I enjoyed the author’s description of the creative process in a writing room. I’m surprised he didn’t tackle what currently seems to be the biggest threat to original, engaging TV and movies: progressivism and its handmaiden, cancel culture.
So far as I know, the author is mainly a comedy writer. I’m sure he’s aware of how tame, ideological, and utterly boring modern comedy has become because the censorious Left control much of the media. AI might be a future threat to scriptwriters and other creative folk, but left-wing ideology and censorship seems to be the current threat.
On the bright side, I recently read that most Disney movies flopped this year, and even the mighty Amazon, with its infinitely deep pockets, is now questioning why it’s spending money making movies that people don’t watch. I suggest the explanation for both failures is the movie makers are more interested in delivering DEI-inspired sermons rather than entertaining. So, to answer the question posed in the title of this article, if the entertainment business doesn’t move away from political correctness and toward original, edgy entertainment, then, yes, TV probably died with Succession.
Last edited 4 months ago by J Bryant
Right-Wing Hippie
4 months ago
AI will not replace great screenwriters. It will, however, replace mediocre screenwriters. I invite Unherd readers to take a look at the most recent World of Warcraft cinematic trailer. There are moments–long moments–when the illusion of reality is complete, when I had to remind myself I was seeing something that had been entirely created in a computer. This presages the end of film acting as a mainstream career, just as ChatGPT and other AIbots presage the end of writing as a mainstream career.
I predict that in ten years, the entire process of filmmaking will have been automated. AIs will draft screenplays and direct virtual actors with digitally created voices and images–and these tools will be available commercially, or have escaped into the digital ecosystem. Before you leave for work for the day, you’ll tell the virtual film studio that lives in your computer, “I want a buddy cop picture with about 75% humor and 25% intense action, starring these two virtual actors I’ve generated, with a token romance and a happy ending, similar to the last five action-comedies I’ve generated (plus or minus 5%), and I want it to run about two hours.” While you’re out, the thing will cook, and then when you get home, you’ll be able to park yourself in front of your monitor with your dinner and watch a bespoke popcorn movie that literally no one else on earth will ever have seen. It won’t be Citizen Kane, but it will very easily replace all the formulaic, by-the-numbers gimme pictures that Hollywood churns out every year.
Of course, there’ll still be a place for live actors, just as there’s a place for artisanal bread or handcrafted furniture. Mass-production didn’t eliminate those activities and it won’t eliminate creative activities, either. What will be eliminated will be the vast numbers of people who make their livings in the creative industry. The period of artist-as-capitalist, which began, more or less, with Charles Dickens, is coming to an end, and we’ll return to the premodern artist-as-hobbyist. People will write or act or paint or sing as they’ve always done, it’ll just be a lot more difficult to get paid for it–unless you’re exceptional, of course.
Spot on. I love the way AI is fumigating human mediocrity from our creative and information industries. If we’re to have creative mediocrity it might as well be robotic, it would free up more real humans to help out with the drudgery of service work. The human elements of that Warcraft trailer are eminently watchable, only marginally uncanny now. Throw in various porn and violence settings and a bespoke/to-order capacity – to say, make the bad guy look like your boss and give your ex-wife an unflattering cameo – and who needs a dozen B grade writers.
James Cromwell’s delivery of that eulogy was a masterpiece.
CF Hankinson
4 months ago
I have rewatched Succession a few times, it’s so hard to let it go, though I haven’t bought the scripts. I enjoyed the essay enormously and endorse its insights. Thanks.
I don’t understand people who don’t get Succession, it’s like not ‘getting’ what it’s like being human. Humans aren’t knowable, they’re messy contradictions: Profoundly slippery and unanchored, wrongly suffering, wrongly proud. Ineffable. Of course we all want more, even knowing there isn’t any more. We are all splashing about in the shallows of life, only AI could imagine that we are more profound. Only humans know despair, defending hope to survive. Does AI ever feel guilty?
There is a lot of this ‘AI will never..’ surety around right now. Strange to be so certain about the future limitations of something evolving at parabolic rate.
