{"id":698491,"date":"2025-11-10T04:45:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T01:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alls-fair-and-the-new-television-of-nothingness\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T04:45:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T01:45:25","slug":"alls-fair-and-the-new-television-of-nothingness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alls-fair-and-the-new-television-of-nothingness\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018All\u2019s Fair\u2019 and the New Television of Nothingness"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\n\tOne feature of modern AI systems is that the model does not actually reason. Unlike the older \u201csymbolic\u201d app<\/a>roach, in which humans hard-program a machine to run through a series<\/a> of options, the current Large Language Models simply synthesize lots of information and predict based on likelihoods. So the model (by definition) cannot conjure up anything of literal substance; it can just regurgitate, sometimes coherently and sometimes nonsensically, based on material it doesn\u2019t understand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAn odd reference point, perhaps. But it came to mind when watching the first three episodes of\u00a0All\u2019s Fair,\u00a0<\/em>Hulu\u2018s new dramatic soap from Ryan Murphy. By network report, at least, the show was written by humans, including Jon Robin Baitz, an excellent playwright who has spent parts of the past 20 years trying to find his footing in television. Yet the result is a regurgitation of fragments of images, of plot lines and dialogue, previously thought native only to automated text-predictors \u2014 an approach to creativity with the same lack of consciousness as an LLM.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy now you know of the series, if only from the people warning you that you really don\u2019t want to know the series;\u00a0\u201catrocity,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u201cbrain dead\u201d and\u00a0\u201cworst TV show of all time\u201d<\/a>\u00a0have been the kinds of terms thrown around. These labels somehow are both too generous and an understatement of the true contribution \u2014 dare I say transformation \u2014 of the All\u2019s Fair<\/em> moment. See,\u00a0the Hulu series is not terrible on the scale of great to awful that television typically runs on. No, it does away with the entire spectrum \u2014 in fact, I would argue it overhauls the definition of television itself.<\/p>\n

\n\tThrough either a great act of artistic subversion or (more likely) just a great accident,\u00a0All\u2019s Fair\u00a0<\/em>has entirely recalibrated what a series should try to do. When faced with the increasingly tough Hollywood question of how to make original TV in a world that has seemingly already unearthed every plot and drained the bag of every surprise, Murphy and his team have returned an unexpected answer: junk the medium\u2019s entire premise. In its place, they say, slide in a show whose defining characteristic is recycled emptiness. Thirty years after Seinfeld<\/em> gave us a show about nothing (which was actually about friendship and frustrations and loneliness and insecurities),\u00a0All\u2019s Fair\u00a0<\/em>has finally come along to make good on the promise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBy a show about nothing, I don\u2019t mean\u00a0All\u2019s Fair\u00a0<\/em>represents a morally vacuous worldview; that would be reprehensible, but at least a perspective. No, I mean literally nothing. There is a universe in which champagne-clinking pronouncements like \u201cfrom cocktails to cock rings all in one 24-hour period\u201d mean something. But we don\u2019t live in that universe. We live in this one, and it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\n\tA Los Angeles-set series anchored by Kim Kardashian,\u00a0All\u2019s Fair\u00a0<\/em>takes the form of a divorce-themed legal drama in which a set of inspirational girlboss slogans\/insults get crossed with the images of an early 2000s perfume commercial. That sounds like a prompt more than a description, and it should; the show contains plotlines and dramatic arcs and character nuances no more than a ChatGPT response about a set of ingredients produces an actual pie. Surely in the history of people saying they didn\u2019t want to do something no one has ever put together a combination of words that read \u201cI wouldn\u2019t\u00a0do [it] even if I were penniless and starving on a street corner\u00a0forced to blow a priest with a chlamydia\u00a0for a bowl of refried beans.\u201d But an LLM doesn\u2019t know that, and when tasked with such an assignment it might just rifle through its training data to arrange them in this way.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is a show which not only doesn\u2019t know but doesn\u2019t care whether it\u2019s supposed to be an aspirational portrayal of wealth or a satire of it \u2014 where a tired husband\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m drowning here with you\u201d is met with \u201cWhat are you talking about? You\u2019re famous. You have three Super Bowl rings,\u201d and it\u2019s not clear to anyone, least of all the actors saying them, whether these lines are meant to be comedic.<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, consumerism, the reliable source of ersatz meaning (and the ultimate goal of LLMs), becomes the go-to in\u00a0All\u2019s Fair\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>many scenes of gourmet-food-picking sister-bonding. Surely it can be no coincidence that when Kardashian\u2019s character (with the decidedly synthetic name of Allura) gets a life-crushing piece of news<\/a>, this is the monologue that follows:<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLiving well is the best revenge, but on the path to living well, looking great matters too. \u2026 The other day I did this new miracle laser that makes the tiny microscopic holes in the skin that stimulates collagen. There\u2019s also the most wonderful new long-lasting filler formulated from salmon sperm. And then there is this new check machine that stimulates 20,000 super maximal muscle contractions; it\u2019s like doing 20,000 crunches or squats. But the best thing I did was vaginal PRP.\u201d (You don\u2019t want to know.)<\/p>\n

\n\tNo person, no matter how dermatologically inclined, would have that reaction to learning about a shattering tragedy. Ah, but that presumes this show is attempting to portray people, not serve as a vessel emptied of meaning. If that is the aim, odes to filler formulated from salmon-sperm is exactly how you would respond to your newly ruined life.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn another era, the era of Rocky Horror Picture Show<\/em> or The Room<\/em>, we might expect All\u2019s Fair<\/em> to be reappropriated and valorized as camp. But the beauty, or at least the fireproofing, of this era is that the cultural techno-machine has already done all that work, processing and reprocessing heightened nonsense so much that there is nothing left for a midnight audience to do.<\/p>\n

