There’s now a sitcom pilot produced entirely with AI. Of course there is. Oscar-nominated Sci-fi filmmaker Neill Blomkamp recently tried something similar, and it was awful. Now, according to the Guardian, some former startup investor named Andrew Dickinson has given it a shot, and it’s awful.
Dickinson reportedly wrote the script in the hopes of getting it filmed—like with human actors. With that in mind, watching this show, called No Big Deal, will feel familiar if you’ve ever read someone’s sitcom pilot and been asked to give notes. Like many aspiring TV writers, it seems Dickinson has taken inspiration from his own profession. The characters are angel investors—although it feels more like they’re taking a class on being angel investors.
To a writer just starting out, the plot probably felt like it worked really well when it was just index cards on a table:
- In the first act (which is more like a cold open that refuses to end) a government minister assaults the main character on a commuter train. The main character also irritates some guy by throwing his umbrella off said train.
- The other main characters are then introduced, and offered the opportunity to invest in some kind of sex couch—though the main main character, who doesn’t seem to be all that enthused about the sex couch, is also seemingly the one pitching the sex couch. He then has sex on the couch. Two of the main characters will now be abandoned for the rest of the episode.
- The main character goes to a supermarket and, in a series of increasingly ugly incidents, descends into psychopathy, and eventually hits a guy with his car. In a theoretically—but not actually—funny coincidence, the victim is the guy from the train scene at the beginning of the episode that the main character irritated.
- Finally, a scene in a hospital sweatily ties all the plot threads together. There’s another ostensibly funny coincidence when the woman the main character had sex with earlier is revealed to be the romantic partner of the train/car incident guy.
I went into all that detail to emphasize how much this script wasn’t ready to go into production in the first place, AI or otherwise. That might be tough for the writer to hear, because it has structure. It’s clunky and confusing, but it has the basic contours of a sitcom episode, and contains elements that show up in a lot of TV pilots, or did about 15 years ago when things like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Peep Show were influential. But the characters and situations don’t intrigue or delight. It feels like if the writer loved and felt inspired by angel investing it might be fascinating, but the show seems to hate angel investing, leaving the viewer with nothing. Just at the level of story, this feels like an empty exercise, entertainment-shaped without being entertaining.
And instead of putting in the hard work of rewriting this until it contained that spark that makes something feel like a TV show someone might want to watch, Dickinson took a shortcut many people are probably contemplating lately and AI-generated it. To be more specific, according to the show’s YouTube description he worked with an AI production studio focused on brands and marketing, and simply churned his pilot script into 25 mutated and itchy minutes of borderline coherent, sitcom-adjacent audiovisual information, and uploaded the result to YouTube.
It’s almost not even worth digging into how horrendous the AI dialogue delivery is, how waxy and nauseating the faces of the characters are, and how bleak and depressing it all feels. For a few scattered seconds of the 25-minute runtime, it’s possible to feel like this is a sitcom—not because the trickery on display is so clever, but just because the tropes are so well-worn. Any time this happens however, the spell breaks fast, and the crash that follows is deflating. You feel sad and grossed out.
Watching this feels like a punishment, but if you’re in the same position as Dickinson—sitting on a pilot you think is good, and impatient to get to the next phase—it might be a good idea. No Big Deal, then, is a valuable lesson in what you should definitely not do next.
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