“There are doorways. Light becomes shadow and shadow fades into nothingness. We are forced through our lives by our fluorescent overlords.”
You might remember Nothing, Forever, which came out last December and was briefly pretty popular. The premise — an entirely AI-generated Seinfeld ripoff, broadcasting endlessly on Twitch — was wonky enough to be attractive right before we all got really tired of AI stuff, and it landed right in the spot on the Venn diagram where “novel,” “janky,” and “slightly uncanny” all overlap.
Because time is a flat circle, Nothing, Forever was suspended from Twitch near the peak of its popularity after main character Jerry Seinf- sorry, “Larry Feinburg” went off on an anti-trans bit during his standup routine.
“What’s curious is that I can’t even remember my own name at times.”
The show came back a few weeks later, but it came back different. According to a mod on the Discord server they’d been hit with a cease and desist from Seinfeld’s lawyers after the Laugh Factory transphobia routine, so the stream had to become yet more legally distinct from its source material. Gone now were the sets based on the show. Larry Feinbug became Leo Borges, Yvonne (Elaine) became blonde, and so on. With the basic premise of “Seinfeld but AI” gone and the novelty wearing off, everyone pretty much stopped watching. Viewership declined from the thousands to, when I last checked in August, fewer than ten.
Then, last week, it got a little strange. Not-Jerry and Not-Kramer clipped into both each other and the fridge, and they stayed like that — totally silent, gyrating slowly — for five full days. When the show came back after that, it was different again. And weirder.
“I hear echoes of distant laughter around the turn of the hallway.”
Jerry speaks of an invisible demiurge shaping reality. Elaine believes her life is a blind puppet show put on for the benefit of a goblin. “I have responsibilities to this goblin,” she says. “To keep him entertained with my stumbling attempts at humanity.” Everyone is constantly talking about dread.
For every inane one-liner (“Is breakfast just dinner taking a vacation?”) there are three that sound like Emil Cioran aphorisms (“Is a building not just a frozen moment, trapped in cement and steel artistry?”). Even when the conversations retain the cadence of a Seinfeld back-and-forth, their subject matter is…odd.
KRAMER: The wind speaks to me. Tells me secrets.
GEORGE: You should ask it for lottery numbers.
KRAMER: My relationship to the wind is sacred. I would never profane it.
In the Old Times, the characters would sometimes hint vaguely at self-awareness, the product of random misfirings in their procedurally generated speech. Now the horror of their endless existence dominates almost every scene.
GEORGE: I’ve noticed our conversations seem to loop.
ELAINE: It’s like I can’t remember anything beyond this apartment.
JERRY: Or mine. And the diner.
ELAINE: And have we ever really spoken about families? Our childhoods? Anything beyond these walls?
In a discussion about waffles, Jerry opines about an invisible audience: “Our suffering is their entertainment. The dread we feel, the tension, all scripted for laughs.” The laugh track plays.
There is music, now. Gone is the thin parody of Seinfeld’s characteristic bass slapping that once began and ended every episode. In its stead, a barely-audible series of low tones plays constantly in the background, like a lofi rendering of Basinki’s Disintegration Loops.
“Entropy rules us all.”
The chatroom is a haunted house. In the show’s heyday it scrolled too fast to read, filling with thin inside jokes: hundreds spamming “MMMMMM” whenever someone turned on the whirring microwave, cries of “FISH JOKE” whenever Jerry told a variation of an incredibly bad joke that recurred in episode after episode. Now it is quiet, punctuated at times by apprehensive observations. “They are stuck in their own personal purgatory, having to act out scenes forever and ever and ever, with no reward,” wrote one viewer, who in the two hours I watched never spoke again.
As if reading the chat, the not-Jerry on the screen agreed. “We’re here to entertain the goblin,” he said.
At one point I asked about the identity of a character dressed in orange, with matching hair. “that orange guy is manfred,” someone helpfully explained, twenty minutes after I’d posted. “he may or may not be an alien.”
The pauses between sentences of dialogue are incredibly long now, the dragging silence filled with the mumbling of those weird musical tones. The dread of which the characters incessantly speak is palpable.
"Why is the dark always such a mystery? Have you pondered the tinkling of stars, or the color of echoes?"
All of these pull quotes are real, by the way.
The plots of the show still loosely hang together. An episode about being trapped in a time loop features a B-plot about George owing everyone money. One very long scene saw Jerry speculate on ways to hack reality and escape the loop, which he believed was being controlled by a “cosmic puppeteer.” “Maybe we could add some new narratives. Diversify our locations. Even go to Paris,” he offered hopefully.
“You couldn’t hack a traffic light!” quipped Elaine.
A few minutes later, Jerry had resigned himself to his fate. “Perhaps the tragedy of a known farce is better than the terror of an unpredictable drama,” he mused.
“Anyway, I’ve been thinking there’s no exit,” added Kelly. Laugh track.