I recently had the opportunity to watch The New Norm on Twitter/X. Describing itself as “The South Park of X,” the pilot is the only thing so far available for the public to watch. It clocks in at exactly three minutes and forty seconds.
The show is being advertised as the first animated “sit-com” on the social media platform. If there ever is a second animated “sit-com” on X, let’s hope it’s much better than The New Norm, because, spoiler warnings, but this is trash.
Now, before we get to the actual plot, I am going to bring your attention to something much funnier than anything that happens within the episode itself. Visit the website for The New Norm, and the first thing you’ll see is a big message pleading with you to give money to the show, with a big blue button with the word GIVE underlined beneath it.
Clicking on this button leads you to a Stripe payment method where you can enter your credit card info and just give them money. But this donate button is not what I promised was so funny.
Scroll past the donate button and the scanner bar (which leads you right back to the option of giving them your money) and you’ll come to a graphic for the show with the accompanying slogan “Make America Funny Again”, this still isn’t it.
Scroll past the paragraph which simultaneously describes The New Norm as “an edgy yet family-friendly comedy” and “a safe space to come together and laugh,” scroll past all that junk and you’ll arrive at the real gold mine of funny. You get to see this:
There is a picture of anti-woke leftist comedian Bill Maher, smiling and accompanied by the word “Brilliant!” I was stunned at first when I saw this. The New Norm was being ratioed by the left, right, and center for being unfunny and cringe all over X. Yet here Bill Maher was calling this thing brilliant.
Except, no, that’s not what’s happening. If you look at the much smaller letters beneath Bill Maher’s name, you’ll notice these words: “Speaking of show creator’s previous work, featured on HBO.”
So no, Bill Maher is not actually praising The New Norm, he’s praising something that someone involved with The New Norm did in the past, and the creators of the new show are slyly trying to pass it off as if they’ve got Maher’s endorsement.
What makes this even more ridiculous is the fact the serious media outlet Mediaite mentioned the Bill Maher praise without reading the fine print. Mediate wrote their initial article on June 25th. As the time of writing, Mediate still hasn’t set the record straight, which means tens of thousands of media observers believe Bill Maher called The New Norm brilliant. This is too funny.
What’s not so funny is the content of The New Norm itself. The New Norm is a lifeless, seemingly AI-created short about an obese old man named Norm who has to wear an ankle bracelet because he assaulted the woke professor of his woke daughter.
A non-binary fellow comes over to monitor his progress, and the woke daughter sees him and it’s love at first sight. A black dude who is friends with Norm comes to visit and the whole thing ends with a terrible song in which a cartoon Elon Musk shows up to dance.
The whole thing is cringe and unfunny and full of plot holes, which is to be expected from something that was seemingly written by AI.
It all makes no sense when you break it down: why is Norm a senior citizen while his daughter is a teenager? Where is the mom? Why does Norm act shocked and horrified when he sees his beer can has a rainbow flag on it – is he not the one who paid for it in the store? There is no way his daughter could have legally bought it for him, she’s too young.
It’s surprising how many mistakes can be crammed in something that’s only around three minutes long. What makes things worse is the fact that there are two different laugh tracks within the episode. One laugh track would be bad enough, reeking of insecurity, but two? This is the kind of mistake that only AI could make.
You might be wondering just who this show is for. From the plot summary, one could assume that The New Norm is a show created by leftists to make fun of conservatives. The woke daughter is the chill one, while the conservative father is deranged, obese, and old, after all.
But no, this show is targeted towards conservatives and is supposed to be anti-woke. Some digging by journalist Ben Sixsmith found that Matthew Faraci, who worked on The Sound of Freedom, and the Israeli Likud party with Akiva were involved with the creation of The New Norm. But The Sound of Freedom was a much better production than The New Norm, so why did these people skimp on talent and seem to rely on AI?
Judging by the replies on X, the only people who pretend to like The New Norm are people like Larry Elder and Dave Rubin, who were paid to voice characters in it. Almost all of the right-wing creators and accounts I’ve seen are completely against the show. The centrists are against it too, as are the leftists. It’s a pause in the culture war simply because everyone can agree this sucks and deserves to be mocked.
Perhaps the best place to finish this article off is with this viral comment from X account Scorched Earth Policy:
I’m disturbingly fascinating watching The New Norm. It’s somehow perfectly achieved a zero-sum state of non entertainment. It is media completely divorced from any natural incentive towards its creation or its consumption. Furthermore, it even manages to eschew the curious morbidity you would find in something Lynchian or Cronenburgesque. There is no horror or novel discomfort in this, it is simply absolutely void of any substance whatsoever…Encountering such media is the cosmorphic equivalent of seeing a skinwalker attempting to blend into society by screeching happy birthday over and over. It didn’t come from anywhere on this earth. Its single sole purpose is to suck your digital tulpa into a time prison, baited by a multilayered density of buzzwords and algorithm bait. I now understand what the fly thinks as the walls of the fly trap slowly crush its thorax into a flattened paste. Watching this felt like being raped to death by a swarm of locusts.
Indeed.
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