Never has a show about nothing encompassed quite so much nothingness.
Since December of 2022, an artificial intelligence has been creating and streaming an endless episode of Seinfeld. Dubbed Nothing, Forever, the ongoing show features characters that vaguely resemble Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine, in a serious of surreal misadventures. “Jerry” delivers a rambling monologue, then he hangs out at his apartment, then back to the standup club to tell more weird jokes (“Why do they call it a TV remote if it’s always in the same place?”) followed by some artificial laughter. It’s very strange, yet oddly compelling.
The co-creator of Nothing, Forever, Skyler Hartle, said this to Vice about the bizarre project:
The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project. But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years …
Hartle claims the principle behind the experiment was “Can we create a show that can generate entertaining content forever? Because that’s truly where we see the future emerging towards. Our goal with the next iterations or next shows that we release is to actually trade a show that is like Netflix-level quality.”
Nothing, Forever is not “Netflix-level quality.” But … I’m honestly having a hard time turning it off? Not only is this thing totally fascinating, it is basically begging to be the premise of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Just imagine Larry David responding to this. (On the show, he’d have to turn it on, and then discover it was generating better material than he was, then get insanely jealous.)
You can watch Nothing, Forever on Twitch here. It’s live right now. And it will be live for the foreseeable future. Maybe forever.
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