Earlier this year, an AI agent powered by Claude basically wiped out a person’s entire company by deleting the code that made the business run. It was pretty funny. Sad, but funny. Well, it happened again, but instead of deleting vital code, an AI agent deleted an entire upcoming season of a TV show.
According to reports from Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, production company Mastiff gave an AI agent access to their servers while putting the final touches on The Challenge Sverige, Sweden’s version of the MTV reality show that feels like it’s been on the air here in the States for at least a century.
‘The Challenge Sverige’ Lost Its Entire Edited Season. Now It Has to Be Rebuilt.
According to the Swedish publication, the AI wiped out the entire edited season just five weeks before it was scheduled to air on November 22. No backup was available to restore the files, so weeks of editing vanished into thin air thanks to an AI agent that is basically also thin air.
The show’s broadcaster, TV4, has been forced to push the premiere date back into 2027 as post-production crews scramble to re-edit every single episode from scratch. The show’s host, Ahmed Berhan, seems to be taking the disaster in stride, telling Aftonbladet, “I knew AI would be the death of me” and “some days you just have to accept that you’re living in a f*cking sitcom.”
If you were asked to select the most unsettling television theme song ever composed, what would you go with? In the event that your answer ends up being Unsolved Mysteries, literally nobody on the planet is gonna have an argument for you. Not one person. However, should you be in the rare position of not knowing what we’re talking about right now, go ahead and listen to the terrifying intro music below—and, for Christ’s sake, turn on a light first.
Composers Gary Malkin and Michael Boyd wrote that haunting little tune you just heard back in the 1980s, and it’s been striking fear into the hearts of everyone who’s listened to it since. Believe it or not, even Malkin himself wasn’t immune to the song’s chilling effects. While speaking with the Los Angeles Timesin 2020, Malkin recalled that after spending countless hours on the score and watching reenactments of murders and abductions in the process, he couldn’t get the melody out of his head. “I was destroyed for weeks,” he revealed, “I had horrible nightmares.”
Why the ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ Theme Still Gives You the Creeps
But Malkin was far from the only one his music gave the creeps to. As he tells it, the folks at NBC had to deal with quite a few complaints over the years regarding kids being freaked out by the show’s opening credits. “We used to get letters all the time from parents saying, ‘Could you please change the theme music? Our children are terrified of it,’” Malkin remembered.
As for what it is that makes the Unsolved Mysteries theme so eerie, Malkin explained that he and Boyd used an interval called the tritone (a.k.a. the devil’s interval), a dissonant combination that, according to musicologist Neil Lerner, creates a sense of tension, ambiguity, and instability. Evidently, religious songs from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance avoided the tritone because it made people feel uneasy. Malkin and Boyd were also inspired by the sinister music featured in earlier horror movies, like John Carpenter’s classic Halloween theme, for example.
If anyone can take credit for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s longevity, it’s Danny DeVito. The veteran actor joined the cast during the second season because the network thought they needed to hire somebody famous in order to boost the ratings. As Dennis and Dee’s father, Frank Reynolds, DeVito immediately clicked with fans, and arguably helped save the long-running series from cancellation. But he wasn’t the only big name being eyed for the part.
In a 2022 episode of The Always Sunny Podcast, Glenn Howerton revealed that there was actually a point when they were “really serious” about getting Ray Liotta to play Frank. Though primarily known for his dramatic work, Liotta did venture into comedy at different stages of his career, appearing in films like Observe and Report, voicing characters on Family Guy and The Simpsons, and even guest-starring on a few sitcoms. It’s unclear why he didn’t end up getting the role of Frank, but needless to say, the character’s run would’ve been cut short if he had, due to Liotta’s untimely death in 2022.
‘It’s Always Sunny IN PHILADELPHIA’ Could Have Had a Very Different Frank Reynolds
One Always Sunny cast member at least got to work with Liotta later on, however, as the Goodfellas star played a film producer in Charlie Day’s 2023 directorial debut Fool’s Paradise. Unfortunately, Liotta didn’t live to see the project’s release because production was delayed several times, but he was reportedly very enthusiastic about it. “Ray would text me every three months like, ‘Hey, man, what’s going on with that movie we did?’” Day recalled ahead of the premiere. “And I would say, ‘Ray, I’m so sorry. I’m stuck back doing It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.’”
