Using their grown-up voices
Stars of 2000s teen sitcoms on Nickelodeon, Disney connect with Gen Z, millennial fan bases via podcasts
For three years starting when he was just 12 years old, Devon Werkheiser dispensed advice for bearing the indignities of middle school as the title character in the Nickelodeon series “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide.” Two decades later, he said, people still recognize him as Ned Bigby.
“There was a time when I wanted to transcend ‘Ned’s,’ ” Werkheiser said, “but maybe it’s the answer in getting me where I want to go.”
Now 33, he has made peace with his past and is still giving tips to his peers, only he is using a more modern medium. In “Ned’s Declassified Podcast Survival Guide,” he and his former “Ned’s” castmates Lindsey Shaw and Daniel Curtis Lee dish about the show, which aired from 2004 to 2007, and open up about past personal and career struggles.
The three are among a cohort of former child stars, many from Nickelodeon and Disney Channel shows that aired during the 2000s, who have started podcasts as a way of connecting with a nostalgic Generation Z and millennial fan base. In doing so, they are embracing roles that they played as children and teenagers — characters that some spent years trying to move beyond, with mixed success.
“Part of the truth is, if any of our careers were maybe further along, maybe we wouldn’t be doing podcasts,” Werkheiser said in an interview. “There are comments that speak to that, as if we don’t know.”
Since the “Ned’s” podcast debuted in February 2023, several exchanges have caused a stir among its 717,000 TikTok followers.
Shaw, who played Moze on the show, spoke about her past struggles with substance abuse. Werkheiser gave an emotional account of his time on the set of the troubled Alec Baldwin Western film “Rust.” And he and Shaw punctured the innocent image of their old show with an awkward exchange about their fumbling off-screen sexual encounters.
Werkheiser was approached about starting a “Ned’s” rewatch podcast by Brendan Rooney. Rooney founded the PodCo podcast network last year with his wife, Christy Carlson Romano, a former child star who played Ren Stevens, the overachieving older sister in the Disney Channel series “Even Stevens.”
In addition to the “Ned’s” podcast, the company produces “Wizards of Waverly Pod,” hosted by former stars of the Disney Channel show “Wizards of Waverly Place,” about three sibling wizards in training. Romano, who also voiced the title character in the Disney Channel animated series “Kim Possible,” hosts two podcasts of her own, including one with Anneliese van der Pol, a former star of the Disney Channel sitcom “That’s So Raven.”
The audience for podcasts continues to grow, with 42% of Americans 12 and older reporting last year that they had listened to one in the previous month, according to a report by Edison Research. But making money isn’t simple, in part because the market is so saturated that there isn’t enough advertising revenue to go around, said Ethan Cramer-Flood, a principal forecasting writer at Insider Intelligence, a market research firm.
PodCo, which was founded last year, expects to turn a profit by the
second quarter of 2024, Romano said. The company plans to introduce several new podcasts this year, including “Pretty Little Pod” featuring Shaw and Tammin Sursok, who appeared together in the ABC Family series “Pretty Little Liars.”
Romano said it was never her plan to capitalize on nostalgia. Rather, she said, she ended up greenlighting shows featuring former stars of Disney and Nickelodeon teen sitcoms because they were people she knew and could trust.
She hopes the podcasts are places these stars can feel heard, she said.
“We’ve been a silent, niche population of people that were conditioned to be compliant and never truly understood our autonomy,” Romano said. “I want to show them that they can be empowered by having these podcasts.”
The hosts haven’t been afraid to get personal.
Jennifer Stone, who played Harper Finkle on “Wizards of Waverly Place,” recalled feeling
left out on set at times in an emotional exchange on “Waverly Pod” with co-host and former co-star David DeLuise. Alyson Stoner, who was a host of the Disney Channel series “Mike’s Super Short Show” and was in the film “Cheaper by the Dozen,” has discussed being stalked and other pressures of child stardom on the podcast, “Dear Hollywood,” which is not a PodCo franchise.
As they adjust to the new platform, the hosts have occasionally landed themselves in trouble. The “Ned’s Declassified” stars appeared in a TikTok live video March 18 in which they appeared to mock Drake Bell, a former star of the Nickelodeon series “Drake & Josh” who shared his account of being sexually abused by his dialogue coach in “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” a new Investigation Discovery documentary series.
There was a swift backlash, including a rebuke from Bell. Within days, the “Ned’s” hosts apologized,
saying they had not seen the series when they were asked to comment on it, and that they did not have a grasp of the gravity of the allegations.
“Now we’ve watched it, and I get it,” Werkheiser said in the March 22 episode. “If I had just watched, especially that third episode, and then watched us joking like that, I would be like: ‘Are they sociopaths? Is there something wrong with them?’ ”
The hosts have also used their shows as forums to talk about what they’re doing now. Werkheiser, who has spoken about having trouble finding work as an actor after “Ned’s,” described his elation at being cast as a cowboy in “Rust” turning to anguish, after a revolver that Baldwin, the film’s star, was handling discharged a live round, killing the cinematographer.
After the film’s safety protocols were called into question, Werkheiser spoke about it in a March 2023 episode.
“Every set has some
chaos; every set is cutting corners and cutting budgets,” he said. “I can only speak for my experience. But in my experience, it was no different than any other set I’d ever been on.”
For Werkheiser, the podcast came about when he needed it, he said. In 2021, he spent countless hours on a pitch for a “Ned’s” reboot, a survival guide for young adults, only for the studio to pass on it in a brief email. His career was foundering, and he “spiraled into deep depression,” he said.
About a year later, Rooney approached him about starting a podcast. Werkheiser quickly embraced the medium, which he said gives him more freedom than he would have on a scripted show. He also relished the chance to reconnect with Shaw and Lee.
“It feels like we’re back on set a little bit,” he said. “Some parts of our childish selves come out, so it does feel like we picked up where we left off.”