Christy Carlson Romano says she turned down an offer to work with the Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV team.
In a preview of the Tuesday, April 16 episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown obtained by Entertainment Weekly, the former child star, 40, called the documentarians “outsiders” and “people who don’t belong to our community.”
“And maybe they, maybe if they knew where to put money towards [fixing] a problem, they would, but again, a lot of this has been perceived in a way that’s — it’s outside baseball. It’s not inside baseball, it’s outside baseball. These are trauma tourists,” continued Romano, per Entertainment Weekly.
The actress said that Investigation Discovery, the network behind the series, had previously approached her to participate in a similar project.
“I’ve chosen not to speak about this with anybody, including ID, who originally came to me looking to see if I’d be interested in a doc like this,” Romano said, per the outlet.
“I don’t know if it was this doc [Quiet on Set]. But I was approached when I first started advocating three years ago for my own YouTube channel with my own experiences that I did in different and separate episodes, so to speak,” she continued. “I started to be approached by many reality-show-type producers, and they were like, ‘Hey, how do we do this?’ and I would combat them with saying, ‘Hey, guys, the only way we would do this is if we talk about how do we fix it?’ ”
PEOPLE has reached out to Investigation Discovery for comment.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Romano said she did not watch the series because “it’s extremely triggering.”
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“I’ve made a choice for several reasons to opt out of watching that imagery. I know a lot of the details, I know a lot of the folks involved,” said Romano.
The Even Stevens alum said she feels there is “no hope being inserted into the narrative,” emphasizing the “importance of understanding trauma porn.”
“I actually have a degree from Columbia in film, and you know, we know that the art of montage and the collision of images is going to incite a certain kind of emotion,” she said, per Entertainment Weekly
“That is what documentary filmmaking in social movements is meant to do,” she continued. “And so we’re so manipulated by media, and we have so many little cut-downs of misinformation and things being thrown, that the echo chambers, to me, are not helpful.”
