’t believe was on Nickelodeon. And I said, ‘Well, let’s stop the tape right here. What are we doing?’” he recalled. When producers explained what the documentary was really about, Summers said he left and discontinued the interview.
Weeks later, he was told he wouldn’t be in the show, which he said was “great,” but things changed later on. “‘Well, you’re in it, but you’re only in the first part of it because you talked about the positive stuff of Nickelodeon,’” he recalled them saying. What he still wasn’t told, Summers said, was that the footage taken when he first saw the questionable Nick clip would be used in the series.
“What they didn’t tell me, and they lied to me about, was the fact that they put in that other thing where they had the camera on me when they ambushed me,” he continued. “And so now, we get into a whole situation about who’s unethical.”
Summers said that he and Dan Schneider, the main focus of many of the series’ allegations, never crossed paths. “I never met Dan Schneider,” he said. “When we got done doing Double Dare and we had run our run, those people came in after and took over our studios. Never met the man—have no idea about any of those things.”
“They made it seem like I knew those people [in the doc],” Summers continued, and implied that he may be taking some sort of action for the way his appearance in the series was handled.
A fifth, bonus, episode of Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV premieres Sunday April 7, on ID.