\n\tA temptation\u00a0hovers to see all this as the logical downward endpoint of Ryan Murphy \u2014 that after the transgressive frisson of Nip\/Tuck<\/em>\u00a0gave rise to the feelgood freshness of Glee <\/em>which yielded the baroque heavyhandedness of American Horror Story\u00a0<\/em>that birthed the empty cosplay of American Crime Story,\u00a0<\/em>this marks the only place he could end up, in the commedia<\/a> dell\u2019arte of Kim Kardashian and her friends describing revenge in terms of chopped-up and force-fed ram scrotums. (Yeah, that\u2019s in the show too.)<\/p>\n

\n\tIt would even be reasonable to find here an inexorable end to Kardashian herself, who, having increasingly turned from any sort of conventionally defined reality-star or social influencer into a meme \u2014 an abstract idea of what a public personality can be \u2014 now must evolve into the only state available to her: a simulation of a human character.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that would actually feel like too mild an ambition for what I think might really be happening here, which is an attempt, with the specter of the AI slop machine looming over Hollywood, to destroy the storytelling medium before a personalize-the-IP-minded Sora can get its hand on the gun \u2014 a kind of pop-culture cyanide-pilling. When the history of 21st-century entertainment is written, I believe we will look at All\u2019s Fair<\/em> as a watershed, the moment that television itself, as a place where new and coherent stories were for decades told, began to give way to something more meaning-free, more recycled, more nothing. As 6 7 gets named word of the year<\/a> precisely due to its emptiness, and perpetrators of political violence\u00a0toss out deliberately incoherent Internet memes<\/a>, the small screen now enters the fray too, appropriating the nothingness and packaging it in its own bejeweled casing.\u00a0With ratings so good<\/a>, expect to see more like it. Broadcast created news\/ variety and basic cable created reality TV and streaming creating prestige TV and social media created outrage-opinion TV and AI will create a tropal emptiness trained on all of the above but adding up, like All\u2019s Fair<\/em>, to much less than it.<\/p>\n

\n\tAll\u2019s Fair<\/em> has an almost laughable number of executive producers (I counted 15, including Kris Jenner), which at first confounds; surely in a group this large\u00a0someone\u00a0<\/em>knows how to produce a passable television show. But then an explanation snapped into place: the abundance of voices is exactly what leads to\u00a0All\u2019s Fair<\/em> anti-televisuality. Each producer cancels the other out, blender-like, just as a broad data set reduces an LLM\u2019s outputs to meaninglessness.<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m not certain if any of these 15 people or the cast (which also includes Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Teyana Taylor, Sarah Paulson and Glenn Close) understood their epically disruptive\u00a0aim (attempts to reach one of the executive producers ended with a redirection to Murphy, who for now isn\u2019t talking). But there were hints at least of a subconscious understanding that what is being streamed here is not television in a classic sense. Because the cast has engaged with this empty memified world on-screen by extending the drama into a meme-land off of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFirst Close on Thursday posted a hand-drawn doodle in which critics are boiled in a stew while the cast gleefully stands around and watches (a legendary actress trying to Fatal Attraction<\/em> journalists was not on this year\u2019s bingo card). The meme seemed to perfectly capture the dynamic on-screen too, the show\u2019s principals burning the avatars of meaning in a pot of hot-water nothingness.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd then Kim Kardashian offered an Instagram post that asked if followers \u201chad tuned in to the most critically acclaimed show of the year?!?!?!?\u201d and went on to cite the awful reviews in a way that recontextualized them as good. She, even more than Close, seemed in on the joke: \u201cThis whole idea of professionals producing television and a set of cultural gatekeepers evaluating it is now so meaningless we can pretend the evaluation is anything we want.\u201d Algorithms are turning information into personalized bits, shaped into whatever we individually find most digestible, so why not grab a hammer and fragment the mass medium of television into subjective smithereens? I have no idea who the insult \u201cI\u2019m surprised your ancestors were actually allowed on the Mayflower but I guess that\u2019s one way to rid the place of half-wits, mouth-breathers and perverts\u201d is supposed to roast. But more important, the show\u2019s creators don\u2019t either, and aren\u2019t particularly troubled by the question. It means whatever you want it to mean.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s something fitting about the author all of this. Who better than Ryan Murphy, who for so long embodied and powered a cable\/streaming ethos with his prestige-flecked airplane reads, to come in and say that era is over? The new moment involves models, for now in human form but eventually, cost-effectively, run by the machines themselves. For years it\u2019s been a good creative run, filled with wonderful and long-lasting filler. But now it\u2019s time to let the salmon sperm take over.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

If you want to read more Like this articles, you can visit our Social Media category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One feature of modern AI systems is that the model does not actually reason. Unlike the older \u201csymbolic\u201d approach, in which humans hard-program a machine to run through a series of options, the current Large Language Models simply synthesize lots of information and predict based on likelihoods. So the model (by definition) cannot conjure up…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":698492,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/GettyImages-2242427304.jpg?w=1440&h=810&crop=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1940,70988,17802],"class_list":["post-698491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-hulu","tag-kim-kardashian","tag-ryan-murphy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}