Ariana Grande has been a household name for over a decade. Having gotten her start on Broadway in the musical 13, and later, breaking through as Cat Valentine on Nickelodeon’s Victorious and its spin-off Sam And Cat, it’s hard to remember a time when Grande wasn’t famous.
While some of her early beginnings took place on children’s shows, Grande recalled some of the adult jokes written in the scripts. On an episode of Penn Badgley’s Podcrushed podcast, she looks back at some of the shows’ material and feels a sense of discomfort.
“There’s also a strange pattern that occurs,” Grande said, “where it’s taken advantage of how much it means to the young performer to [make producers laugh], like ‘Oh sh*t, i’m doing something great! This is funny, this is good!’ […] Specifically thinking about our show, that was something that we were convinced was the cool thing about us, we were pushing the envelope with our humor. […] Now looking back on those clips it’s like… damn like, really? I think ‘If that were my daughter’, you know?”
Such jokes, as well as alleged abuse from the shows’ creator Dan Schneider, were the subject of a docuseries, Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV, which premiered on Max earlier this year. Though Grande was absent from the documentary, she has since vocalized her support for her fellow former child stars.
“A lot of people don’t have the support that they need to get through performing at that level at such a young age, but also dealing with some of the things that the survivors who have come forward…there’s not a word for how devastating that is to hear,” Grande said.
She also emphasized that sets and music studios also employ the right personnel to insure safely.
“I think that the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting, and I think there should be therapists, I think there should be parents allowed to be wherever they want to be. Not only on kids sets,” Grande said. “I think if anyone wants to do this or music or anything at any level of exposure that it means to be on TV or to do music with a major label or whatever, [it] should be in the contract.”