Looking over the vast landscape of television options in 2025, do you yearn for a show tailored more to your exact tastes? Or, more precisely, a show where characters like President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian can fight, levitate and/or experience an emotional breakdown while delivering dialogue that is (kind of) your creation?
If so, then Showrunner from Fable Studio may be for you. The AI-powered platform, released to the public in July, allows users to craft short animated scenes for free after typing in a dialogue text prompt and choosing from a menu of preset characters, actions and settings. Users simply access the platform’s Discord, pick from a drop-down menu of options (other available characters include Arnold Schwarzenegger and a young Clint Eastwood), type up an overarching idea, wait a few minutes and voilà — out pops a scene in a style reminiscent of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty.
It’s all part of the company’s ambition to create the “Netflix of AI.” The leaders of Showrunner see a future in which audiences can insert themselves into their favorite shows and create new episodes. “AI is not just a tool in the toolbox; it’s a competitor,” chief executive Edward Saatchi says in a video posted to Showrunner’s website. Major gatekeepers have taken note, with Amazon’s Alexa Fund recently making an investment in Fable and Saatchi telling Variety he’s in talks with Disney and other studios about licensing their titles.
But does this technology threaten the story professionals, aka the actual showrunners? To find out, The Hollywood Reporter asked a few to create scenes in the public-facing platform in its current state. Read their takes below. Spoiler alert: The writer-producers aren’t fearing for their livelihoods just yet.
On the show we’re doing now, we have a group chat, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll come up with some little quick videos, and then I’ll amaze people by sending in this funny video.” The interesting thing is that it’s amazing it makes these animations, [but] by the same token, I spent 45 minutes on and off and I made six or seven of them — and I didn’t wind up sending any of them. None of them wound up being, to me, especially funny or clever.
What they do is they make connections. AI is very good at that. If you put in Elon Musk and you put in Bernie Sanders, it’ll make connections between the words you put in and something about Bernie Sanders. To me, it was just references. It was just connecting things in a way that a database of infinite amounts of information can do in a way I can’t do.
The best episodes of shows I’ve done come from experience, come from a fight I had with my wife or something I did with my kids or a phone call. Those come from real, lived experiences. And I’m sure AI can read up about all these experiences. They probably have, but I don’t know if they can experience it … I would never say it’s not possible. But I don’t see it yet.
Screenshot/Courtesy
Jeff Dixon and Jim Cooper, showrunners, Curses!
DIXON To me, it felt more like a party trick than an actual replacement. I was comparing it to when you were a kid and you would make music on one of those old Casio keyboards and they had the little drum button where it would be like, “Push for beat” … and you’d be like, “This is the best song ever!”
COOPER Every character cussed. Like every character. And it didn’t really matter which one you picked. … It’s funny, you can see that in beginning writers’ writing a lot. If you read a spec of another show, a lot of times people are dropping [those words], like, “I’m matching the dialogue” and you’re going, “But there’s not really the joke there other than you did the F-bomb …”
DIXON I know it’s growing, and I know it’ll change. I know it’ll get there, but just looking at it now, it feels like just output, and not actually a story.
Marc Guggenheim, showrunner, Arrow, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Carnival Row
The truth is I was generally unimpressed. I certainly don’t feel as though my job is under threat by this app. Yet. The app — which you have to access through Discord, which makes for a frustrating user experience — is basically a souped-up version of the flash animations that have been available for ages.
The name “Showrunner” is, I think, a bit misleading. I think the public thinks showrunners just create ideas and write them, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as the job goes. Ninety percent of the job is dealing with other people — executives, actors, directors, crew — and that’s not something you can outsource to AI. I like to say that I write for free. I get paid to take notes. But how would AI deal with bad notes? Could it even recognize them? I doubt that very much.
If I had the idea for a funny animated short to, say, skewer Trump in my newsletter, I might try to use Showrunner for that purpose. But that’s a pretty narrow use case.
This story appeared in the Sept. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.