90s Sitcoms As Art

Last week there was a bit of buzz around this guy who built a bot to write new scripts for “Full House” automatically, every day, forever. The write up over at nymag.com puts that project in the context of several others which have, in recent years, used the form of situation comedies from the 1990s as the basis for unconventional, semi-serious but mostly tongue-in-cheek art projects. Last year I wrote about a crazy, twenty-three minute video that overlays every episode of “Friends” on top of each other.

There’s more like that out there, apparently, including this one: a six minute supercut of countless moments from the immortal “Seinfeld” where nothing happens. As with the “Friends” video, this one is unexpectedly mesmerizing; I had watched nearly the whole thing before I realized it had me so hooked. Even though it’s nearly impossible to identify the particular episodes or narratives that any given shot was a part of, the overall sensation is surprisingly familiar and even intimate, almost like being on the set of the show without all the cast and crew. For some of us, I guess, these shows will forever be a kind of second home.

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