When I was 20, I remember sitting in a university lecture theatre at Bournemouth University “The best in the country for Television” It boasted. Daily. eye roll, where TV programmers from major UK broadcasters were invited to speak to about 3,000 students hauled in from across the country. The topic was simple: How to Make Money in Television.
Their advice was equally simple: do what works. Repeat proven formats. Stick to models that have already succeeded.
And the audacious, ignorant filmmaker in me stood up unimpressed by their conclusions and asked:
“If you keep making regurgitated content with the same ideals, how are you going to keep up with the progress of humanity?”
They laughed at me. The response was candid:
“I’d argue we aren’t going forwards. If anything, we’re going backwards.”
Another student jumped in and said “but Breaking Bad doesn’t follow those patterns, and me and all my mates cannot stop watching it”
A programmer from ITV2, one of the most major TV channels at the time, replied, “See they brought me Breaking Bad and I passed on it because yes, you and your friends might watch it but that’s not a lot of people.”
The young, beanie-wearing, scruffy teenager sat back down, quietly insulted by his response. In that moment, the programmer had lost the audience. The majority of the people in that room. Students. Most of them already half way into season three of Breaking Bad.
But they weren’t entirely wrong. There are proven models for producing broadcast media, a clear one being the inclusion of a famous celebrity. No matter how good or bad the execution, the audience shows up because of their attachment to that character.
Traditional television favoured moral clarity, episodic resolution, and extended seasons structured around volume rather than narrative progression. Cheap and cheerful, they’d call it. But these models weren’t going to last. What he didn’t realise was that Breaking Bad would go on to disrupt the media landscape by not following the accepted patterns at all. The protagonist faced real consequences, experienced moral decline instead of redemption, unfolded through slow and patient pacing, used cinematic visual storytelling, and trusted the audience’s intelligence.
The key point is that it didn’t follow the established patterns of television at all. That’s why people liked it.
The broadcaster continued: “People don’t know what they like — we tell them what they like.”
Those words have echoed through my mind ever since. It showed me how easily institutions can mistake control for insight — and why creative authority doesn’t always sit where power does.
***
History took a different turn. As it turns out, that student ‘and all his mates’, made up a market share of interest. Breaking Bad went on to help redefine Netflix and reshape how stories reached audiences.
The programmer wasn’t completely wrong. Breaking Bad didn’t perform as well on broadcast. But broadcast was the limitation, not the content.
Breaking Bad is widely credited as one of the shows that drove early Netflix subscriber growth, helping push the platform and accelerate its shift from DVD rentals to a streaming-first library. This led to a shift in culture. By October 2012, Netflix had surpassed 30 million streaming members, establishing an early lead in a new media landscape. Terms like “binge-watching” and “Netflix and chill” emerged organically, largely from university and young-adult culture, signalling two things: first, that how people watched television had fundamentally changed; and second, that “you and all your mates aren’t a lot of people” was categorically wrong.
This shift didn’t go unnoticed. By 2013 Amazon folded Prime Video into its broader ecosystem, treating serialised storytelling as a long-term engagement tool rather than a ratings product. Hulu caught on in 2015, Disney pulled it’s programs from Netflix and started Disney+ in 2017 and HBO, long insulated by prestige and subscriptions, was forced to follow audiences online with its own platforms in 2020.
We weren’t new to ‘streaming’, but somehow this held a different posture. TiVo and On-Demand offered a similar process, but they still asked audiences to plan ahead, wrestle with clunky interfaces, and rely on remote controls that only worked when they felt like it.This was a catalogue. Instant, high-quality video. No buffering. No friction. No Schedule. Open your laptop and press play.
After Covid kicked off, everyone else got on board by force. AppleTV+ took a different approach. It brought back weekly serial releases, something streaming had already moved past, but paired it with extremely high production standards. Fewer shows. Slower rollout. Higher trust in the work. In that context, the model worked. Another shift in a moving world less than a decade from when streaming took off. This reshaped job security for writers. Twenty-four episodes became eight. Fewer scripts. Shorter contracts. And then AI arrived.
AI has been a moral and practical tornado in the creative world. It can rewrite, reformat, and even automate research in your work. It can speed things up and reduce your need for teams of people. It can generate content and create a roll pulls, but right now, that’s largely where it stops. Even models that generate imagery, 3D assets, or storyboards are limited. They don’t offer true control, and the time spent correcting faulty outputs often costs as much time and money as hiring a real artist to do the work properly from the start.
AI doesn’t draw from lived experience, only from pockets of data it has been trained on. It can only draw from curated information designed to fulfill specific outcomes, paths it has travelled hundreds of thousands of times. When it starts touching the fringe of new information, it can begin hallucinating, making the information unreliable.
It also crawls the internet to find information, but it can’t verify whether that information is accurate. That discernment lies with the researcher. Reddit is optimized for product discovery. Online spaces often reward argument because it keeps people returning to the platform. Websites like Forbes or Wired may publish paid articles or promotional pieces, while tabloids are often written to provoke outrage, not seek truth. AI can treat each of these sources as if they hold the same level of truth.
Large language models (LLMs) can’t make judgments the way people do, shaped by shifting social realities, perspective, the ability to identify contradictions, and growth. They work from patterns. From what already exists.
That’s where the risk sits. With the rise of Generative AI and LLMs many businesses are tempted to replace reflection with efficiency. To optimise process instead of understanding people. But that’s the same mistake broadcast made. Building systems around who audiences were, not who they were becoming.
Creativity doesn’t come from trend models or averages. It comes from people paying attention, observing the world, and using their discernment and emotional intelligence to write important stories and character arcs. It comes from noticing change before it’s measurable. From stories that reflect where we are and where we’re trying to go.
By 2025, streaming had become the dominant way people watched television. Broadcast had fallen below 20% of total viewing, not because the technology failed, but because it stopped reflecting how people lived.
The same is true for AI. Broadcast lost relevance because it measured what audiences had watched, but failed to understand what they were ready for next. AI will do the same if it’s put in charge of judgment instead of supporting it.
Finally, Breaking Bad didn’t really kill broadcast. People did.
So the question is no longer what AI can make, but what people want from it: shortcuts, creativity, or a deeper understanding of who we are?
So I ask the question again: if humanity is still moving, slowly and imperfectly, toward deeper moral consciousness, how can we expect our stories to keep up if we keep using regurgitated content, and tools trained to look backwards, as the basis for moving forward?
Discernment still lies with the observant and conscientious writer, not with systems trained on the convoluted, agenda-weighted musings of the past.
Image: Producing and directing “Mum’s the Word” — a 3-camera studio comedy directed and written by Naz Rahimi, Bournemouth University.