I enjoyed the article but Succession is a crashing bore of a program. A parade of awful characters bickering about who gets to be the most important? Yawn.
Never heard of the show, Succession. But I spent Thanksgiving weekend binge rewatching “The Sopranos” and “Game of Thrones”. No AI could ever write either of those shows. AI is a genius-level psychopath. Imagine Hermann Goering, Lavrenti Beria, Ted Bundy and Albert Speer all inside the “mind” of the most powerful AI engine ever created. That engine could never write a single episode of the above.
I just finished Succession season 4, and I was already wondering if they’d used AI to come up up with some of the dialogue. I especially loved one of Roman’s lines: “Tell them to stick their petrodollars up their human rights record”, which got a belly laugh from me, but it’s only one example of what’s a relentless stream of wit from many of the main characters. Or maybe a writers room can come up with twelve hours of dialogue in which every remark is a witty riposte or elegantly-crafted insult – I don’t know.
What I do know is that there remains a demand for television shows so stuffed with clever dialogue that they’re addictive, like Succession. Whether that gets delivered by the classic writer’s room, an ever improving AI or a combination of both, makes no difference: the demand for it will only increase.
Especially it we’re all at home watching TV because the robots are doing all the work.
Mark epperson
4 months ago
TV, movies, ETC, started dying in the mid 1990’s of a combination of politics, finance algorithms, and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.
Just like everything else.
Although the script of Squid Games seemed as if it was written by AI
SIMON WOLF
4 months ago
Succession was overrated.The first series was the best and then after that it became a parody .Better shows in recent years were The White Lotus series 2 ,El Candidate (Amazon Mexican) Faking Hitler (all4) Gold (bbc)
Jonathan Jones
4 months ago
Bronze Age TV is a bit much to hope for. We’re pretty much in the age of Plastic TV now.
Samantha Stevens
4 months ago
Succession was like watching an amazing Broadway play every episode. The only show better is The Sopranos.
Andrew R
4 months ago
Personally I couldn’t stand Succession, thought it was terrible. I tried to get into it several times but it just annoyed me.
Same as that, the hammy acting and awful screenplay was cringeworthy.
Tyler Durden
4 months ago
It’s my belief that the liberal phenomenon that was “Succession” has laid the ground for the $1.5billion made across the globe by middle-class graduate audiences flocking to “Barbie”. Kind of like the naked Emperor being clothed on TV first before his big-screen puppet was released.
Straightforwardly, the bar was set so low by the shaky camera-work, flat characterisation and snarky inanities of said TV serial that an anti-conservative parable about a plastic corporate doll has cleaned up this year.
Dougie Undersub
4 months ago
Not the Jamie Carragher?
Andrew Armitage
4 months ago
Succession, White Lotus, Morning Show, Slow Horses, South Park etc there’s plenty of great writing talent around.
If humans are afraid of competition from AI maybe we just need to up our game a bit.
At the low end, formula, painting by numbers level, it can be generated. Is that such a bad thing? It sets a minimum threshold to be worth paying for.
greg reaume
4 months ago
Great piece. Thank you.
Phil Rees
4 months ago
I’ve just finished a rewatch of the complete Sopranos by David Chase. And now I’m going to rewatch the whole of The Wire. Succession isn’t worthy of any mention at all alongside just those two, and many other HBO titles.In terms of tv/DVD series we live in a deprived era.
Jacques Rossat
4 months ago
A cliché among clichés but I definitely believe that Telly isn’t dead, it just smells funny, as Frank Zappa said about jazz. It changed, it is changing, it’ll change, certainly shrink but will survive, even with or because of AI.
Sonny Ramadhin
4 months ago
For all I remember my fondness for the first (and possibly second) series, ‘Succession’ succeeded only in becoming complete and utter drivel.
Harsh – but it did increasingly become a vehicle merely for enabling repetitive displays of the excessive and predictable character traits of the main characters. The plots also became more fanciful – especially to those of us with some knowledge of business. The score remained its best feature, and two series would have been plenty.
