2025-11-15 07:05:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s campaign to redistrict his way to a House majority in the 2026 midterms may be beginning to backfire.
What happened? On Friday, Indiana Senate Republicans announced they would not move forward with a plan to redraw state congressional maps in a way that would favor Republicans. The decision, if it sticks, likely deprives the GOP of an extra seat in the 2026 midterms.
What’s the context? Redistricting usually happens once per decade after a new census. But earlier this year, Trump kicked off an unprecedented wave of mid-decade redistricting by pressuring Texas lawmakers to redraw their maps and create five new Republican congressional districts.
That effort spread to Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, all of which redrew their maps to favor Republicans to varying degrees. California voters, meanwhile, approved a redistricting ballot measure in last week’s elections, which will likely net Democrats five seats, and Virginia could create as many as four new Democratic seats.
Why is this a problem for Trump? Early in the redistricting wars, the conventional wisdom was that the GOP would likely come out ahead. With Indiana’s decision to opt out, along with Democratic victories in California and Virginia, that no longer appears to be the case (though some states are still up in the air).
If Democrats do break even in redistricting, or even gain seats, that gives them a serious edge heading into the 2026 midterms, where the party out of power is usually favored and the GOP will be tasked with defending a slim House majority.
And a Democratic majority in the House would spell trouble for Trump. Not only would his legislative agenda be dead in the water for the final two years of his presidency, but his administration would have to deal with increased oversight and Democratic subpoenas. Those consequences are still contingent on the outcome of the midterms — but what happened today is a concrete step in that direction.
Let’s gather around and appreciate a singularly good headline from the New York Times: “This Is What a Vindicated Iguana Looks Like” (a gift link, and recommended viewing for the iguana side-eye alone).
As it turns out, the iguanas in question had been accused of being an invasive species on Mexico’s Clarion Island; as a result, they were slated for eradication. Luckily for the iguanas — about 100 in total — they have been exonerated by recent DNA analysis: They’re native to the island after all.
As always, thanks for reading, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!
2025-11-15 04:45:00
Menu planning, therapy, essay writing, highly sophisticated global cyberattacks: People just keep coming up with innovative new uses for the latest AI chatbots.
An alarming new milestone was reached this week when the artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced that its flagship AI assistant Claude was used by Chinese hackers in what the company is calling the “first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign.”
According to a report released by Anthropic, in mid-September, the company detected a large-scale cyberespionage operation by a group they’re calling GTG-1002, directed at “major technology corporations, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies across multiple countries.”
Attacks like that are not unusual. What makes this one stand out is that 80 to 90 percent of it was carried out by AI. After human operators identified the target organizations, they used Claude to identify valuable databases within them, test for vulnerabilities, and write its own code to access the databases and extract valuable data. Humans were involved only at a few critical chokepoints to give the AI prompts and check its work.
Claude, like other major large language models, comes equipped with safeguards to prevent it from being used for this type of activity, but the attackers were able to “jailbreak” the program by breaking its task down into smaller, plausibly innocent parts and telling Claude they were a cybersecurity firm doing defensive testing. This raises some troubling questions about the degree to which safeguards on models like Claude and ChatGPT can be maneuvered around, particularly given concerns over how they could be put to use for developing bioweapons or other dangerous real-world materials.
Anthropic does admit that Claude at times during the operation “hallucinated credentials or claimed to have extracted secret information that was in fact publicly-available.” Even state-sponsored hackers have to look out for AI making stuff up.
The report raises the concern that AI tools will make cyberattacks far easier and faster to carry out, raising the vulnerability of everything from sensitive national security systems to ordinary citizens’ bank accounts.
Still, we’re not quite in complete cyberanarchy yet. The level of technical knowledge needed to get Claude to do this is still beyond the average internet troll. But experts have been warning for years now that AI models can be used to generate malicious code for scams or espionage, a phenomenon known as “vibe hacking.” In February, Anthropic’s competitors at OpenAI reported that they had detected malicious actors from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia using their AI tools to assist with cyber operations.
