Keke Palmer’s Mom Says Dan Schneider’s Nickelodeon Sets Were ‘Very Weird’ and ‘Cultish’

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 7, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 7, 2024 |

Keke Palmer starred in True Jackson, VP on Nickelodeon from 2008 to 2011, and while that show was not a Dan Schneider original, Palmer’s mother Sharon says the atmosphere was still uncomfortable.

“I honestly do remember you having a lot to say about the Dan Schneider sets,” Palmer said to her mother on a recent episode of her podcast, Baby, This Is Keke Palmer. “I remember you feeling a way about Nickelodeon.”

“My honest opinion is that I thought the whole atmosphere of the Dan Schneider set was very weird, very cultish. The parents were very secretive, and I honestly thought they all took themselves way too seriously,” Sharon said.

Sharon and her daughter would have been forgiven for taking themselves too seriously, as Palmer didn’t get her start on Nickelodeon but had already starred in movies like Akeelah and the Bee. But Sharon says that success gave them perspective.

“I always looked at you being at Nickelodeon as being a stopping station,” she said. “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.”

Maybe that’s why she and her daughter made it out unscathed, while others weren’t so lucky. When she saw Drake Bell’s story of abuse at the hands of adults working at Nickelodeon, she said, “It just broke my heart because I could see how his parents got trapped.”

The parents and guardians of child actors are either deeply involved with their child’s success or not at all, and that level of involvement can be for better or worse in either case. Palmer said her mother’s involvement was a point of contention at times.

“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,” she said. “You would never 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.”

Parental supervision isn’t the complete and total solution, though, because every child actor doesn’t have a mom like Sharon. Some parents don’t have their children’s best interests at heart. Safe sets are great, reassessing how we put children to work and what we expect of them is better.