The Showtime series Yellowjackets tells the story of a girls' soccer team who get into some freaky cult shit after a plane crash strands them in the Canadian wilderness, as well as the further freaky shit that the survivors get into as adults years later. Half of the show takes place in the '90s, and it goes hard on '90s cultural references, with grown-up teen-cinema greats like Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci playing leading roles. The soundtrack is heavy on '90s alt-rock hits (including Live, who Ricci hates), and the creators got Shudder To Think's Craig Wedren and that dog.'s Anna Waronker to do the score. As Yellowjackets gets ready to return for its fourth and final season, a new teaser involves a fake Alanis Morissette.
Season four of Yellowjackets comes to Showtime next month. Yesterday, the show's Instagram page posted a new teaser: A fake MTV News bulletin about the young cast getting rescued and preparing to return home. It truly does look like something you would've seen on late-'90s MTV, and it includes a moment where Alanis Morissette, taping her 1999 MTV Unplugged performance, dedicates "Ironic" to the survivors: "This next song is for the Yellowjackets girls' soccer team. You are such a symbol of hope, and I wish you a future of really beautiful moments through all of life's ironic twists and turns."
In 2023, a promotional video for Yellowjackets season two featured a de-aged deepfake version of iconic MTV News anchor Kurt Loder. That video was made by the marketing company Legion Creative, and one of its executives is former MTV VJ Steve Isaacs. As Business Insider reported, Legion Creative made that promo using a new video that Loder recorded, as well as unspecified amount of AI. (In the clip, the fake Loder also hyped an Alanis Morissette interview.)
The new promo video involves a quick voiceover cameo from former TRL host Carson Daly and former MTV News anchor Serena Altschul, who is now a CBS News Sunday Morning reporter. MTV News doesn't exist anymore, but Showtime, like MTV and CBS, is part of the newly conglomerated media mega-entity now known as the Skydance Corporation, and the promo is another collaboration with MTV. At this point, we don't know whether Altschul went the Kurt Loder route and recorded a new video to serve as source material for the deepfake.
Presumably, Alanis Morissette would've had to give her permission for that fake MTV Unplugged moment, and it's not currently clear whether she was involved in the creative direction. It's at least possible that her appearance is just a clever editing take on her Unplugged performance, without the use of deepfake tech. Given the history, though, it does seem likely to be at least partially AI. In any case, Morissette has a history with Yellowjackets; she covered Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker's theme song "No Return" during season two.