AUDIENCE OF ONE  

Launched last week, Showrunner promises to be the ‘Netflix of AI’. The platform allows users to create scenes of a TV show with a few typed prompts and – in a feature that proved popular during alpha testing – insert themselves into a TV show’s world. It’s free to view Showrunner-generated content, and the AI shorts can be shared across YouTube and social media.

Two interactive original ‘shows’ were available at launch: satirical comedy Exit Valley and Everything Is Fine, which centers around a couple’s epic meltdown in IKEA (who can relate?). The current focus is on animated content, which requires less processing power than live-action scenes. Showrunner was developed by San Francisco-based startup Fable, which secured an undisclosed investment from Amazon’s Alexa Fund VC investment arm. Fable CEO Edward Saatchi told Variety that the company is in talks with Disney and other Hollywood studios about licensing IP for the platform.  Another AI novelty… or the future of entertainment and content consumption?

OUR TAKE

We’ve previously explored how content is clustering at extremes and what that means for the middle ground. Instead of disrupting attention, Showrunner is another challenge on authorship and collapses the distance between ‘I watched it’ and ‘I made it’ . Sites like Wattpad and fanfic communities require significant user input, but Showrunner allows for creation with just a prompt. And at US$ 10-20 a month for hundreds of scenes – cheaper than a Netflix subscription – economics alone could drive experimentation, regardless of output quality.

Allowing users to insert themselves into the narrative opens up a new category of UGC. These episodes will most likely compete with Instagram Stories or TikTok’s FYP – content users watch because of who made it. After all, a colleague’s AI sitcom about office life hits different from The Office.

But if we’re honest, Showrunner can’t seem to decide what it is. One moment it’s tempting fans to ‘make new episodes of shows you love’ (that sounds legally dubious…), the next it’s positioning itself as a tool for ‘original animated comedies.’ Even Saatchi himself seems unsure of the product-market fit, confessing to Variety that ‘maybe nobody wants this.’ A quick scan of the comments suggests some agree. And the market uncertainty masks a bigger problem: Showrunner can’t sustain stories beyond single episodes, meaning that every episode functions like a pilot.

Technical limitations aside, Showrunner represents an acceleration of an existing trend: the erosion of entertainment’s collective nature. While shows still create shared cultural moments (in 2025 Severance, The White Lotus and Adolescence all got fans talking), Showrunner pushes us toward a future where entertainment is increasingly atomized – think millions of personalized shows with an audience of one. It’s hard to have water cooler conversations about an episode where you were the sole viewer.

So, where does this leave brands? The opportunity isn’t in creating better content – it’s in enabling creation. In markets like Indonesia, where Shopee Live sellers already blur entertainment and commerce, audiences don’t need education on ‘creator-as-entertainer’. The brands that win won’t be those buying ad spots in AI-generated shows; they’ll be the ones giving customers tools to tell their own stories.

In a world of infinite personalized entertainment, the scarce resource isn’t attention – it’s shared attention. We don’t just need a new word for ‘content creator,’ we urgently need new spaces for collective culture. If everyone’s a showrunner, what are we all watching together? And does it even matter?

For those of you born before 1997, ‘fax, no printer‘ is Gen Z speak for ‘undeniable facts I agree with’

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