In September, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) published a report on the threat of AI-enabled hacking. It explained that the most time- and resource-intensive parts of most cyber operations are in their planning, reconnaissance, and tool development phases. (The attacks themselves are usually rapid.) By automating these tasks, AI can be an offensive game changer — and that appears to be exactly what took place in this attack.
Caleb Withers, the author of the CNAS report, told Vox that the announcement from Anthropic was “on trend,” considering the recent advancements in AI capabilities and that “the level of sophistication with which this can be done largely autonomously, by AI, is just going to continue to rise.”
Anthropic says the hackers left enough clues to determine that they were Chinese, though the Chinese embassy in the United States described the charge as “smear and slander.”
In some ways, this is an ironic feather in the cap for Anthropic and the US AI industry as a whole. Earlier this year, the Chinese large language model DeepSeek sent shockwaves through Washington and Silicon Valley, suggesting that despite US efforts to throttle Chinese access to the advanced semiconductor chips required to develop AI language models, China’s AI progress was only slightly behind America’s. So it seems at least somewhat telling that even Chinese hackers still prefer a made-in-the-USA chatbot for their cyberexploits.
There’s been increasing alarm over the past year about the scale and sophistication of Chinese cyberoperations targeting the US. These include examples like Volt Typhoon — a campaign to preemptively position state-sponsored cyber-actors into US IT systems, to prepare them to carry out attacks in the event of a major crisis or conflict between the US and China — and Salt Typhoon, an espionage campaign that has targeted telecommunications companies in dozens of countries and targeted the communications of officials including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance during last year’s presidential campaign.
Officials say the scale and sophistication of these attacks is far beyond what we’ve seen before. It may also only be a preview of things to come in the age of AI.
2025-11-15 03:15:00
About a month ago, Trump v. Illinois looked like it was going to be one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions of the entire Trump era. The case concerns President Donald Trump’s attempt to deploy National Guard troops to an immigration facility in Broadview, Illinois, in order to suppress a small protest that has ranged in size from a few dozen people to about 200.
After two lower courts ruled that Trump’s use of the National Guard in this way is illegal, Trump asked the Supreme Court — which has a Republican majority that frequently rules in his favor — to greenlight his use of troops in mid-October.
Yet, in a break from their ordinary practice, the Court signaled in an October 29 order that they are skeptical of many of Trump’s legal arguments. And they asked for additional briefing on a question that neither party raised to the justices. The first round of those new briefs were filed on November 10, and the Court is likely to rule on the case after briefing completes on Monday, November 17.
The upshot is that Trump’s attempt to send troops to Broadview remains blocked by the lower court orders, at least for now. The Court’s October 29 order, moreover, suggests that the justices may look to delay a showdown on whether and when Trump can use the military against Americans on US soil until a future case.
For now, in other words, the stakes of the Illinois case may be somewhat diminished. But, even if the Court does rule against Trump, that will likely only punt the question of when Trump is allowed to deploy troops against Americans until a future date.
Beginning in September, a small group of people have protested the Trump administration’s immigration policies outside of a detention facility in Broadview. According to Judge April Perry, a federal district judge who ruled against Trump’s use of troops, “the typical number of protestors is fewer than fifty,” and “the crowd has never exceeded 200.”
Some members of this small group of protesters have also been charged with crimes. Some allegedly vandalized federal law enforcement vehicles, and others have been arrested for more serious crimes such as aggravated battery.
When Illinois first reached the Supreme Court, the case seemed to turn on whether federal law permits using National Guard members against such a minor protest. Ordinarily, the National Guard is under the command and control of state governments. But Trump relied on a federal law that permits the president to take command of the Guard if there is “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” or if “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
In their initial brief to the justices, Trump’s lawyers made some very aggressive arguments. Among other things, they claimed that the decision to take control of National Guard members “is committed exclusively to the president” and cannot be reviewed by federal courts. They also claimed that the small group of protesters constitutes a “rebellion” that justifies military force.
But, in their October 29 order, the justices dodged these questions and instead asked for briefing on an unrelated question: “Whether the term ‘regular forces’ refers to the regular forces of the United States military, and, if so, how that interpretation affects the operation of” the relevant federal statute.
