Opinion | In his commitment to creating a show that puts clickbait and ad sales ahead of public service, he is teaching the rest of the media an important lesson. The great fear is that they learn something from it 🖋 @nickfthilton.bsky.social Read more: trib.al/JbsdMhl

Is Celebrity Traitors the most anticipated launch on British TV ever? I'm trying to think of another new show that arrived with such pre-release hype...

I didn't write the headline, but, yeah, I certainly don't think Steven Bartlett is a force for good in podcasting.

I don’t think I’ve seen a critical cycle work as quickly as it has with The Life of a Showgirl: immediate fawning praise followed, swiftly, by a vicious backlash. And now “actually, it’s kind of good” reappraisal. All within a week! We might manage to repeat the cycle again by the end of the month…

A newsletter on the idea that The Free Press was somehow worth $150m.

Happy 25th birthday to Gilmore Girls: a fantasy of America that’s infinitely preferable to the real thing.

I went out of my way to watch Monster: the Ed Gein Story yesterday (it is, I think, the worst of the Monsters) and write about how televisual horror is evolving into something all too literal.

The moment, last night, when Movers & Shakers won Gold in the Impact category at the British Podcast Awards. A great recognition for a long, hard year of campaigning, and thankfully @rorycj.bsky.social was on hand to collect the award.

To be fair to Tyler Cowen, I suspect AI is going to significantly increase the global supply of virgins. His utopia is coming.

Not going to review the new Hamlet at the National (thankfully…) but I will review the bloke who tapped me on the shoulder in the interval and said “sorry if you have some sort of condition but your head is moving a lot”. My review of him? Two thumbs down!

Who are the people paying £15 to go to their local Cineworld to watch the latest episode of Diary of a CEO with... Louis Tomlinson from One Direction? Like, what demographic could this possibly be catering to?

Have other podcast people noticed a huge increase in obviously AI-generated guest suggestion emails in the past few weeks? If so, is this the result of some new, bullshit AI tool? Or has there been a new data leak?

The acting community is generating a lot of noise about this, complete non-story, of an AI actress. This is a PR gimmick, not a real threat to their jobs. But when have the acting establishment ever shown any solidarity with their technical colleagues who are already losing jobs to AI?

No comment – obviously – on the person making these comments, but I do wonder how many people have experienced the sheer volume or density of misogyny that Emma Watson has experienced since she was a literal child. I think the insinuation that she is some unworldly naïf is a touch unfair.

Acting isn't threatened by AI because – and I hate to say it – you can't fuck an AI. Whereas rotoscopers? Compositors? Extras? They're the creative industries professions who are genuinely imperilled by the current direction of traffic.

Some thoughts on the lighting of TV. Essentially: there are so many variables that filmmakers can't control with TV, that it makes it hard to be tricksy with light. Better to err on the side of caution with the great, democratic art form.

For all its faults as a publication, TMZ can still occasionally cook.

😈 tell the friendly chatbot your secrets. your deepest, darkest secrets... 😈

The Hack is a bit of a muddle, but still entertaining enough.

um yeah, nice one guys but if your "science" isn't a chatbot that can create other chatbots, then i think i speak for the entire investment community when i say: i'm out!

The TV schedule has become a new culture war front, because the American president is a product of, and an obsessive about, TV.

tfw you're scared nobody will know you were ever in a relationship with Monica Bellucci if you don't issue a totally needless statement about your break-up.

Just sad that there is no successful podcaster in British politics.

It’s amazing to die, at the age of 89, and precipitate such an outpouring of shameless thirstiness.

Can't wait to see Danny Kruger attempt to pull a pint at some pub in Skipton. I'm confident it'll be about 90% head.

🎶 I’m having custard creams/Dunking them in my tea 🎶 (To the tune of ‘Pink Pony Club’; sometimes you just have to accept the muse, when it strikes.)

Too many journalists think the worst consequence of getting something wrong is having to print a correction. In reality - and without exaggeration - this shit endangers lives.

Some of the reporting on the Charlie Kirk murder has been so gratuitously bad that it's very hard for defenders (like myself) to sustain the arguments against just handing journalism over to AI models.

I'm shocked – shocked! – to discover that the Charlie Kirk murderer appears to be nihilistic internet shitposter rather than some profound leftist ideologue.

Friendly reminder that if you're an adult journalist pitching a story about a student debating society, you must – 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 – urgently get a life.

The media industry is being increasingly reckless with, and negligent about, the medium-term economic impacts of integrating AI technologies. We have been here before.

I’m at a media technology conference for an afternoon of panels about AI in journalism and my takeaway is this: journalists working at big media orgs, go buy the nerdy tech and business folk a pint (or two)! These are Computer Science grads who will otherwise blithely destroy your industry.

It's always staggering to me how low an opinion insipid commentators like Dan Walker have of their fellow humans. "Let me introduce you to a little thing called 𝒄𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒆𝒅 𝒅𝒆𝒃𝒂𝒕𝒆," says the 10th place finished on the 2021 Strictly Come Dancing/ the founder of the Twitter #EggClub.

On violence, and the way that the current conditions of the streaming industry foment it.

Thank you everyone, now let’s have that debate about our Parky Charter

Not a good week for humanity’s odds of making it to 2026.

Good illustration of the digital media dilemma: Harry Cole/The Sun's new YouTube show has HUGE exclusive with Mandelson. Yet 316 subs & just 6k views in 9 hours on YouTube vs 715k views on the X preview suggests audiences don't want to migrate. Yet YT is where the money is (at present).

It is in the interests of everyone – particularly Apple and Spotify – to find a way of filtering out the growing deluge of AI spam-slop. Otherwise we will end up with an unmanageably engorged, low-quality marketplace where nobody (advertisers or consumers) will pay for content.

I watched Netflix's 3-hour Charlie Sheen documentary and – largely – enjoyed it. So, that's a win, I guess.

Every day, our society's sick obsession with defending bad things done by bad people inches us closer to a Kyle Rittenhouse and Lucy Connolly podcast.

It is reasonable to think that Graham Linehan should not have been arrested by armed police officers for his tweets. It is reasonable to think that Lucy Connolly should not have received a jail term for her offences. It is not reasonable to think that either is a remotely good person.

Imagine the New Yorker calling your novel “brisk and persuasive”. Nobody’s written a “brisk and persuasive” novel in about four decades.

The Paper – a long awaited spin-off to The US Office – is ok. Somewhere between Joey and Frasier, in the sitcom side quest spectrum. www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...

Was watching the Baillie Gifford Prize shortlist announcement video, and struck by the fact that (at least) three of the nominees carried a Rory Stewart blurb on the cover. Says a lot about who non-fiction books are being marketed to in the UK currently.

This is kind of an amazing fact about In Our Time. I pray the BBC don’t intuit this as a call to “inject more youth” into the show in the post-Bragg era. The stuffiness is what the kidz like!!

I'm not a fan of either the police or bigots, so it's a huge W for me if they waste each other's time.

The punishment doesn't often fit the crime, but Glinner being apprehended by armed police and forced to stop his terrible posting is a rare example where it's spot on.

Task isn’t as unexpectedly gripping as its forebear, Mare of Easttown, but it’s grown-up, accomplished TV (and a relief in a very mid year). www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...