The chat collectively playing in to the nonsense is all part of the experience.

MST3K, Rocky Horror, The Room, etc.

It IS the experience. Without the chat I would have checked out of the nonsense in a minute but the audience reacting to the endless non sequiturs truly made this an art.

NEW RESTAURANT

Yep, it's the TV equivalent of Blaseball, or Dwarf Fortress(DF). Given a sufficiently complex generator of event strips, framing[1] becomes a social activity. Blaseball saw the production of wikis[2], songs[3], and announcer recap[4] framings.

Likewise, DF wouldn't be the same without Boatmurdered[5] or any of the other story tellings that followed suit.

Conspiracy theorists follow the same pattern but applied to news and current events - a participatory group activity that discards the majority frame and synthesizes new frames under a different genre. Participants reuse people[6] and locations[7] but rewrite the script to become both playwrights and audience members to a substantially transformed alternate experience of reality.

Watchmeforever, is exactly this group mythmaking experience that pairs a random event strip with improvisational community framing that takes the meaningless output of AI-generated content and transforms it into a meaningful group experience.

EDIT: Also The Sims franchise to a large extent. Longtime players have a certain tendency to embellish in-game events beyond the game's pre-packaged framing in a way that produces deeper meaning than the novice/out-of-the-box-frame engages in. Certainly CK1/2/3 and countless others as well.

1. In the Erving Goffman sense

2. https://www.blaseball.wiki/w/Main_Page

3. https://thegarages.bandcamp.com/track/my-name-is-mike

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diAHuUV2Meg

5. https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/

6,7. People qua actors, and locations qua sets.

Blaseball is so great. Baseball already serializes well to text based (like listening to a play by play on the radio) and then they started mixing things in like 4th base, unruns, crow attacks, etc that I loved. I almost want to make my own blaseball style sim (maybe based on WWE wrestling?) but don't really have the time.

I think it’s funny in the same way it’d be funny to watch your kids try to act out their own scene from Seinfeld. It’s not the punchlines that we enjoy, it’s the uncanny proximity to the real thing. Sometimes humor comes from expecting something you’re used to and being served something just ridiculous instead.