The fact that the Court did not immediately rule for Trump on his more aggressive arguments suggests that a majority of the justices are skeptical of them. There would be no need, for example, to parse the meaning of the words “regular forces” if Trump’s decision to deploy troops against protesters cannot be reviewed by the courts.
It is likely, moreover, that the justices are sympathetic to a reading of these two words that would require them to rule against Trump in the Illinois case. But a ruling against him on these narrow grounds would merely delay the question of whether and when Trump can use the military against Americans on US soil.
Recall that federal law permits the president to use the National Guard to quell domestic unrest if “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” Prior to the Supreme Court’s October 29 order, both the Trump administration and the lower courts read the phrase “regular forces” to refer to civilian law enforcement officials. Thus, as Trump’s lawyers presented the case to the justices, Illinois turned on whether Trump was unable to enforce US law in Broadview without relying on the military at all.
But an amicus brief filed by Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman argues that the words “regular forces” refers, not to civilian law enforcement, but to “the standing military forces of the Armed Services, within the Department of Defense.” Thus, under Lederman’s reading, Trump may only deploy the National Guard to enforce domestic law if he has first demonstrated that he is unable to enforce the law using the actual Army or Marines.
And it appears that Lederman’s argument is sufficiently persuasive that it convinced a majority of the justices to seek additional briefing from Trump and from the Illinois plaintiffs on whether Lederman is correct.
To understand Lederman’s argument, it’s helpful to understand some of the history of the National Guard. Many of the United States’s founders feared a permanent, national, standing army; as the Supreme Court summarized this fear in a 1990 opinion, “there was a widespread fear that a national standing Army posed an intolerable threat to individual liberty and to the sovereignty of the separate States.”
Instead, the framers imagined that states would maintain a militia that would generally operate under the state’s control. But the Constitution also permitted Congress to call this militia into federal service “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”
The framers’ original vision of a nation with no permanent federal army obviously no longer describes America’s relationship with the military. The United States has the most powerful standing military forces in the world. By the dawn of the 20th century, the state militias had, in the Supreme Court’s words, “proved to be a decidedly unreliable fighting force.” President Theodore Roosevelt warned that the laws governing these militias were “obsolete and worthless.”
In 1901, Roosevelt asked Congress to enact new legislation that would replace the atrophied militias with what became the modern-day National Guard. Notably, Roosevelt’s message to Congress proposed that the armaments and other resources provided to this new militia should “be made identical with those provided for the regular forces.”
Congress responded with the regrettably named Dick Act of 1903 (the law is named after Rep. Charles Dick, who chaired an important congressional committee), which established “the organized militia, to be known as the National Guard of the State, Territory, or District of Columbia.”
As originally enacted, the Dick Act permitted the president to use the National Guard when he is “unable, with the other forces at his command, to execute the laws of the Union in any part thereof.” But Congress amended the law in 1908 to something more similar to the modern version. The 1908 version provided that the president may use the National Guard when he “is unable with the regular forces at his command to execute the laws of the Union in any part thereof.”
According to the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, this change was made to ensure that the National Guard would be the “second line of defense” after the use of other military forces. (Congress removed the words “at his command” in 1956 because it deemed them to be “surplusage.”)
In any event, much of Lederman’s brief is a long list of historical examples showing that Congress used the words “regular forces” to distinguish a standing federal military from state militias. An 1806 law, for example, provides that militiamen are subject to the same rules of military justice as federal troops when “acting in conjunction with the regular forces of the United States.” A broader 1814 law concerned court martials of militiamen serving under the United States “whether acting in conjunction with the regular forces or otherwise.”
The Supreme Court also used the term “regular forces” in this way around the time that the Dick Act was enacted and first amended. In McClaughry v. Deming (1902), for example, the Court referred to the “substantial difference between the regular forces and the militia.”
There’s more. But suffice to say, a majority of the justices appear to have found his evidence persuasive enough to set aside the Trump administration’s arguments and instead demand additional briefing on the meaning of the term “regular forces.”
Unless you are a fan of military forces in US streets, the implications of Lederman’s argument may seem alarming. If Trump isn’t allowed to use the National Guard without first attempting to use the regular Army or the Marines, then he is likely to deploy the regular Army or the Marines against Americans protesting his policies.
