TV’s superpower is to offend people - because AI never will

What’s the real role of content? To entertain? To inform? To challenge?
TV isn’t just a medium - it’s an art form. One that’s always had the power to make us laugh, cry, rage, reflect. At its best, it forces us to feel something. But lately, fewer people are feeling much of anything from TV.

Ask senior execs why younger audiences are disappearing and they’ll blame competition for attention, falling ad revenue, algorithmic distraction, and a disdain for long form. Yes, there’s truth in all that (although I’d argue the last point). But let’s be honest: the real reason they’ve gone is because our content just isn’t good enough - it doesn't resonate with them.

They haven’t switched off because episodes are too long or the TV app is clunky. They’ve gone elsewhere because the content elsewhere is better, more authentic, more emotionally reactive.

In telly, we’ve become too scared and as a result our output is bland, samey, and mainly speaks to people over 40. In part this is because our content is too expensive, so more is at stake. Investors want a return, so they don’t want to do anything that will lose money. Ironically, making formulaic stuff does just that.

But why does this matter? Well, as people like Evan Shapiro have often argued, if we alienate the young from our industry now, they won’t come to it later. Traditional TV is not like gardening, you don't come to it when you hit a certain age, so we have to make content that appeals to them now.

Remember when TV was subversive?

When Channel 4’s The Word, Brass Eye, and Trigger Happy TV caused outrage? I once hosted a show called Celebrity Snatch, where I deliberately upset famous people until they said, “Don’t you know who I am?” (They never did, by the way.) You’d never get a title like that away now.

But even before those shows, culture was being upended. Punk ripped through society.

The Sex Pistols, The Clash - these weren’t just bands, they were a scream of rebellion. That energy used to be TV’s too.

We say we still want that kind of edge but tell ourselves we can’t make that content anymore even though, absurdly, we’re the ones setting the rules. “It was a different era,” we sigh. Yet scroll your teen’s social feed and you’ll see: that kind of content is everywhere. Wild, rude, outrageous, because that’s what younger audiences still want: something real. Something dangerous.

So what’s really going on?

TV used to be made by creative outliers: messy, brilliant artists who pushed boundaries. We trusted them and we trusted the curators: commissioners, heads of channels, maverick producers. Perhaps most importantly, we trusted the viewers. The stories were immersive, dangerous, emotional. They made us face uncomfortable truths.

Now, the pendulum has swung the other way. There are more creators than ever, and their digital, unpredictable work is often labelled “toxic” or “biased.” Our institutional reaction? Retreat. Not into better content but into safer output. Sanitised by compliance teams and terrified of cancellation or backlash.

The end result? Our stories no longer reflect how young people actually feel. If they did, they’d still be watching.

Instead, they’re glued to TikTok, YouTube, Discord, Twitch - platforms full of content that’s raw and reactive. That shift matters. Because when you hand discovery over to algorithms, you lose control of the cultural conversation.

And that causes people to polarise.

When your gateway to culture is curated by code, your world narrows. You get echo chambers and in trying to fix this, we’ve asked platforms to regulate themselves, which only increases automation - the very thing everyone’s now currently panicking about.

We need to understand, AI doesnt just create. It sorts. Suppresses. Sanitises.

We’ve started seeing that as a good thing. No chaos. No pain. No offence. Content must never upset anyone.

But ask yourself this: If nothing offends, then nothing challenges. And when no one’s provoked, no one’s paying attention.

So people then go looking for provocation elsewhere - in darker, more extreme corners of the internet. If TV veers away from making provocative content for younger adults, the vacuum it creates is filled by people like Andrew Tate.

If you ban offence, you don’t kill it. You just push it underground.

You have to risk offence - not gratuitously, but bravely.

If you want to challenge prejudice, you have to show prejudice. You have to depict ignorance, conflict, cruelty. Not glamorise it, but expose it subtly, in a way that’s uncomfortable to watch. You don’t scream “THIS IS BAD” and nor do you pretend it doesn’t exist. You let people realise it’s wrong. Which they will.

If we don’t trust that young adults will, in the majority, make the right decisions and instead decide that ‘normal people’ can’t be trusted, then we’ll end up in 1933 again, burning all the content we don’t think people should read.