I enjoyed the author’s description of the creative process in a writing room. I’m surprised he didn’t tackle what currently seems to be the biggest threat to original, engaging TV and movies: progressivism and its handmaiden, cancel culture.
So far as I know, the author is mainly a comedy writer. I’m sure he’s aware of how tame, ideological, and utterly boring modern comedy has become because the censorious Left control much of the media. AI might be a future threat to scriptwriters and other creative folk, but left-wing ideology and censorship seems to be the current threat.
On the bright side, I recently read that most Disney movies flopped this year, and even the mighty Amazon, with its infinitely deep pockets, is now questioning why it’s spending money making movies that people don’t watch. I suggest the explanation for both failures is the movie makers are more interested in delivering DEI-inspired sermons rather than entertaining. So, to answer the question posed in the title of this article, if the entertainment business doesn’t move away from political correctness and toward original, edgy entertainment, then, yes, TV probably died with Succession.
AI will not replace great screenwriters. It will, however, replace mediocre screenwriters. I invite Unherd readers to take a look at the most recent World of Warcraft cinematic trailer. There are moments–long moments–when the illusion of reality is complete, when I had to remind myself I was seeing something that had been entirely created in a computer. This presages the end of film acting as a mainstream career, just as ChatGPT and other AIbots presage the end of writing as a mainstream career.
I predict that in ten years, the entire process of filmmaking will have been automated. AIs will draft screenplays and direct virtual actors with digitally created voices and images–and these tools will be available commercially, or have escaped into the digital ecosystem. Before you leave for work for the day, you’ll tell the virtual film studio that lives in your computer, “I want a buddy cop picture with about 75% humor and 25% intense action, starring these two virtual actors I’ve generated, with a token romance and a happy ending, similar to the last five action-comedies I’ve generated (plus or minus 5%), and I want it to run about two hours.” While you’re out, the thing will cook, and then when you get home, you’ll be able to park yourself in front of your monitor with your dinner and watch a bespoke popcorn movie that literally no one else on earth will ever have seen. It won’t be Citizen Kane, but it will very easily replace all the formulaic, by-the-numbers gimme pictures that Hollywood churns out every year.
Of course, there’ll still be a place for live actors, just as there’s a place for artisanal bread or handcrafted furniture. Mass-production didn’t eliminate those activities and it won’t eliminate creative activities, either. What will be eliminated will be the vast numbers of people who make their livings in the creative industry. The period of artist-as-capitalist, which began, more or less, with Charles Dickens, is coming to an end, and we’ll return to the premodern artist-as-hobbyist. People will write or act or paint or sing as they’ve always done, it’ll just be a lot more difficult to get paid for it–unless you’re exceptional, of course.
Spot on. I love the way AI is fumigating human mediocrity from our creative and information industries. If we’re to have creative mediocrity it might as well be robotic, it would free up more real humans to help out with the drudgery of service work. The human elements of that Warcraft trailer are eminently watchable, only marginally uncanny now. Throw in various porn and violence settings and a bespoke/to-order capacity – to say, make the bad guy look like your boss and give your ex-wife an unflattering cameo – and who needs a dozen B grade writers.
Think AI is coming for much of the drudge service industry too to be honest
Yup, it’s cheaper and more reliable.
James Cromwell’s delivery of that eulogy was a masterpiece.
I have rewatched Succession a few times, it’s so hard to let it go, though I haven’t bought the scripts. I enjoyed the essay enormously and endorse its insights. Thanks.
I don’t understand people who don’t get Succession, it’s like not ‘getting’ what it’s like being human. Humans aren’t knowable, they’re messy contradictions: Profoundly slippery and unanchored, wrongly suffering, wrongly proud. Ineffable. Of course we all want more, even knowing there isn’t any more. We are all splashing about in the shallows of life, only AI could imagine that we are more profound. Only humans know despair, defending hope to survive. Does AI ever feel guilty?
Same. Don’t get Succession; I don’t get you
There is a lot of this ‘AI will never..’ surety around right now. Strange to be so certain about the future limitations of something evolving at parabolic rate.