But according to a later episode of The Always Sunny Podcast, Liotta also came close to doing a guest spot on the show. Though Day remains uncertain as to whether or not Liotta ever watched it, the two did discuss the possibility of him making an appearance. “So he was like, ‘And why don’t you have me on your TV show sometime?’” Day remembered. “I was like, ‘Absolutely, we’ll find something for him.’”
Liotta died on May 26, 2022, a few months after Always Sunny’s 15th season concluded. Fool’s Paradise finally hit theaters the following May.
Scooby-Doo is one of the most recognizable IPs in entertainment, spanning generations. The various shows and films have woven themselves into pop culture in unique ways. Pamela Anderson played herself in the live-action 2002 film, but in 1999, Scooby-Doo paid homage to the most iconic found-footage horror film, The Blair Witch Project.
The Blair Witch Project revolutionized the horror genre because it was the first of its kind to hit the mainstream. Instead of a polished Hollywood production, The Blair Witch Project had shaky handheld cameras and characters that felt like real people. It didn’t have a huge budget, but it proved that original ideas don’t need millions of dollars to work. The concept helped influence films like Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield.
In 1999, Scooby-Doo spoofed the film by releasing The Scooby-Doo Project on Cartoon Network. It aired in segments on Halloween night during the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! marathon.
The Mystery Gang Meet The Blair Witch
Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby head out to investigate their latest mystery in Casper County. Velma is filming the project for the gang, who spend time interviewing locals about the monster haunting the woods. Soon enough, they park the Mystery Machine to trek into the woods. In the original film, the students stumble upon a pile of eerily placed stones—in the parody, they’re Scooby Snacks. When they lose their map, Shaggy reveals he got hungry and ate it.
Later, they begin to hear strange sounds outside their tent, only to discover it’s Scrappy-Doo! It’s a clever way to parody the film while honoring Scooby-Doo lore. When the show first premiered in the 1960s, it paid homage to classic monsters that first appeared in Universal’s black-and-white silent films in the 1930s and 40s. In the end, the gang unmasks a random live-action man who claims to have nothing to do with the haunting in the woods. Only then do they realize there’s a more sinister monster lurking just outside as the camera cuts out.
The Scooby Project wasn’t the first Blair Witch Project spoof; in fact, it was one of many, but it definitely introduced a new level of frights and trauma for children excited to watch a marathon of cartoons.
On May 11, 1955, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto—a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing a decade earlier—appeared on the American TV series This Is Your Life. Tanimoto was there to discuss the Hiroshima Maidens, a group of 25 women who were left disfigured from the attack. However, the show’s host, Ralph Edwards, had his own agenda that day.
Early on in the broadcast, Edwards says that he’s been working behind the scenes to put together Tanimoto’s life story. Through the door located to the left of them, Edwards explains, will come many people who helped shape Tanimoto’s destiny. Although this was always the show’s basic premise, Tanimoto clearly didn’t know that and was blindsided by the revelation. “We hope you’ll have some pleasant moments,” Edwards tells Tanimoto before turning to the camera and saying, “And we hope, too, ladies and gentlemen, that you will have a better understanding of what it is to look into the face of atomic power.”
A Hiroshima Survivor Was Brought Face-to-Face With an ‘Enola Gay’ Crew Member on LIVE TV
From there, Edwards jumps right into the events of August 6, 1945—the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Aided by sound effects, dramatic music, and real footage of the city’s destruction, Edwards walks a visibly distraught Tanimoto through that fateful morning and questions him about his actions around the time of the explosion. “What did you do when you heard that bomb?” asks Edwards at one point. “Well, I didn’t hear any sound, but I saw a strange flash,” Tanimoto responds, adding that he was lying down in a garden afterward, where he felt “strong blasts of wind.”
As if this all wasn’t uncomfortable enough, Edwards also decided to bring out a special guest in the form of Captain Robert Lewis: co-pilot and aircraft commander of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Tanimoto and Lewis then awkwardly shake hands as the studio audience applauds, and Edwards allows Lewis to recount his experience on the morning of August 6. Prior to exiting the stage, Lewis shares with Tanimoto six chilling words he later wrote in his logbook: “My God, what have we done?”
You can check out the whole bizarre spectacle for yourself below.
