![]() ![]() Everyone who worked with Nicole found her pleasant but the people with power at the show were passing negative assessments of her to all and sundry, even people who had never met her.”Īgain and again Burn It Down returns to showrunners who seem to wilt under the pressure of the job and take it out on those below them. “The stars, Mison and Beharie, both had difficulties adjusting to being leads on a broadcast network show. We think it’s bad.’” She gives a wry smile. “With Sleepy Hollow, if you asked all the executives at that studio ‘do you think racism is good?’ they all would’ve said, ‘No. He was allowed to go on leave for a month and I had to continue working.” In interviews after she left the show, Behari said “everyone of colour on that show was seen as expendable and eventually let go,” recalling that her and Milson “both got sick at the same time with the same illness and had different treatments. Ryan cites a PR person at Fox who spread rumours about Beharie to journalists. Beharie left the show at the end of season three after false rumours that she’d been difficult to work with, had mental health problems and had bitten a hairstylist. In one chapter of the book, which is published in the UK on July 6, Ryan reports on racism embedded in the “woke” liberal supernatural detective show Sleepy Hollow that ran for four seasons from 2013-2017 with Tom Milson as reanimated Ichabod Crane and Nicole Beharie as FBI agent Abbie Mills. If it was always wrong, how much were the people who were part of that system complicit in it? The fact is, we all have to wrestle with a system that was fundamentally flawed.” If there was always a great deal of coercion, bullying, assault, intimidation and toxicity and if it was wrong in 2017, I think it was always wrong. “It’s very hard to get your head around, because the implications are too enormous. As a lover of quality television who has reviewed and written about the small screen since 1997 she gradually realised that “poor leadership, abuse, domination, bullying, all kinds of biases, were pretty rampant, and they were enabled, allowed or encouraged,” she says, still sounding a little disappointed. ![]() But it neatly illustrates the first half of her book, which sets out her argument using deeply researched stories that post-date or were barely reported during the MeToo outpourings. When Ryan asked to interview him, his reply that the Muppets was his “dream job” was accompanied by a lawyer’s letter which placed her “on notice not only of the falsity of the claims against Mr Goldberg but also of the great harm to Mr Goldberg and his reputation your book may inflict should you choose to publish untrue statements about him.”Īs she writes, this feels like one of the less fun Muppet capers. The Muppets recent reincarnation on Disney+ – The Muppets Mayhem, a curious show about the in-house band trying to record an album – was created by Adam Goldberg, whose autobiographical sitcom The Goldbergs ran for 10 years on US network ABC. (Kushell, who was fired from a CBS comedy in 2018 for using “inappropriate language”, did not respond to Ryan’s requests for comment.) The safest are his endless recounting of his erotic dreams to female co-workers, his cry of “f_ her in the ass!” whenever he received feedback from a woman and, after hearing a female writer’s account of being assaulted, asking if she wanted to have sex. Most of the stories she tells about him are difficult to recount in a respectable newspaper. ![]() In a chapter about Hollywood’s reliance on reusing IP, she recounts the Muppets revival in 2015 under a showrunner called Bob Kushell. But they had two showrunners that I have questions about.” I lived for Pigs in Space and adored Dr Bunsen Honeydew. “You’re thinking, what? Mo’s now going make me depressed about the Muppets? I would like to make clear, I do love the Muppets and everything to do with them. “Everyone loves the Muppets,” she nods when we discuss this on a lengthy transatlantic Zoom call – Ryan is a contributing editor at Variety and is based in Chicago. Her revelations about the behind-the-scenes chaos at Lost are grim but not entirely unexpected. She unpicks the years of abuse that Social Network producer Scott Rudin meted out to his employees in the US and the UK. Her book is forensic in revealing the toxic culture Lorne Michaels has created at Saturday Night Live. Perhaps the most shocking story in Burn It Down, Maureen Ryan’s elegant demolition of Hollywood’s abusive ways, is when she gets to the Muppets.
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