'Double Dare' Host Marc Summers Explains Walking Out of 'Quiet on Set' Interview

Summers was briefly in the first episode of the 'Quiet on Set' docuseries.

While some former Nickelodeon stars and other employees spoke out about their time on the children's network on Investigation Discovery's Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV documentary, Double Dare host Marc Summers is admitting why he walked out during his own interview. Summers hosted the popular game show from 1986 to 1993. He was among the Nickelodeon employees to speak about his time on the network in the documentary, but via Deadline, in an interview on Elvis Duran and the Morning Show, Summers was unaware of what the docuseries was really about when he agreed to do it.

"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. But they did a bait and switch on me," Summers explained. "They ambushed me. They never told me what this documentary was really about. And so 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?'"

The Quiet on Set docuseries, told in four parts with a fifth part airing this Sunday, exposes the toxic work environment and abuse that crew members and child stars endured while working on Nickelodeon, most notably in the late '90s and early '00s. After being told the documentary was about Dan Schneider and the sexual abuse Drake Bell suffered, the Double Dare host walked out.

"I left. So I got a phone call about six weeks ago saying you're totally out of the show. And I went, 'Great.' Then they called me about four weeks ago and said, 'Well, you're in it, but you're only in the first part of it because you talked about the positive stuff of Nickelodeon,'" Summers shared. "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. And so, now we get into a whole situation about who's unethical."

Additionally, Marc Summers said that he had never met Dan Schneider since he was brought on after Double Dare had ended. "As far as anything that happened on that show with any of those people, I never met any of them. I didn't know anybody. But it made it seem like I knew those people," he explained.

Summers appeared only in the first episode of the docuseries and spoke highly of Nickelodeon and its popularity among children. After being shown clips from shows like Victorious and Zoey 101 that are more or less taken to be sexual innuendos, he was clearly cut off guard, and now it makes sense why. 

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