Normal sitcoms have to pace out their scandals and reinventions, but in the world of artificial intelligence, everything seems to move a bit more quickly. Take Nothing, Forever, the AI-generated Seinfeld knock-off, for example. After debuting on Twitch as an endless sitcom dreamed up by computers, its not-Jerry Seinfeld quickly found himself in hot water for trying out some trans- and homophobic stand-up material. The show was suspended from Twitch as a result and, in a classic TV move, has now distanced itself from its former star by replacing the entire original cast with new characters.
Nothing, Forever’s second season is still a mishmash of garbled conversations punctuated by canned laughter. Instead of a not-Jerry, not-Elaine, not-George, and not-Kramer, though, the cast now consists of a duck-tailed, bespectacled main man called Leo Borges, a blonde woman in a bright red suit, and two other guys not clearly based on other, flesh and blood sitcom stars.
The apartment and diner exterior shots and sets have changed as well, with the apartment now darkened ominously by deep shadows and the stand-up interstitial replaced with the main character narrating new entries to his blog. From what we watched, the script is as inane as before, only now it’s disconnected from other frames of TV reference. (At the time of writing, the cast was discussing how strange it is that we “park in driveways and drive in parkways” and why banks have “branches” if “money doesn’t grow on trees.” They also repeated these jokes and others twice within a few minutes.)
If the material’s going to be this poor, we imagine it won’t be too much longer before Nothing, Forever hurtles toward the proper next step in a sitcom’s lifespan and generates a bunch of digital water skiers jumping over digital sharks while reciting nonsense lines.
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