Maureen Ryan

Critic, author, and award-winning journalist Maureen “Mo” Ryan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and has written for Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Salon, GQ, Vulture, The Hollywood Reporter, TV Guide, Slate and Polygon. Ryan, who was named the best TV writer in America by Complex in 2013, previously worked as the chief television critic at Variety, Huffington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Her first book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, which the New Yorker called “galvanizing,” came out in 2023, and immediately hit the New York Times and Los Angeles Times best-seller lists. The chapter on the hit drama Lost excerpted in Vanity Fair made news around the world, as did her rollercoaster of an interview with Jeff Garlin and other in-depth coverage of Hollywood misconduct and exploitation.

Ryan, who has a Master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, served for many years on the juries of the Peabody Awards and the AFI Awards, and she has appeared as an expert on CNN’s Reliable Sources, the BBC, NPR, and ABC’s World News Tonight, and in the documentaries We Need to Talk About Cosby and This Changes Everything. She served on the board of the Television Critics Association, and given that she was the founding editor of The Official X-Files Magazine way back in the ’90s, she will never forget Walter Skinner’s middle name (Sergei). She has a free newsletter, she can be found on social media—not on That Site, but Bluesky and Instagram—and more of her work can be found at moryan.com.

An avid gardener and a longtime Buddhist (when you cover Hollywood, you require either alcohol or meditation—sometimes both), she lives in the Chicago area with her family.