London, UK – 14 Sept, 2026: No Big Deal, a British sitcom pilot built shot by shot with AI tools instead of being filmed on a set, has arrived on YouTube. Written by Andrew Dickinson and produced by the UK studio ModeLabs.ai, it is believed to be the world’s first sitcom written by a human and produced entirely using AI, and it can be watched here.
Closer to engineering than to prompting
Anyone expecting a story about typing a description and getting an episode back will be disappointed. The account given by the show’s creator describes something nearer to a build cycle: a specification, an attempt, an inspection, a rework, repeated until the shot held up.
“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.”
More than 65 rewrites is a striking figure for a single pilot, and those passes happened while the episode was being assembled rather than in a separate drafting stage. Each run through the tools exposed problems that only became visible once the shot existed, a pattern familiar to anyone who has fixed a system by running it and watching where it breaks.
The score was made by hand
Not everything went through a model. The music is Dickinson’s own work, recorded with a collaborator, and the storylines came out of his years working in finance.
“I wrote No Big Deal during my time as an angel investor and investment manager. Every storyline began with a real incident that has been exaggerated and expanded for comic effect. I also wrote all of the original music used throughout the series, which was performed and recorded with the help of my good friend and outstanding musician Andy Pike.”
The joke underneath the tooling
The script sends up venture capital. At an investment firm called Janus, the team hunts the next billion-pound business idea, usually with disastrous results. Derek Tudor is a brilliant but unpredictable investor who cannot keep his thoughts to himself, and Lydia de Mabro became the firm’s de facto leader after its only successful investment earned her a board seat. John Stevens inherited the money to start his business and is a well-meaning but spectacularly underqualified founder. Perry Kent, meanwhile, is an experienced investment banker who sees the firm chiefly as a route towards a US Green Card. Fart-proof underwear, clinical toilets and questionable items of sex furniture are among the pitches, and every promising investment ends in comic disaster.
Dan Hawthorne, of ModeLabs.ai, said the tooling should be judged the way any other production technology is judged.
“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.”
No Big Deal episode one is out now and free to watch on YouTube, here.
The show posts updates on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Reddit.
