Do we like Ryan Murphy?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of money and jobs for trans and LGBTQ+ people and women directors, held back by a contested on-set claim and some grubby true-crime fights.
Ryan Murphy is the man behind Glee, American Horror Story, Pose and the Monsters series, and on the harm test he's got more runs on the board than most. In 2018 he said he would give 100 percent of his profits from FX's Pose to trans and LGBTQ+ charities, starting with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. His line was that these groups “do amazing work and need our support.”
The same year he told a Trevor Project gala he would fund a multi-million-dollar organisation to target Senate and Congress candidates who oppose LGBTQ+ rights. He said they think they can get votes “hurting and discriminating against us.” That is a statement of intent reported by the Washington Blade, so we're taking him at his word, not tallying a result.
Away from the screen, his Half foundation, launched in 2016, set out to staff half of the directing jobs on his shows with women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ members. He told Fortune “I personally can do better” and said the industry needed to go to underrepresented directors, not wait for them to knock. That's a practical push, not a slogan.
The mess is in how he tells true stories. After Netflix's Dahmer series, families of victims said they were distressed, and Murphy said his team tried to reach about 20 families and friends and “not a single person responded.” He offered to pay for a memorial himself. With the Menendez series, Erik Menendez accused the show from prison of portraying events through falsehoods, and Murphy hit back that Erik issued a statement without having seen it.
Then there's the on-set claim. Actor Angelica Ross alleged in a 2023 Hollywood Reporter interview that Murphy yelled at her after she tweeted about racism on the American Horror Story set. A producer who said she was beside Murphy during the call disputed that account, and he did not respond in the article we read. It's one contested allegation, not a pattern, but it stings given his ally branding.
His latest bruise was the Kennedy family. He told Gavin Newsom's podcast he “was not prepared” for the firestorm over his JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette series, and said he'd welcomed some of the criticism. He argued it's a love story and that the Kennedys have been dramatised plenty without family approval. Nothing new has turned up in the last few months that we could verify, so there's no fresh blow-up to report.