‘Ridiculousness’ Workers Vote to Unionize With Writers Guild West

Katie Kilkenny
·3 min read
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Staffers at MTV’s comedy show focused on viral videos, Ridiculousness, have voted to unionize with the Writers Guild of America West.

In a National Labor Relations Board ballot count that occurred Monday in Los Angeles, eight creative consultants voted to join the WGA West, while none voted against, a spokesperson from the NLRB shared on Tuesday. Two ballots were challenged and won’t be counted “because they aren’t determinative,” said NLRB director and press secretary Kayla Blado.

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The union and the employer now have five days to raise any objections, and if none are brought forth, the Ridiculousness union will be certified and can begin to bargain a first contract.

“Yesterday, my colleagues and I voted in favor of joining the Writers Guild of America West by the widest possible margin, 100%. This result really matters given the scare tactics used by the company in an attempt to disempower us and break our unity,” said organizing committee member and Ridiculousness staffer Ryan Connor in a statement. “We expect the NLRB will certify the election results next week, and we call on the company to do the right thing and give us a fair deal.”

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to representatives for employers Superjacket Productions and its subsidiary, Purple Shark LLC.

Workers on the long-running MTV show filed a petition with the NLRB on July 12, amid the ongoing WGA strike against film and television companies, to join the union’s western branch. The union has stated that these staffers initially first asked for voluntary recognition, but were rebuffed by management. (The employers have not offered a comment to THR.) Though the WGA West generally does not represent many workers in reality television or documentary, a representative told THR at the time that it considered the Ridiculousness staffers comparable to those already in the union on America’s Funniest Home Videos and Tosh.0.

The union’s eastern branch, meanwhile, has made inroads at specific nonfiction shops in a push to organize the sector that has lasted over a decade. Staffers from Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions and Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan’s Story Syndicate have joined the union in the past two years, which also has organized workers at Sharp Entertainment, ITV Kirkstall/Leftfield and Vox Entertainment, among others.

“As reality writers, a lot of people don’t know, these shows are scripted. Unscripted reality television is scripted,” Ridiculousness consulting producer Ally Maynard said in a speech at the Nonfiction Coalition West Coast Solidarity Picket on Aug. 15 at Paramount Studios. “We’re sick of studios being allowed to use unscripted TV to plug the gaps when scripted shows unionize. Next time a strike happens, if we have to do this again years down the road, unscripted, they’re not going to be able to rely on that anymore.”

The Ridiculousness staffers sought “parity with their peers in the industry and respect for their work” with the unionization attempt, a WGA West spokesperson said in July. The creative consultants are responsible for brainstorming segment ideas and writing conversation starters and monologues.

The Ridiculousness unionization effort came amid a new surge of discussion about working conditions in nonfiction entertainment. As the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes raged on over the summer, former The Apprentice: Martha Stewart and The Real Housewives of New York City star Bethenny Frankel called for reality television casts and crews to unionize, while power lawyers Bryan Freedman and Mark Geragos announced that they had taken on current and former cast and crewmembers of NBCUniversal reality shows as clients, claiming that there has been “grotesque and depraved” misconduct on some titles. “Our investigation is ongoing,” Freedman wrote to NBCUniversal’s general counsel on Aug. 3.

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