But there are other laws that govern the use of regular military forces within the United States. One is the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of those forces “to execute the laws” except “under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” Another law, commonly known as the Insurrection Act, permits the president to use the military to “suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” — but only in limited circumstances laid out in that statute.
The Justice Department has long interpreted these circumstances very narrowly. In a 1964 memorandum signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, for example, the DOJ concluded that the Insurrection Act may only be used if “state authorities are either directly involved, by acting or failing to act, in denials of federal rights of a dimension requiring federal military action, or are so helpless in the face of private violence that the private activity has taken on the character of state action.”
Barring a court order permitting the use of troops, moreover, Katzenbach concluded that military force is only allowed under the Insurrection Act when “those engaging in violence are either acting with the approval of state authorities or have, like the Klan in the 1870s, taken over effective control of the area involved.”
Needless to say, the small group of protesters in Broadview hasn’t come close to seizing control of that region in the same way that the Ku Klux Klan dominated many parts of the South in the post-Civil War era.
Still, the fact that the Justice Department has long interpreted the Insurrection Act narrowly does not mean that either the Trump administration or this Supreme Court — which is ordinarily so sycophantic toward Trump that it literally held that he is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes — will read the same law as narrowly.
But a legal showdown over the meaning of the Insurrection Act is not currently before the Court. If the justices accept Lederman’s interpretation of the amended Dick Act, then that will mean Trump will lose his bid to send National Guard members to Broadview. It will then be up to Trump to decide if he wants to set off a new legal fight by claiming authority under the Insurrection Act, and deploying regular forces to American cities.
2025-11-14 23:10:00
Editor’s note, November 14, 2025: On November 12, the House Oversight Committee released 20,000 pages of documents it received from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate. The documents provide further evidence about how well Donald Trump and Epstein knew one another and have led to a new round of questions about the nature of their relationship. The following story was originally published in July 2025.
Reports of Donald Trump’s name repeatedly appearing in the Jeffrey Epstein files, coupled with the unearthing of a suggestive birthday card that the president sent the convicted sex offender, have renewed scrutiny of their relationship.
But if the government really had damning information about Trump’s entanglements with Epstein in its possession for years, then why didn’t his Democratic predecessor and political rival, President Joe Biden, ever release the files?
It’s impossible to know for certain. Conspiracy theories about a government cover-up in the Epstein case have swirled around right-wing media circles since his 2019 death in prison, which was ruled a suicide.
But appearing in the Epstein Files might not, in and of itself, suggest any wrongdoing on Trump’s part. Even if the material in the sealed files does raise concerns, it would be highly unusual for the government to release that material outside of a courtroom.
The Epstein Files are a collection of more than 100,000 pages of evidence gathered as part of a Justice Department investigation. They include records of physical evidence, grand jury testimony, digital evidence recovered from technology seized at Epstein’s properties, and more.
After releasing an initial trove of documents in February, the Justice Department announced on July 7 that it would not be releasing any more, denying the existence of any “incriminating client list” from Epstein or anything else related to the case that ought to be publicly disclosed.
That prompted backlash from Trump’s base, and the president has maligned his supporters for not letting the issue go. The House shut down early for a month-long recess on Thursday in order to prevent a vote on expediting the release of further documents, as the push has divided the Republican caucus. Trump himself is now on board, having recently called for the release of “pertinent” grand jury testimony in two separate cases involving Epstein from 2005 and 2007.
A federal court in Florida has denied such a request from the DOJ. The department made a similar request to a separate court in New York, but its ruling is still pending.
Trump may hope that the release of the documents can put to rest speculation about his involvement with Epstein. That might be an unrealistic outcome given that the conspiracy theories have now taken on a life of their own and may be uncontainable. But the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s was just one among hundreds of names, many of similarly prominent figures, featured in the unreleased Epstein Files. Those files include not just the grand jury testimony, but also 300 gigabytes of digital evidence.
