The Nepo Baby Running Skydance Thinks the Future of Television Is A.I.
Tomorrow, Larry Ellison’s son, the overly smooth looking David Ellison, will take over the Paramount television empire. At just 42, Ellison will oversee the official merging of Skydance and Paramount. He’s stepping into the role as we hit a critical juncture with TV as we know it. Late-night shows are losing money at a near comical rate. Attention spans are being destroyed by short form video. Ratings continue to plummet.
Already, the lead-up to this merger has been dramatic: allegations that the Ellisons promised Trump up to $20 million worth of television ads, the unexpected cancellation of Stephen Colbert on CBS, the whole Trump versus 60 Minutes lawsuit. The fact that the Federal Communications Commission even approved the merger was cause for some clamor.
The younger Ellison is now at the helm after all of that. What can we expect from this massive change? Probably a lot of A.I. and other technology.
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In an extensive profile of the new television king from The Hollywood Reporter one television executive described Ellison as “the kind of person who’s going to take advantage of these innovations,” in reference to advanced algorithms and A.I.
If true, it will be a major change for Paramount, which THR describes as “a company built for the 1990s.” From Variety’s reporting, we know the implementation of A.I. will just be the tip of the iceberg. Ellison also wants to reduce the operating budget by $2 billion, and totally overhaul the technical capability of the company. Like THR, Variety wasn’t too kind to Paramount’s current technological set-up, describing it as “a semi truck running on AA batteries.”
This tech beef up, including the implementation of A.I., isn’t some distant goal. The Ellisons are also the owners of Oracle, the company responsible for curating the TikTok algorithm. One executive described the younger Ellison as “the perfect executive for the next-generation Hollywood company. He not only can go to a table read, but he can go to the next room and code.”
That’s all fine and dandy, but it leaves us wondering what this will actually look like. Will Paramount+ start to reflect the TikTok app? Will The Late Show be replaced with an hour worth of 15-second video clips of crowd-work comments? Will we get a spate of perfectly apolitical A.I.-generated hosts to replace Colbert?
Only time will tell. Hopefully it goes better than other nepo baby projects.
