TV Wasteland!

Frankie Fanelli - Executive Editor & Online Co-Editor-in-Chief

Just before the end of school, OCSA Evolution sat down with Ryan Flaherty, a senior in the Culinary Arts & Hospitality conservatory as well as the CEO of TV Wasteland. TV Wasteland is a website that Flaherty started with the goal of covering “breaking news, television reviews, and business recaps from a teenage perspective.” Flaherty was eager to bring the world of television reporting and media “a unique perspective that the industry is lacking” and she succeeded in not only doing just that, but also in building a company that expanded faster and reached levels of success higher than she ever expected.

In our Q&A with Flaherty, Evolution asked her to tell us about TV Wasteland: what it is and what the company stands for. “I started TV Wasteland in January of [2019], planning it, and we ended up launching in June. We focus on interviews, covering news, reviews, industry analysis, trailers, and a lot more.” Flaherty stated that she got her own start in working with TV and film after having a change of heart over her own future career path. “I think it was about 2 years ago was when I decided I no longer wanted to be an elementary school teacher, and wanted to work in the film industry, which was a very large switch, but I was so, so anxious to work in the film industry and so I started a club at OCSA and I was doing presentations and it was great. And then I was like, I’m putting so much effort into these presentations, [...] what if I created a website for the presentations to live on? And then I started writing, found WordPress all of that, and I realized that this could be so much bigger than just a club.” She also recalled the moment she realized her passion lies in the television industry: “I think that websites cover television for teens in a way that isn’t really realistic, they’re like ‘Riverdale!’ and stuff like that and I think it underestimates us a little bit. I think for me it was Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Netflix series, was the first one that I really followed. I read about the development of it and everything and that was really the beginning of my interest in all of this.

Evolution also asked Flaherty to elaborate on the process of building up the website and getting it started once the idea and the concept for the company was there. “Yes!” Flaherty responded excitedly, “That’s my favorite part of the story, so absolutely. In January [of 2018] I decided I wanted to upload all of my club presentations to a website and started working on- oh my god I can’t even remember the website developer name, but [...] I ended up losing all of the work because we had a disagreement with customer service on a few aspects of it so I ended up moving everything to WordPress, starting over, and when I was starting over I was like, ‘Wait, this could be a lot bigger than just a club if we cover news the way I want to cover it.’ Everything about [TV Wasteland] is what I wanted that I just wasn’t getting: news that is condensed and meant for teenagers and what I want to see. Upcoming TV trailers all in the same place, which I was SO surprised isn’t anywhere else! So that started and then from there it was just me, Matt [Gannon, CW alum ‘19], and Aaliyah [Mayer, IA ‘20] and we were just doing news, the TV Tour Guide, and reviews and that’s it. And at that point I was writing our TV Tour

Guide personally. From there we expanded to a team of three people to twenty, six months later, and so now I’m running a very, very large team with a level of executives and then people working below them. It was all very fast. It was six months planning, which was the slow part, we launched June 1st, 2019, and then June 3rd we submitted our first application to cover a television festival called Series Fest in Colorado and we got accepted within the first 48 hours of the website being up, which was incredible. So I flew out to Colorado and covered that festival professionally, did some interviews, and that’s really what kicked us off.”

But covering Series Fest wasn’t the only run in that TV Wasteland has had with the professional world of television- a few months ago Flaherty got an opportunity to visit Netflix headquarters. “Netflix has been pretty amazing throughout this entire thing. One of our first interviews was with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, who’s the star of a new Mindy Kaling series called Never Have I Ever, and when we started doing interviews we reached out to her to see if she wanted to do an interview and they said ‘We’ll circle back to you’ and all that. And then they did! Matt, our Director of Talent Relations, interviewed her over the phone back in November. That was really the kickstarter of the entire exclusive interview section of the website so we are very, very indebted to Netflix, they’ve been incredible through this entire thing.” Some of TV Wasteland’s more recent celebrity interviews include ones with Nicole Maines of The CW’s Supergirl and Maxwell Jenkins of Netflix’s Lost in Space.

And if all of that doesn’t sound impressive enough, Flaherty made sure to emphasise the fact that a big motivation in launching the company was the fact that women are an extremely under-represented group in the TV industry and therefore tend to be at a disadvantage when trying to break into it. “I wanted to hire a predominantly female team to start working in the business early so they have more experience and can get into the industry easier,” Flaherty said. “So, working with a- oh god- a very, very predominantly female team has been [amazing]. We have a few boys but it’s definitely female-run. All of the executive team is female, which is pretty great.” Flaherty also had a lot of valuable insight on the television industry’s current manner of tackling the issue of normalizing and adding more female representation both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. “I think [the industry is] doing pretty well. I think it’s definitely been a slow process so far, but I’m happy with where we’re at and where we’re going. I think the most important thing is really starting at the ground level. It’s not going to happen over night that you’ll just be able to say, ‘Oh, we’re finally accepting women now!’ I mean, you really have to start with schools teaching it. It’s like STEM, you know? You have to go back to the foundational level, you can’t just expect that women are going to become CEOs and executives, you have to start that training early in high school or middle school, that sort of thing. So I think it’s pretty great so far but I think there’s definitely a lot of work to do.

Finally, Flaherty reflected on the beginnings of TV Wasteland nearly a year and a half ago now and how much it’s grown since: “...This is definitely a team project, I mean there’s just no way I could be doing this without the [team’s] incredible writers, media managers, reviewers, all that, and I just had no idea that we were going to make it as far as we have. I just could not be more grateful that we are where we are.

You can visit TV Wasteland at tvwasteland.org, on Instagram at @tvwaste, or Twitter at @thetvwasteland