On December 16, 2016, A&E announced it was launching a new documentary series about the Ku Klux Klan entitled Generation KKK. The show, which was set to premiere on January 10 of the following year, revolved around four Klan-affiliated families, each with a member seeking to leave the infamous hate group. Among the reported subjects of Generation KKK were an Imperial Wizard who was grooming his young daughter to take his position in the Klan and an Iraq War vet raising his son to adopt the group’s views. This was in addition to the series covering various anti-hate groups and their attempts to lead members away from the KKK.
“This series gives viewers an unprecedented look at what it is like to be born into hate,” Rob Sharenow, A&E EVP and general manager, said at the time. “Our producers gained access to Klan families, allowing for full immersion into this secret world and its impact on the next generation.” Sharenow went on to say, “Generation KKK brings viewers inside the places where hatred and prejudice are born and bred, and carried forward or not.”
The Controversial KKK TV Series That Never Made It to Air
The announcement was met with immediate backlash, and within a week, A&E decided to change Generation KKK’s title. To make it clear that this wasn’t a reality show made for entertainment purposes, the network revealed that they were now calling the project Escaping the KKK: A Documentary Series Exposing Hate in America. Furthermore, they explained that they were adding segments featuring civil-rights leaders to provide context for viewers. Those portions were to be interspersed with the rest of the footage the showrunners had already captured.
However, on December 24, the network pulled the plug on Escaping the KKK after making an unfortunate discovery. “A&E learned last night from third-party producers who made the documentary that cash payments—which we currently understand to be nominal—were made in the field to some participants in order to facilitate access,” reads a statement posted on their official website. “While we stand behind the intent of the series and the seriousness of the content, these payments are a direct violation of A&E’s policies and practices for a documentary,” it continued. “We have now decided not to move forward with airing this project.”
While Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist duke it out as John Steinbeck’s Trask brothers, Florence Pugh’s Cathy is a gothic villain you can’t help but root for.
In 1971, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo set up a fake prison in the basement of a building at Stanford. Twenty-four male college students were selected at random to either be guards or prisoners. Zimbardo hired real police officers to "arrest" the students so that the experiment felt more real. — Read the rest
No matter how well-matched a couple is, every relationship brings with it some kind of compromise. In our household, one such compromise has resulted in me being a near scholar of the survival reality show Alone. I’ve hated camping for as long as I can remember and, in general, share Socrates’s preference for the city over the countryside. My Esteemed Partner is not the opposite by any means, but she would probably like to do more outdoor activities than we actually wind up doing. When we discovered Alone during the pandemic, that created an important release valve. She gets to indulge her fantasies of roughing it in the wilderness, while I get to apply my “always-on” analytical mind to a show that is in fact almost a parody of neoliberal individualism.
The premise is simple and cruel, taking the “skills-based” reality show paradigm to its logical limits. Contestants are dropped off in the remote wilderness, in the same region but far distant from each other. The winner is the one who is able to endure the isolation and deprivation the longest. All the contestants are in some sense survival experts, in many cases either living off the grid, providing instruction in survival, or both. Hence they have many skills that can help them extract some kind of living from the land. But few have the experience of extended periods of complete social isolation — perhaps we see here why the show became a hit during the pandemic? — and all of them are tormented by a complete lack of knowledge as to how many other contestants are still going and how long they may have to hold out.
Winning does not require holding out against death. Contestants receive periodic medical checks and can be extracted if their condition has dangerously deteriorated. (To my knowledge, no contestant has actually died, but part of me wonders if someone has and they just never showed the footage or acknowledged their existence.) Instead, they are holding out against the temptation to give up — an ever-present option. They are equipped with a satellite phone that allows them to “officially tap out,” the term of art for giving up. Within the space of an hour, a team shows up to film them sharing the vital life lessons they have learned from the experience and then to clean up their hard-won shelter so that it is as though they were never there.
The post-“tap out” filming is an exceptional moment — up until then, the contestants must film themselves. We occasionally get a glimpse of the quite imposing suitcase full of camera equipment they have to lug around in addition to their survival gear. Sometimes this gives them an advantage, for instance using the camera’s light for other purposes or setting up motion-detecting cameras to track animal habits. I assume that they have enough downtime that the work of setting up the shots, etc., doesn’t become excessively burdensome. But I suspect the act of filming is a double-edged sword. It gives them an imaginary friend to talk to (one contestant this year constantly addresses the camera as “you guys,” by which I assume she means the home audience), but sometimes the irony of constantly performing for an absent interlocutor seems to promote the inevitable spiral into abject loneliness.