If the files suggest that Trump’s involvement with Epstein really was just of the harmless social variety prior to their reported falling out in 2004, then the Biden administration would have had no obvious political reason to release them. (Former President Bill Clinton’s name appears in the files that were already released, although there is no allegation of any wrongdoing on Clinton’s part.)
But it also couldn’t have done so without court approval. Grand jury testimony is secret by design: It allows jurors to confer about whether to charge someone with a crime confidentially and without outside influence or fear of public backlash. Such testimony is typically only released under exceptional circumstances, when a judge determines that the public interest overrides the interest in protecting the identity of witnesses, informants, and other people accused of crimes brought before the grand jury.
Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who helped Epstein secure his 2008 plea deal on child prostitution charges in Florida, has said that the grand jury testimony from that particular case includes a redacted FBI affidavit that names individuals who were accused of crimes in connection with Epstein.
As for the remaining digital evidence, it’s highly unusual for the FBI to release information unrelated to charging individuals with a crime. There are several reasons for this, including the desire to protect individuals’ privacy and reputations and to protect ongoing investigations. The agency has said, however, that there would be no new indictments related to Epstein based on a review of its existing investigation files.
So even if Democrats wanted to release the Epstein Files in their entirety during Biden’s presidency, it’s not clear that a court would have granted their request. Trump is now encountering the same issue — meaning that the firestorm around him might not die down anytime soon.
2025-11-14 21:30:00
Before Franz Kafka died in 1924, he had a simple wish for his friend and literary executor Max Brod: burn all of Kafka’s unpublished writing and papers.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, Brod largely ignored what Kafka had said, which is why today we have works like The Castle and The Trial, not to mention the word “Kafkaesque.” But Kafka’s story does raise the question of what rights artists, musicians, writers, and celebrities more generally should have over their work once they die. And those questions are going to be more important in the age of AI, when it’s not just someone’s work that could live on after them, but their actual voice.
The AI audio startup ElevenLabs, which generates amazingly realistic synthetic speech, just rolled out an “Iconic Voices” marketplace that lets companies legally license AI versions of well-known voices — some living, many deceased — for ads and other content.
On the living side, the actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have both signed on. McConaughey — an investor in the company — plans to use his synthetic voice to translate his “Lyrics of Livin’” newsletter into Spanish, which shows how the technology can be used to localize content across the world. (Muy bien, muy bien, muy bien, as Spanish AI McConaughey might put it.) Caine, one of the most celebrated actors in England, is joining the marketplace as a marquee voice and has argued that the move should be seen as amplifying human storytellers, not replacing them.
As weird as it is to imagine an AI speaking with Caine’s inimitable Cockney accent — and frankly, no AI can do Caine better than these two guys in The Trip — at least he made the active choice while alive to sign it away. But ElevenLabs has also struck estate deals that let users hear narration in the voices of historical figures, like Judy Garland, James Dean, Maya Angelou, and AI pioneer Alan Turing. (That’s right, the genius who once said that if computers became smarter than humans, “we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled,” will now be lending his posthumous voice to the machines.)
This is a long way from projecting a holographic Tupac Shakur for a “duet” with Snoop Dogg at Coachella in 2012. We’re generating new readings in the vocal style of someone who can’t consent today.
The incentives are obvious. Synthetic voices are cheaper than staging a hologram tour and more scalable than booking an A-list narrator. With a modest archive, you can generate hours of multilingual audio that sounds plausibly like the original. In the company’s defense, ElevenLabs says its marketplace routes everything through deceased figures’ rights holders to address ethics and misuse concerns. That means heirs get paid, and it’s better than a deepfake AI-for-all, but the core fact remains: Once a voice is an asset, the estate becomes a product manager for a digital ghost.
This is where the Kafka lesson comes in. If you’re a famous person who wants control over posthumous AI content based on yourself — or really anyone who works in creative fields — get an estate lawyer to write those demands down now. Do you permit the creation of a synthetic voice after death? If so, for what? Are archival restorations and documentaries okay, but not ads, political content, or interactive chatbots? Who holds the kill switch: a literary executor, a family council, an independent trustee? If you don’t want your AI voice talking on ChatGPT 55.7 in 2060, don’t leave that decision to a board meeting taking place well after you’ve ended up on the Oscars “In Memoriam” segment.
