Golden Girls Reboot Hoax Has Launched a Delightfully Ridiculous TV Recasting Meme

X was recently set ablaze by a poorly mocked-up poster for a Golden Girls reboot starring Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Lisa Kudrow. While some did fall for the hoax, most saw through the ruse and raised the stakes with their own recastings of classic television ensembles.

Despite its recent virality on X, the Golden Girls post that kicked off this trend originated on Facebook, thanks to the self-proclaimed “King of Facebook Fake News,” YODA BBY ABY. “People seem to get very primal anger over these things. So strange,” the creator told The Daily Beast after receiving death threats over the faked Golden Girls poster. However, the rage-inducing self-life of the fraudulent reboot was short-lived, and soon, an influx of memes making fun of both the original post and those seemingly duped by it took hold.

Either directly quote-retweeting the original Golden Girls post or utilizing the post’s faux-exaggerated caption “I don’t want this!” users on X have meme-ably recast everything from M*A*S*H to Game of Thrones. X user @michaelcollado contributed two entries that perfectly exemplified and popularized this trend, with a photoshopped Sex and the City poster starring Susan Sarandon, Anya Taylor Joy, Florence Pugh, and Jenna Ortega and a Seinfeld one with Timothée Chalamet, Josh Peck, Addison Rae, and Austin Butler.

Others have gone the route of stacking their reboots with a murder’s row of unpopular or controversial celebrities, such as @emopunkloser, who delivered a sobering Sopranos reboot starring James Corden, Amy Schumer, Chris Pratt, Awkwafina, and Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp.

In a world where the entertainment industry has begun to eerily mirror the satirical version of itself once reserved for the 30 Rock writers’ room, it’s not too terribly surprising that folks on social media fall prone to reboot hoaxes or even catch themselves doing double-takes from parody accounts like DisbussingFilm.

The fake Golden Girls reboot, and even the bevy of hyperbolic recasting memes in its wake, doesn’t necessarily feel too distant a parody of an entertainment industry hellbent on mining existing intellectual property, with current examples ranging from the recent Road House remake to the upcoming reboot of The Office. The notion of Dune’s Chalamet as Seinfeld‘s Cosmo Kramer is undoubtedly hilarious, but perhaps the message of both the intentionally faked Golden Girls poster and its subsequent memes is that some roads should be traveled down, but not back again.