There is a new British sitcom to stream this week and it costs nothing to watch. No Big Deal is set inside a venture capital firm with a gift for backing the wrong idea, and its pilot episode landed on 14 September. You can watch it on YouTube here.
What you are watching
The firm is Janus and the job is finding the next billion-pound business idea, which almost never goes to plan. Derek Tudor is the one with the real investing talent, except that nothing he thinks stays unsaid and nobody can predict what he will do next. Lydia de Mabro is the de facto leader after the firm’s only successful investment earned her a board seat. John Stevens is the well-meaning but spectacularly underqualified founder who inherited the money to start the business, and Perry Kent is the experienced investment banker treating Janus as a stepping stone to a US Green Card.
The running gag lives in the pitches, which take in fart-proof underwear, clinical toilets and questionable items of sex furniture. Nothing that looks like a winner gets out of the episode without ending in comic disaster.
How it was put together
The pilot came from ModeLabs.ai, a UK AI studio, and is believed to be the world’s first sitcom written by a human and produced entirely using AI. Writer and creator Andrew Dickinson said the tools did not remove the work, and the script was rewritten more than 65 times before the episode was finished.
“Making the Pilot wasn’t simply a case of pressing a button. Every shot, camera movement, performance, line reading, location and visual detail had to be carefully planned, refined and recreated through an iterative creative process between the writing and production teams. Even while we were making it, the script was rewritten more than 65 times.”
Dan Hawthorne of ModeLabs.ai drew a comparison with screen technology that audiences stopped arguing about long ago.
“Nobody questions whether the CGI in a Marvel film is ‘cheating’. People judge entertainment by how it makes them feel, not by the tools used to create it.”
Hawthorne said the writing, rather than the production method, is what the show should be judged on.
“No Big Deal is brilliantly written and genuinely funny. AI isn’t the punchline – it’s simply the production technology that made an ambitious independent comedy possible.”
The music is original too
Dickinson wrote all of the original music used across the series, performing and recording it with the musician Andy Pike. Before he turned to comedy he spent his career on the other side of the table, as an angel investor and investment manager, which is where the storylines came from. He said the characters are what keeps him coming back to it.
“I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve created together. I still laugh at these characters, and I hope audiences will too.”
Episode one of No Big Deal is out now and free to stream on YouTube, here.
If you want more, the show posts to YouTube and keeps accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Reddit.