It is indeed quite chilling.
I enjoyed the article but Succession is a crashing bore of a program. A parade of awful characters bickering about who gets to be the most important? Yawn.
If I wanted that, I’d watch one of the presidential debates.
Or read Unherd threads! 🙂
Never heard of the show, Succession. But I spent Thanksgiving weekend binge rewatching “The Sopranos” and “Game of Thrones”. No AI could ever write either of those shows. AI is a genius-level psychopath. Imagine Hermann Goering, Lavrenti Beria, Ted Bundy and Albert Speer all inside the “mind” of the most powerful AI engine ever created. That engine could never write a single episode of the above.
I think The Sopranos blows GofT out of the water.
I just finished Succession season 4, and I was already wondering if they’d used AI to come up up with some of the dialogue. I especially loved one of Roman’s lines: “Tell them to stick their petrodollars up their human rights record”, which got a belly laugh from me, but it’s only one example of what’s a relentless stream of wit from many of the main characters. Or maybe a writers room can come up with twelve hours of dialogue in which every remark is a witty riposte or elegantly-crafted insult – I don’t know.
What I do know is that there remains a demand for television shows so stuffed with clever dialogue that they’re addictive, like Succession. Whether that gets delivered by the classic writer’s room, an ever improving AI or a combination of both, makes no difference: the demand for it will only increase.
Especially it we’re all at home watching TV because the robots are doing all the work.
TV, movies, ETC, started dying in the mid 1990’s of a combination of politics, finance algorithms, and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.
Just like everything else.
…but they are still there.
Since we started watching Korean drama, Western shows seem coarse and mediocre in comparison.
Although the script of Squid Games seemed as if it was written by AI
Succession was overrated.The first series was the best and then after that it became a parody .Better shows in recent years were The White Lotus series 2 ,El Candidate (Amazon Mexican) Faking Hitler (all4) Gold (bbc)
Bronze Age TV is a bit much to hope for. We’re pretty much in the age of Plastic TV now.
Succession was like watching an amazing Broadway play every episode. The only show better is The Sopranos.
Personally I couldn’t stand Succession, thought it was terrible. I tried to get into it several times but it just annoyed me.
Same as that, the hammy acting and awful screenplay was cringeworthy.
It’s my belief that the liberal phenomenon that was “Succession” has laid the ground for the $1.5billion made across the globe by middle-class graduate audiences flocking to “Barbie”. Kind of like the naked Emperor being clothed on TV first before his big-screen puppet was released.
Straightforwardly, the bar was set so low by the shaky camera-work, flat characterisation and snarky inanities of said TV serial that an anti-conservative parable about a plastic corporate doll has cleaned up this year.
Not the Jamie Carragher?
Succession, White Lotus, Morning Show, Slow Horses, South Park etc there’s plenty of great writing talent around.
If humans are afraid of competition from AI maybe we just need to up our game a bit.
At the low end, formula, painting by numbers level, it can be generated. Is that such a bad thing? It sets a minimum threshold to be worth paying for.
Great piece. Thank you.
I’ve just finished a rewatch of the complete Sopranos by David Chase. And now I’m going to rewatch the whole of The Wire. Succession isn’t worthy of any mention at all alongside just those two, and many other HBO titles.In terms of tv/DVD series we live in a deprived era.
A cliché among clichés but I definitely believe that Telly isn’t dead, it just smells funny, as Frank Zappa said about jazz. It changed, it is changing, it’ll change, certainly shrink but will survive, even with or because of AI.
For all I remember my fondness for the first (and possibly second) series, ‘Succession’ succeeded only in becoming complete and utter drivel.
I find it’s a problem with most yank television, they always seem to drag it out too long rather than go out on a high
Harsh – but it did increasingly become a vehicle merely for enabling repetitive displays of the excessive and predictable character traits of the main characters. The plots also became more fanciful – especially to those of us with some knowledge of business. The score remained its best feature, and two series would have been plenty.