I’m sure there is a lot to say about the subcultures that have grown up around the show, its effect on survivalist circles, the almost uncanny recurrence of the theme of a man leaving his very pregnant wife behind to be on the show, etc. I don’t know anything about that — I just know what I see on screen. And what I see is so perfectly, sublimely ideological that I almost suspect that Adorno is an executive producer. The surface-level content of the show is radically individualistic. Each of the contestants is completely isolated and forced to rely on their wits, their knowledge, and the limited kit of survival items they have cultivated. The contest appears to be a pure meritocracy, judged not by a fallible human being but by nature itself.
Yet seldom has there been a less “natural” setting. They are undertaking a task no human being has attempted or even would attempt. The places they are forced to survive in have, as far as I can tell, never been permanently inhabited by humans. Had they chosen to live there, they would not have done so in radical isolation, but in a group. There are no indigenous lifeways that involve shivering alone in a makeshift shelter north of the Arctic Circle or hunkering down under a tarp in the middle of a freak rainstorm in the South African desert. The scenario is, in short, completely contrived — it would only “really” come up as a result of a highly technologically-mediated event like a plane crash.
And their existence is itself highly technologically mediated. Their “tap out” phones depend on a network of satellites connected to the GPS system. They have an elite medical team on call at a moment’s notice. And the reason we can even see what they are doing is that they have a wide range of camera equipment — including extremely durable batteries and advanced solar cell technology — to capture them as they essentially generate endless video “content.” The material they are filming will be distributed on cable and streaming networks, but what they are doing is not essentially different from a TikTok influencer. In fact, many of them already are influencers — the “getting to know you” segments often include YouTube clips of their survival feats — and as the show has gone on, awareness of the past episodes and the surrounding social media discussion has deeply shaped how more recent contestants prepare. After the first few seasons, it became common for current contestants to name-drop past stars of the show, both as models and cautionary tales. The most radically individual experience is thus profoundly socially mediated.
The show is not without its pleasures. There is amusement in seeing an arrogant contestant brought low by his failure to catch any fish day after day. There is morbid fascination in getting a window into the minds of these certified weirdos (who else would even attempt such a thing?). And there can be moments of profound empathy when a bedraggled contestant drops out, unaware that they are one of the last two remaining and that their opponent is also hanging on by a thread.
As when watching obscure sports on the Olympics, one becomes an insta-expert, confidently judging the contestants’ choices. (My go-to commentary: Hunting big game? Always a mistake, absolute hubris. Fishing, only fishing!) But having seen almost all extant episodes, I cannot accept the notion that this is a contest of skill or merit. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. One rule of thumb, for instance, is that the person who builds the most effective shelter will always tap out shortly thereafter. As I have said, the contestants who get their food situation permanently “locked down” (by killing a big game animal and drying all the meat) wind up with an albatross around their neck — their sole task becomes to protect their horde from the various rodents and scavengers. And in the end, no one ever has “enough” food for the long haul. Winter comes, nature closes up shop, and the show becomes a “starvation contest” — a phenomenon that has itself entered the contestants’ patter. Along the way, competitors are more likely to be eliminated by sheer happenstance — as when an otherwise highly skilled Australian competitor’s boot came unglued shortly after he landed — than by any discrete mistake.
In the end, it is an emotional game, and few of us have the emotional resources to stand up to the boredom, deprivation, and isolation of this competition. Those who do seem to be either vaguely insane or — I don’t know how else to put it — a little bit stupid. A recent winner fit the latter description, letting every disappointment and setback roll over him, only once losing his temper (upon finding that the persistent marten he had nicknamed “Sassy” had yet again stolen his food cache), mostly passing the time by reciting self-help slogans and other banalities. He was not just the last man standing, he was the Last Man.
And yet one did not begrudge him. Indeed, we were rooting for him to prevail against the last holdouts. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing the person that the system has selected for. I have no doubt he would be an exemplary middle manager, an unflappable customer service rep. But at the end of the day, we were rooting for Sassy, the true winner — who received a life-changing jackpot from this man who had been forced to generate social media content at the outer reaches of the GPS network.
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