Kafka’s fame is a standing argument that, sometimes, betraying an artist’s last wish serves the world. But if you, famous person, absolutely don’t want to leave the fate of your voice to chance, learn from the example of British fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. Per his very specific wishes, a hard drive containing his unfinished books was ceremoniously flattened by a steamroller in 2017. Try reconstructing that.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-11-14 21:00:00
Though it’s still early in its first season, I Love LA is already being compared to previous character-driven sitcoms about aimless young people in big cities, namely Girls — only there’s an element of that show that’s noticeably missing from this new one.
I Love LA follows aspiring talent manager Maia (Rachel Sennott) and her tight-knit group of friends, including her formerly estranged, influencer bestie Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), whom she represents as a client. Right off the bat, it’s clear the show wants to establish the sort of relatable, “which one are you?” type of TV ensemble. However, their personalities, aside from Maia’s straight-man boyfriend, aren’t all that distinguishable. Maia, in particular, is an oddly nonspecific protagonist whose voice resembles Twitter more than an actual person. Everyone speaks in the same dry, “cool-girl” tone. Maybe this is an accurate depiction of Gen-Z Angelenos nowadays, but it doesn’t really work for a show that’s aiming to make you invested in its characters.
This could very well change as the season progresses. Still, sitting through I Love LA brings to mind a larger question: Are we in a TV character drought? Will we ever have someone as iconic and knowable as Carrie Bradshaw or Don Draper on our screens again?
It’s been declared ad nauseam that TV is in its “mid” era, post-Succession. The explosion of streaming has wrought countless shows that are perfectly adequate or plainly bad. It isn’t just the streaming that has made TV protagonists less of a fixture in pop culture, though. If TV characters seem less relevant now, it might be that the confluence of reality TV and social media have allowed ordinary people to replace these imagined figures.
To be clear, the sort of TV character that you can easily reference in conversations and dress up as for Halloween isn’t totally obsolete. The Roys from Succession, Carmy from FX’s The Bear and, more recently, Dr. Robbie on HBOMax’s The Pitt, come to mind — although, the latter example is still maybe more of a niche, social-media obsession. ABC’s Abbott Elementary, one of the last remaining network shows that it feels like everyone is watching, has an ensemble with distinct characters who have really seeped into viewers’ households.
Even then, it might be unfair to compare these few contemporary examples to the influence of “Golden Age” antiheroes like Bradshaw, Mad Men’s Don Draper, The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano, Breaking Bad’s Walter White, and the titular Fleabag. According to Vulture critic Kathryn VanArendonk, it took a few seasons for these now-legendary names to “harden into our collective cultural consciousness.” They’ve also managed to claim real estate in our minds due to our current nostalgia-driven culture.
Still, it’s hard to ignore that TV is increasingly being made in a way that allows viewers to be less invested in what’s happening on-screen, let alone be required to pay attention to the quirks and nuances of a particular character — if there are any.
Take the critically panned, Kim Kardashian-starred Hulu show All’s Fair. The characters mostly function to flaunt designer outfits and deliver ridiculously vulgar dialogue that will presumably warrant viral screenshots and clips on TikTok.
It epitomizes a particularly vapid, spare form of TV writing that’s becoming more common, as TV is being referred to and oftentimes feels like a casual, background viewing experience. During the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, writer and producer Justine Bateman, who served as AI consultant for the union’s negotiating committee, told the Hollywood Reporter that multiple showrunners had complained about networks telling them their writing wasn’t “second screen enough.” In a Guardian piece from January, Netflix showrunners, who weren’t explicitly instructed to dumb down their writing, discussed the inevitability that the average TV viewer is probably also looking at their phones. This state of affairs hardly inspires vivid character-building.
The competition between TV screens and phones has fed into a growing suspicion that some TV writers have instead become hyperfocused on writing quips and shocking dialogue for the sake of being memed and clipped. Many writers have denied this incentive. But it’s hard not to feel this expectation for virality watching something like All’s Fair, where Sarah Paulson calls people “c—burgers” and says things like “greedy little pig bottom.”