That’s the accusation dogging much of the BBC’s recent output: it’s too safe. Too toothless. A vision of the world scrubbed clean of anything offensive, or conversely, a one-sided, moralistic view of what’s right and wrong, driven by people who believe “the masses” won’t make the right calls. That’s not a position I subscribe to by the way, but it’s one I hear increasingly often.

Go and “Snog a granny”.

Everyone my age remembers the “snog a granny” segment from Channel 4’s The Word. It was shocking. It was cheeky. But it was also a perfect cultural provocation. Young adults were asked what they’d do to get on TV, a valid question underlining that people would do anything to become famous. One week, the question was: would you kiss a really old woman? The guy did. Cue national outcry. Newspapers went berserk.

But it also raised some real questions. Why is that taboo? Is it about ageism? Erotic shame? What are we really offended by?

It was grubby, yes, but it made people think. That’s the point.

I was twenty when that aired. That’s what young people were watching then and they still are now. Just not on TV. On TikTok, Snap and Insta. The platform’s changed but the appetite hasn’t.

AI will win the war for blandness if we let it.

The irony is, if we keep playing safe, AI will beat us at it.

In a world of shrinking margins, AI will soon be able to produce safe, reliable, emotionally sanitised content faster, cheaper, and with less friction than we can. The lawyers will love it.

But it will be soulless. Edgeless. Dead on arrival and that’s because there’s one thing AI can’t do: it can’t make offensive TV.

It can write a script. Mimic a voice. Create a serviceable narrative. But it cannot, and will not, ever intentionally offend. That’s not a glitch - it’s the governing logic.

Remember The Matrix? Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the first simulated world was a perfect utopia. No pain. No hunger. No conflict. But humans rejected it. “Entire crops were lost,” he says because it felt fake.

That’s where we are now.

The smoother the world becomes, the more alienated we feel. The more we blunt our stories, the more our audiences disconnect.

AI’s inability to offend isn’t just a limitation. It’s a clue. A reminder that culture isn’t meant to be safe. It’s meant to be jagged. Messy. Human. That’s what drives debate. That’s what sparks discourse. That’s what TV used to do and what it still must.

Offence is not the enemy. It’s the edge of culture.

We need to wake up to the real danger of creative AI.

The risk isn’t job loss in our industry. It’s cultural anaesthesia.

If we let AI dominate content creation - optimising for safety, affirmation and speed - we lose the thing that makes TV culturally vital: its ability to provoke.

Even worse, we lose something else: the right to decide for ourselves.

Audiences should be trusted to make up their own minds. But when corporate gatekeepers strip out every rough edge pre-emptively, what’s left is moral spoon-feeding.

And no one, least of all Gen Z, likes being told what to think.

That’s why they’ve gone elsewhere.

The proof is right in front of us

Counter-intuitively, Disney, of all companies, recently offered proof of what works.

For years, its family-friendly output faced cultural blowback, accused of being too safe, too smooth. Until it took a risk. A big one.

Andor Season 2 is arguably the best Star Wars content ever made. Why? Because it didn’t try to please everyone.

The characters are morally grey. The politics are real. The violence is shocking. The drama is grown-up. There is suicide, sexual aggression, drug use, genocide and murder. All of it uncomfortable and that’s what made it brilliant. If you haven't seen it take the time to watch.

The gamble, on arguably their biggest franchise, paid off.

It holds a 97% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Some episodes are among the highest-rated in the entire franchise. It succeeded because it dared to say something. It had a point of view. It trusted the audience to handle discomfort.

That’s the test. That’s the model.

So we can blame tech. We can blame fragmentation. We can blame the algorithm. But the real reason young audiences left TV?

We stopped making anything worth arguing about.

If we want them back, we need to start making content that offends - just enough to start the right fight.

We must let people disagree. Let them shout. Let them think. And we must resist the urge to tell them what to think. Let them make up their own minds.

Ultimately, I believe, they won’t disappoint you.

That’s what storytelling is for. It’s parables. It’s warnings. It’s what draws us together around the campfire.

Stories aren’t there just to soothe, but to spark - and they must be made by human creators.

So go offend someone. Be a punk.

It might just save the industry.