AI Emerges as TV Drama's Go-To Villain
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- BBC's "The Capture" series 3 revealed its overarching villain is "Simon," an AI the British military uses to "support, map, execute and command ops" — a system that ordered the assassination of the home secretary (Paapa Essiedu), with the trigger-pulling soldier shrugging he's "just a cog in the machine."
- Writer Ben Chanan says the show is "more rooted in reality than I intended," noting that drones, AI, and software from Palantir are already deployed in real conflicts from Iran and Venezuela to Gaza and Ukraine.
- The show's "Correction" subplot — using deepfake hacks of CCTV to frame targets — escalated from a tool used against state enemies to one wielded by military top brass, explored through real-adviser insights from a former E Squadron special forces operative.
- Other networks are running the same AI-villain playbook: Apple TV+'s "The Morning Show" had an AI lookalike chatbot torpedo CEO Stella Bak during a live presentation, Amazon's "Scarpetta" featured an AI griefbot for the dead, and ABC's "The Rookie" introduced a malignant AI children's chatbot called Zuzu.
- HBO's "The Comeback" ended its season with an on-screen credit reading "No AI was used in the making of this show," after its plot saw a studio use AI to script an entire sitcom during a writers' strike.
- Chanan admits his writing team has tried using ChatGPT to pen an episode — "it's not good enough yet" — and questions how courts and the public can trust video evidence when deepfakes can fabricate footage of crimes, missile strikes, and government actions.
Why it matters: The trend tracks a real technological arms race: Palantir software and autonomous systems are already being deployed in conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza, and Chanan warns that deepfake video manipulation could undermine evidence in criminal cases and footage of military actions. Writers are also signaling anxiety about AI's threat to their own craft — HBO felt compelled to certify that no AI was used in production.
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