Even shows with a goal to really engage and stimulate viewers in a more traditional sense are hindered by shorter seasons and inconsistent schedules. In its first season, the HBO teen drama Euphoria established itself as an explicitly character-driven show, with each episode dedicated to the backstory of one of the show’s dysfunctional teens. Since 2019, though, the series has only aired two eight-episode seasons. Apple TV’s Severance is another “appointment TV” series whose storytelling viewers seem especially gripped by. Still, fans have had relatively little of the show to actually consume since it premiered in 2022.
The past few years have also witnessed an increasingly popular approach to TV characters that’s less in-the-moment and propulsive, which VanArendonk sees as a feature of older episodic TV writing. Instead of focusing on plot, the writers are constantly gesturing at characters’ pasts. Many critics have argued that this sort of reverse character development inhibits a lot of initially promising TV shows, notably The Bear, which has been scrutinized in its later seasons for relying too heavily on backstory and flashbacks. VanArendonk argues that characters are more engaging and impressionable when we consume them through their active choices.
“I do want to know things about [a character’s] past,” VanArendonk says. “But just tell me who they are right now and what they are doing today, and what they care about and what their weird quirks are. I promise you that giving me a huge chunk of clues about how they became the person that they are is actually a less important and less effective way of making them feel like a real person.”
If there are names in TV that are constantly referenced and familiarized with in our popular consciousness, they seem to come from real life. Reality shows like the Real Housewives franchise, The Kardashians, Love Island, Selling Sunset, and more recently The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, have been extremely successful in creating household names and recognizable archetypes that stick around for years.
These shows benefit from having longer seasons than many prestige, scripted shows nowadays. But these personalities also remain relevant thanks to years-long tabloid coverage and the stars’ own social-media activity. The past few years have also seen an uptick in spin-off series like The Traitors and Love Island Games that re-cast already familiar reality stars. Even network staples like The Bachelorette, which recently made Mormon Wives star Taylor Frankie Paul its latest titular star, are constantly reinforcing the presence of these personalities in our media consumption now.
“The surge in reality-TV popularity is unmistakable, and it has taken over social media conversation in the way that Mad Men used to,” says Salon’s Coleman Spilde. “People are watching Love Island and Severance the same way. And then there’s just the basic truth that a lot of people would rather spend their time on TikTok than watch narrative television or are only interested in narrative television if an influencer or TikTok star is in it.”
As Spilde suggests, reality TV isn’t the only avenue where the average individual is eclipsing fictional characters in our attention economy. From influencers to podcasters — and influencers with podcasts — to bonafide celebrities caught up in legal scandals, we’re becoming more parasocial in the way we spectate. Social-media personalities, compared to characters confined to fictional settings, are constantly delivering intimate content on a frequent basis. The interactive function of social media also allows us to participate and even alter the storylines and drama we watch unfold online. Real Housewives, for example, has become increasingly centered around online gossip and backlash from viewers.
Even the average person who doesn’t identify as an influencer has the ability to become the main character of the week or month in our current surveillance culture — the latest example being the Astronomer CEO who was caught cheating with his head of HR on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert earlier this year.
This interest in online personalities is bleeding back into television, as more familiar faces from the internet are attempting to revive the medium with varying results. Of course, the comedian/influencer-to-TV-star pipeline isn’t new. But it’s become a reliable formula that doesn’t feel innovative or even fruitful at this point. This year alone has seen Overcompensating starring internet comedian Benito Skinner; Adults, featuring podcaster Owen Thiele; the Meg Stalter comedy Too Much; and the aforementioned I Love LA. (The most dire example in the category is pretty firmly All’s Fair.) Additionally, it was just announced that the viral internet comedian and Therapuss podcaster Jake Shane is working on a scripted comedy based on his life.
Who knows whether these shows will be capable of producing memorable, era-defining characters further down the line? Right now, though, this trend feels less experimental and more representative of a lack of imagination and general distrust in audiences to become absorbed in the unfamiliar. In the case of a show like I Love LA, for instance, a familiar face isn’t nearly as exciting as discovering a fresh, enigmatic character week after week.