A few weeks ago, when I was writing about the way AI is changing the creative landscape, I mentioned the Writer’s Guild of America strike. The WGA has been on strike, refusing to write or revise any work to be filmed, since early May, which meant that the major film and TV studios could only continue work on the scripts that were already written, nothing new. Well friends, I’m happy to announce that – after furious weeks of negotiating and bargaining – the actors are now on strike as well. The Screen Actors’ Guild this week joined the writers on the picket line, and once again, AI is one of the major concerns.

One such concern that has been talked about a lot is the practice of using AI to digitally create a “performance.” This isn’t the same thing as using CGI to generate a performance like Gollum from Lord of the Rings – in those films and many other films that have used the same technology, Andy Serkis performed the role himself and the digital character was created based on his movements, his voice, his PERFORMANCE. That’s not at issue here.

This is about the ability to sit at a computer and whip up – for example – a digital simulation of the late Olivia Newton John to drop into the Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies series, which was fortunately canceled before that could happen. Or – and this is something that SAG claims the studios are actually planning – to pay an actor for one day’s work, scan their likeness and voice, and then use them as a background character in perpetuity. Jobs for extras and small roles, traditionally the best path for someone to break into screen acting if they weren’t lucky enough to be born with industry connections, would be wiped out overnight. What’s more, once that contract is signed there’s nothing to stop a studio from using your likeness in a role that you would never have agreed to perform – a Nazi, a serial killer, an insurance adjuster. The possibilities are chilling. 

Granted, this isn’t going to hurt the likes of Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lawrence, millionaire actors who are firmly entrenched in the system and aren’t going anywhere. But this isn’t about them. It’s about everyone else who works in the movies. Percentage-wise, the Tom Cruises are a tiny fraction of the people who actually appear on screen, and while he’ll be perfectly comfortable filming Mission: Impossible sequels until he finally runs out of places to run, the practice would be devastating for the guy who played “Bartender” in a movie today, has “Cop #2” booked for a TV show tomorrow, and has his fingers crossed that he’ll get the coveted role of “Jury Foreman” next week since that one actually comes with a line and a pay bump.

Even then, there’s no guarantee that this will end there, as this same technology would theoretically make it possible to generate an entire show with no human input at all. A recent episode of the documentary television program Black Mirror titled “Joan is Awful” demonstrated this perfectly. In “Joan is Awful,” Annie Murphy plays a woman who learns that, because she didn’t pay attention to the terms of service when she signed up for a streamer that is MOST DEFINITELY NOT NETFLIX she gave them permission to use AI to generate a melodrama based on her life, with a new episode based on what she was doing every day and painting her in the worst light possible. The show even “casts” Salma Hayek as Joan, and Salma herself is shocked to learn what she agreed to when she signed over her likeness. Black Mirror has always been the sort of show that looked at technology and projected a logical worst-case scenario in the near future, but I bet even showrunner Charlie Brooker is surprised to learn that this particular episode was set in August 2023.

For most of us, of course, there’s very little we can do at the moment except wait for the networks and streamers to run out of new stuff to dole out and start complaining. But the good news is that the last few years of TV have been so rich in goodness that, odds are, there’s plenty of worthwhile material available that you haven’t watched yet, most of which have – and this is the part that the studio heads will struggle to understand – been made by human beings. So I’m going to share with you today some of the TV shows that I haven’t watched that I plan to take advantage of the strike downtime to binge.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is first on my list. This series, available on Amazon Prime, just recently finished its five-season run, and although I’ve always been interested in it, I haven’t quite found the time to watch it before. I was already planning to move it up on my rotation with the news that the show’s star, Rachel Brosnahan, has been cast as the new Lois Lane in James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy movie, which will commence filming as soon as the strikes are settled, so hopefully sometime before the sun explodes and Kal-El loses another planet.

Mrs. Maisel, from what I understand, is about a 50s era housewife who decides to embark on a career as a stand-up comic. I’ve always kinda been fascinated by the world of stand-up, and setting it at that particular time period with a female lead seems like it would create a very unique perspective. The tricky thing about making a show or movie about a comedian, though, has always been to make sure they’re legitimately funny, which sometimes has proven difficult. But no doubt the AI joke generator has nailed Mrs. Maisel’s routines (that or a team of writers led by showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino, who also created the whip-smart Gilmore Girls), and the performance itself can be landed flawlessly just by dropping Brosnahan’s face into a computer and letting it figure out the delivery on its own.

Wednesday is another show I, shockingly, haven’t watched yet. I’m a fan of The Addams Family, both the original series and the films from the 90s, so it’s weird that I haven’t gotten around to it yet, although in my defense, that last season of Better Call Saul was monopolizing a lot of my time.

I know a little more about Wednesday than Mrs. Maisel, just by virtue of it being a new incarnation of a classic IP created by the Hotspot AI Art Generator cartoonist Charles Addams. I know that, in this version, Wednesday Addams is sent to a boarding school, and I know that Jenna Ortega apparently did a good job portraying the character, by virtue of the fact of her getting an Emmy nomination on the same day she went on strike. Also, there is apparently some big dance number that Ortega herself choreographed on the day they filmed it, although no doubt it could have been done just as efficiently by a computer. 

Hulu brings us Only Murders in the Building, a comedy starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as a trio of true crime enthusiasts who go over the top trying to solve a real murder that happens in their apartment building. Steve Martin and Martin Short, of course, are comedic legends whose legacy will only be enhanced once their likenesses are inserted into a database so they can continue starring in this show for the next 70 years. Last fall my wife and I attended one of their live shows (which was really weird, since they had to do the entire thing without CGI), in which they praised Selena Gomez as being “such a good actress that she pretended to know who we were.” Why haven’t I watched this show yet? I have no idea. Seems like a terrible oversight on my part.

Finally, I’m going over to MAX to watch Peacemaker. I know, considering my comic book pedigree it’s got to be a shocker that I haven’t seen it yet. Guys, you would be horrified at how many comic book series I’ve yet to get around to watching. It’s almost as disturbing as the number I started watching but have yet to finish.

Anyway, Peacemaker is a spinoff of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, starring John Cena as the titular superhero commando who loves peace so much he’s willing to kill whoever he has to in order to achieve it. It’s a satire, of course, a concept that is probably lost on anybody who has missed the point of the previous three entries I’ve written about and, likely, Mark Zuckerberg. The character, as presented in the movie (which I have seen) is fundamentally absurd, and it’s the absurdity that made him fun to watch. I’m hoping for more of the same in the TV show, which again is written and directed by James Gunn. Gunn was also the writer and director of the three Guardians of the Galaxy movies and one Holiday Special for Marvel, which might trick you into thinking he’s got a pedigree and knows what he’s doing, explaining why Warner Bros. hired him to take command of DC Studios going forward, although they might have thought twice if they realized they clearly could have gotten the same quality of work by using ChatGPT.

So there I am – four series, a total of 79 episodes so far. That should keep me busy for a while. But if I run through these series before those pesky writers and actors realize how expendable they are and end the strike, there are plenty more to choose from: Yellowstone, Ted Lasso, Foundation, House of the Dragon, Andor, and all of the thousands of other shows I haven’t seen yet that could just as easily have been made by feeding some data into an AI engine. 

A Golden Age of Television indeed.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. In case you didn’t get it, the point here is that all of these things were made by actual human writers and directors and actors, and that doing it all by computer would be terrible. In case you didn’t get that.