What if ChatGPT, but too much? Too popular, too omniscient, and far too nefarious than today’s cutting-edge chatbots?

That’s the premise of Mrs. Davis, an ultra-ambitious series from Big Bang Theory veteran Tara Hernandez and Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof. Mrs. Davis, premiering at SXSW before its April 20 streaming debut on Peacock, tells the story of a heroic, street-savvy nun (three-time GLOW Emmy nominee Betty Gilpin) battling an omnipresent AI and its legion of obsessed fans who will do anything to please their tech deity (called Mrs. Davis), which is supposedly striving to make the world a better place. Oh, and there’s also a quest for the Holy Grail, possible Nazis with butterfly nets, nefarious magicians and a teary make-out session with Jesus — and that’s just in the first two episodes. As Gilpin’s character, Simone, says at one point: “It’s a lot.”

“The most exciting thing about Mrs. Davis is that there’s nothing like Mrs. Davis,” says Hernandez.

The series (teaser trailer below) was immaculately conceived during the early months of the pandemic, when Hernandez and Lindelof wished there were a benevolent algorithm that could cut through the blizzard of conflicting COVID-19 information and definitively explain, for instance, whether disinfecting groceries was useful or not. “We were like, ‘God, I just wish there was an app that said whether this is a huge waste of time,’” Lindelof says.

Straight off, their choice to have a cool-nun heroine was a bold one given the heavily tarnished reputation of the Catholic Church (the nuns who sadistically torture a Native American character in Paramount+’s 1923 are more aligned with the cultural vibe).

“It definitely felt subversive and terrifying to us because they’re not somebody that people here on the West Coast typically prop up as heroes of a story,” Lindelof says. “But at this point, we’re not pulling punches, so we’re just going to go for it and see if we can get people on board with her journey.”

Instead of the usual evil AI tropes, the team was instead interested in exploring the idea of a system clearly programmed to be benevolent — and how even that could still go wrong. “Instead of the AI wiping out humanity, what would that look like?” Lindelof says. “To us, that felt like the more potentially comedic and interesting way of looking at the God question, which is: What do people turn to God for? How does God make people feel? The thing about AI is it takes away the best part of God’s branding, which is mystery.”

As the team put the finishing touches on the show, they watched OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot become part of a massive cultural conversation about the technology and its potential misuse. “The writers’ chat thread is, like, blowing up,” Hernandez says. “I actually think it’s a good thing that it’s happening now because we wouldn’t have gotten anything done” if it had launched earlier, because they’d have been swept into the discussion.