Weary Ridiculousness writers include "please make other shows" in their list of union demands
The writers of MTV's most-shown show are also calling for better pay and residuals for the more than 200 episodes they produce a year
It’s hard to imagine that there’s a show on cable TV more profitable—in a strict “how much we pay for it” vs. “how much we get for it” sense—than MTV’s Ridiculousness. As people have noted more than once over the last several years, that’s why the reality series has so aggressively colonized the MTV schedule in the modern era, subsuming all in its path, until the network literally runs more hours of programming that are Ridiculousness than aren’t: It pulls ratings, and it’s cheap as hell to make.
That cheapness is, obviously, a big part of why the show’s writers—who are billed as “consulting producers,” and whose duties include “consulting” a bunch of things for series star Rob Drydek to do and say on every one of the literally hundreds of episodes the show produces every single year—have been pushing to unionize over the last few months. “We produce the most profitable show currently on TV,” writer Ally Maynard told Deadline this week, shortly after news broke that the show’s writers had submitted their ballots for unionization to the National Labor Relations Board “And yet we are paid 60% less than WGA writers that work for America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Maynard added that, “‘Unscripted’ television is very much scripted ,and our writing staff is fed up with being abused and underpaid by Paramount, MTV and Rob Dyrdek.”
In a very odd note, the writers’ lists of demands, acquired by Deadline, don’t just include the usual calls for more equitable profit sharing and less harsh conditions: They also apparently include a request “for MTV to order more shows,” because it is presumably very exhausting to carry the entire creative output of an entire TV network on your backs. It’s not every day you see TV writers asking for shows that aren’t theirs to be made—but it’s not also every day that a network gives over almost its entire television output to a single series. (Unless you’re watching MTV, in which case it is every day; which is exactly the point.)