If you’ve ever wanted to make the worst TV shows imaginable using AI, Fable has you covered.
Later this week, the San Francisco-based startup will launch an alpha version of Showrunner, an AI-powered tool that allows you to “create” your “own” animated series. Backed by Amazon, Fable is run by Edward Saatchi, a businessman and filmmaker who founded and led Meta’s now-defunct VR subsidiary, Oculus Story Studios. The company produced several VR titles, including the Emmy-winning Henry, before shutting down in 2017.
That makes it all the more baffling that he would pivot from winning an Emmy for his artistic work to AI garbage. With Showrunner, users can feed the platform one- to 100-word prompts to generate the dialogue, characters, shot types and other elements, with AI taking those guidelines and handling all of the writing, voiceover and animation.
See below for “Exit Valley,” a supposed Silicon Valley parody, for an example of the kind of high-quality content you can expect from Showrunner. The other “original” Showrunner title, “Everything is Fine,” follows a bickering couple that gets transported to another world. Fable has also previously used Showrunner to make unauthorized South Park episodes, which it claims garnered over 80 million views.
Speaking to Variety, Saatchi boasted about all of the ways he thinks AI will revolutionize entertainment.
“Hollywood streaming services are about to become two-way entertainment: audiences watching a season of a show [and] loving it will now be able to make new episodes with a few words and become characters with a photo,” he said. “Our relationship to entertainment will be totally different in the next five years.”
As an example, he points to Pixar’s beloved Toy Story franchise. “The ‘Toy Story of AI’ isn’t just going to be a cheap Toy Story. Our idea is that ‘Toy Story of AI’ would be playable, with millions of new scenes, all owned by Disney,” he said. (That’s a particularly funny series to highlight since they’re gorgeously animated films that have been praised for their soulful existential themes, all of which are derived from human artists.)
In addition to Amazon’s undisclosed financial backing in Fable, Saatchi said his company is already in talks with Disney and other companies. He added that Fable has “guardrails” to prevent offensive or illegal content (including copyright infringement), as well as story issues like inconsistent characterization.
He talks a big game, but again, a quick look at the “entertainment” that Showrunner has already created reveals unbelievable stale and awkward animation. Besides the AI voices lacking the full range of emotion of human actors, the characters often have distracting delays in their speech. Or take this video featuring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While he’s notoriously weird and very likely a lizard person in real life, Showrunner takes that one step further by having him randomly walk around mid-conversation for seemingly no reason.
lmao i looked up a video someone made with this service. yeah man let me bet a couple hundred million on this https://t.co/tMQ3YRz7AP pic.twitter.com/lMsvhNRMx2
— aLec robBins (@alecrobbins) July 30, 2025
It’s all just incredibly sterile and soulless, without any of the personality or style that handcrafted animation can have. But hey, if this slop interests you, Fable is inviting people to its Discord to get started.
Ironically, though, Saatchi even conceded to Variety that Showrunner could flop. “Maybe nobody wants this and it won’t work,” he said. We can only hope!
Image credit: Fable
Via: Variety
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