Maureen Ryan on Why ‘Burn It Down’ Isn’t a “Trashy Cash Grab” and the Silence From Networks, Studios Over Allegations
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Maureen Ryan, author of the upcoming Hollywood exposé Burn It Down, says a number of major networks, studios and entertainment companies responded with “crickets” when she reached out about allegations regarding their TV shows.
The veteran entertainment reporter and contributing editor at Vanity Fair appears on the latest episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘sTV’s Top 5 podcast, where she speaks about her process for her new book, which explores patterns of harassment and bias in entertainment following an excerpt about the behind-the-scenes toxicity and bias on Lost.
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During the more-than-30-minute discussion, Ryan details the experience of putting together around four years worth of reporting that covers a number of (some now ended) shows like Lost, Sleepy Hollow, The Goldbergs and Saturday Night Live. “One of the things that’s threaded through the book” that shocked her the most, she says, were the “crickets” she frequently got when she reached out about allegations.
“The number of times that people who do PR for very large industry companies simply did not respond to my questions at all — like not even the grace or the favor of a ‘no comment,'” she tells podcast co-hosts Lesley Goldberg and Daniel Fienberg.
Ryan points to her interactions with public relations representatives for her Saturday Night Live reporting as one example. The experience saw her asking NBCUniversal a series of questions about allegations around the show as well as “a very high-profile lawsuit that was settled last fall” involving former castmember Horatio Sanz.
“I emailed many people at NBCUniversal and that whole world. I did get the favor of a ‘no comment’ from someone high up in [communications], so that was exciting,” she says. “But for other situations, a theme that you will see running throughout the book is no one replied to my emails. No one answered me. Nobody wanted to address this.”
She adds that there was one particular situation involving “problematic showrunners” for a high-profile piece of intellectual property that is ongoing and “into many different iterations” on TV. Ryan says she wasn’t just asking about the people employed within that universe but ultimately what the production companies are “doing now to make sure that all of your workplaces and that the staff feel sufficiently protected if they come forward.”
That, the author and journalist says, was in part what fueled her to write the book and what distinguishes it from a “trashy cash grab,” as Ryan says one Twitter user described it. “When I got done laughing, I’m like, frankly, this is the opposite of a trashy cash grab. With every chapter in my book, there’s a version of this that is an 800-word hit piece. But I don’t know that that’s valuable,” she explains of her decision to cover shows that “ended six, seven years ago.”
“There’s value in dredging it up because the people who were harmed are still in the industry,” she continues, going on to talk about those facing allegations. “Most of the projects that I touch on in my book, or even in my previous reporting, a lot of those people are still in the industry. It’s not like there was a mass — just to refer to The Leftovers — there was not a mass disappearance of people. So I think there’s value in asking those people what they would have done differently, what they wish had gone differently, what they wish they’d known.”
Instead of producing an “ad hominem beat down” of people working in Hollywood, Ryan says she hopes the book can illuminate how the issues are not just a series of “bad man stories,” but an industry-wide buy-in from production studios, HR and more around workplace standards in Hollywood. It was an angle inspired by her reporting between 2020 and 2021, which began to feel not only like an “endless doom loop of the same stories being told over again” but also, eventually, like a “clubhouse and a handbook” for misconduct being passed around.
“The easy thing to say is, ‘Well, bad things happened on that set or at that show or that production office or at that network,’ and we close the book on that, and we will never speak of that,” she tells the TV’s Top 5 podcast. “Again, I don’t know that that’s helpful. We need to talk about it. We need to have productive, proactive conversations about what realistic limits on behavior and conduct and management should be.”
She does that, in part, through interviews with a rabbi, a criminal justice expert and a Hollywood screenwriter who has navigated a restorative justice process who help her unpack things like atonement, forgiveness and “what does a reckoning look like?” She also speaks to “people in the trenches who are making it better, have made it better and are providing better role models” after coming out of their own toxic workplaces.
“There aren’t enough good examples of, ‘OK, terrible revelations came out. Now what?” Ryan adds. “Whether you’re the head of the camera department or the head of a major feature film, you typically did not — or do not — get the training or support that you need to be a good leader and, on top of that, you’ve seen a lot of bad examples, probably. This is the dynamic that I’m hoping to unpack.”
The Burn It Down author also teased her findings into misconduct and bias on the set of Fox’s Sleepy Hollow — which she said “gives necessary and important context” to the trajectory of one of its star’s careers — and why she did follow-up reporting after her Vanity Fair interview with The Goldbergs‘ Jeff Garlin.
It was in her Sleepy Hollow reporting that she personally discovered one of the things that makes her want to “burn it down” the most.
“If there’s a thing that causes me to want to burn things down, it’s when people leave the industry or are essentially forced out of the industry or forced into, essentially, career hiatuses,” she said. “Not due to a pattern of serious misconduct or serious unprofessionalism or serious transgressions of any kind but because they feared for their mental health, their physical well-being, their safety, and their overall quality of life was terrible.”
Listen to this week’s TV’s Top 5 podcast in full below.
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