Kenan Thompson Speaks On Good Burger Franchise • Hollywood Unlocked

Kenan Thompson hopes that the adventures of Dexter Reed and Ed will continue, even with the creator of Good Burger, Dan Schneider, having a bad reputation.

The Saturday Night Live star mentioned to Variety that he is open to revisiting the Good Burger characters in upcoming movies, with different writers leading the way. He actually did this last year in Good Burger 2, written by Kevin M. Kopelow and Heath Seifert who also co-wrote the original film. “Those guys know the cadence of those characters just as well, without having tarnished careers,” Thompson said. “It’s about us, as opposed to who had the first idea years ago.”

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Expressing regret over the impact of Schneider’s controversies on the franchise, Thompson added, “It’s just sad that that has to be our conversation… The separation of the artist and the man conversation didn’t come into my life at all until recently. There was no need to do that. A guy was a pig, and we knew he was a pig, but it wasn’t like the deviousness since, like, [Bill] Cosby and [Harvey] Weinstein. All that s— is just way out of bounds.”

He continued, “That whole thing has just been such a burden for recent times — the conversation of, Do we still listen to Michael Jackson? Do we still listen to R. Kelly? What do we do with The Cosby Show? I think we’re all still figuring it out and navigating. Because the trauma is real, the victims are very real. I don’t want to gloss over that. We also don’t want to just throw really solid, creative things in the trash either.”

Schneider was prominently featured in the Investigation Discovery series Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, where former Nickelodeon stars made accusations of racism, sexual harassment, sexism, and verbal abuse on sets led by Schneider. He departed from the network in 2018. The series also revealed that two individuals convicted of child abuse, Brian Peck and Jason Handy, were part of Schneider’s production teams.

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Thompson, who appeared on Schneider-produced shows such as All That and the spinoff Kenan & Kel in the ’90s, stated that he did not personally witness the negative behavior depicted in the docuseries. He also shared that he has fond memories of his time working with the network.

“I feel so guilty saying that,” he added. “All those things started happening after our tenure, because, I guess, no one would even dare. It wasn’t that kind of environment.”

Of those early days at Nickelodeon, he said, “There was no dictatorship about it all. We were all building something and, when you’re building something, I don’t think anybody’s cocky enough to be pulling things behind the curtain.”