Widow’s Bay Is a Menacing and Hilarious Mash-up

At a time when much TV recycles familiar formulas, the Apple TV series feels like something new.

In spring 2025, OpenAI rolled out an update of ChatGPT that featured a new image generator. The update proved wildly popular in large part due to how easy this new tool made it for users to produce polished custom images of whatever they could dream to prompt. What wild fabulations would OpenAI’s user base conjure? What feats of imagination might these newly democratized users perform? Turns out, most people just wanted to ask ChatGPT to reproduce celebrities and movie scenes and viral meme formats in the style of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. Within hours, the internet was flooded with uncanny Ghibliesque images of Kramer from Seinfeld, Mike Tyson, Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at himself on TV.

These images say a lot about the state of AI and creative work. They foreground the kind of proud, amoral acts of copyright infringement, or at least copyright edging, that sustain companies from OpenAI to Anthropic. They apply a warm and friendly filter on a technology whose promise is the total transformation (and possible inadvertent annihilation) of society. And, more than that, they appropriate the work of an artist who is repulsed by the rise of this technology: In a clip from 2016 that’s been in active circulation online in the past few years, Miyazaki famously said he was “disgusted” by AI animation. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” he said.

[Blank] meets [blank] or [blank] in the style of [blank] has become the signature grammatical structure and logic of genAI content: “Seinfeld in the style of Hayao Miyazaki …” But that prompt format is age-old: It’s been the structure of the Hollywood elevator pitch since forever. And, in TV’s private equity era, it’s become the rigid refrain of the risk-averse executive. The creative logic of an increasingly derivative media environment mirrors the corporate logic of an industry rooted in derivation. In many ways, the imaginative grammar of genAI itself descends from this lowest-common-denominator vision of art practice.

Recently, it’s been tempting to point this out when a thinly, cynically conceived show flops. This show feels like a ChatGPT prompt! But it’s also true that many of the greatest TV writers now working have been forced to adapt their skills to this combinative mode, to become prompt hackers. Severance is The Office meets Lost. Andor is The Wire in the style of The Mandalorian. Simple ways to make risks look safe, to make a complicated idea seem easier to swallow. Culture right now, we are often told, is stuck, directionless, stale, deliberately........

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