God bless machine-generated prose: Sure, it’s probably just paving the way for the rise of eloquent, skull-smashing robots. But in the short-term, it’s a reliably easy way to take the familiar—like, say, every single episode of Scrubs, to pick an example entirely at random—and give it just enough inhuman weirdness to liven things up a little.
Case in point: This script for the long-running Zach Braff-starrer, generated by the machine-assisted comedians over at Botnik. The group apparently fed a bunch of Scrubs scripts into a predictive keyboard, played around with and edited the output, and produced. what they’re describing as “the exact average episode of Scrubs.”
And to be fair, they do hit all the major beats, including a hostile Janitor (“You’re a quick smudge on these lockers called life”), wise patients (“Does that chart tell you that my mom hated the ocean Doctor?”), and, of course, smug voiceovers from John Dorian himself, musing on topics like, “Sometimes you have to break a patient to help yourself. It’s funny how a bunch of doctors don’t know that.”
The end result is both borderline Lynchian, and weirdly true to the actual Scrubs spirit. (We’re eagerly awaiting the fan edit introducing characters like Dr. Kayak Man and “the eel I bought from the narcoleptic” into the mix.) If nothing else, at least, it’s still a better legacy for the show than an eternity advertising Russian boner pills.