What Happens To Storytelling In the Age Of Deepfakes?

And how "The Capture" found itself ahead of the curve.

Jun 19, 2026

The first season of the Peacock/BBC original “The Capture,” an excellent series starring Holliday Grainger, premiered in 2019 — by 2022, not only did it seem surprising that the series was returning to life after such a long delay, it came back as a remarkable bit of speculative fiction, a series taking the idea of “deepfake” video and extrapolating it into what could possibly happen in the wrong hands, even though what it depicted arguably wasn’t even possible at the time, certainly in the way it played out as a drama.

But now it is.

And now “The Capture” is back for its third season, just in time to bask in its predictive storytelling (or botch it — we shall see).

The series dropped all six episodes on Thursday (as in last night) on Peacock, just four days after the New York Times released a splashy (and depressing) story with the headline: “The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes.”

Talk about excellent timing.

The NYT headline could be the tagline that explains the entirety of S2 of “The Capture,” which leapt from a compelling, tightly told story in 2019 to one that smartly realized what was once a story about manipulating CCTV in the free world’s most camera-covered country — Britain — now had the opportunity to play “what if.”

That second season of “The Capture” — the title refers to video capture on CCTV — was exponentially more ambitious, primarily because technology had changed after the first season (which likely had something to do with the three year lag before the next one). There were moments when I was watching S2 and thinking, as it got ever more entrenched in the speculative part — showcasing how nation-state bad actors could go live with deepfake news — that maybe it was inching toward sci-fi.

That’s not a damning thought — I absolutely loved the second season of “The Capture” (and the first as well), and was impressed how series creator and writer Ben Chanan(who also directed the entirety of the first season), got the opportunity to follow very quickly on technological advances and craft a compelling warning about where it all might be headed.

I don’t know if the technology as depicted in S2 could be pulled off precisely in the kind of live as-it-happens way that Chanan imagined, but the New York Times story, and others that have been written on the proliferation and quality of deepfakes and video manipulation perfection, certainly makes one believe that we’ve crossed the threshold into something life-altering, not just mind-altering.

And that’s scary on multiple levels.

I watched the first episode of S3 of “The Capture” last night and it certainly leans into the “nothing is believable” concept, but until I’ve finished the season in its entirety, I’m not yet going to guess at whether Chanan pulled off another storytelling coup.

I’m thinking first and foremost about what this means as a society, for the world we live in, but as a storyteller it's also a topic that makes you wonder how the landscape will change.

My first thought: After the coming, predictable onslaught of stories about bending reality (this time not as sci-fi, but has reality), there’s likely to be a return to the simple and the true.

If that’s possible? And I think it is.

Maybe that’s a bold, hopeful idea in the era of “truthiness,” where fact and fiction intermingle and conspiracies abound on the internet (video manipulated and otherwise). In a world where nobody believes what they see, what are people going to want to see or read in their stories?

One thing I know personally, after finishing the second season of “The Capture” and then reading that New York Times story: It was a much easier decision for me about which of my own fiction stories to focus on going forward.

In late 2022, I wrote a pilot based on an idea I had (which I’m not going to mention, since it’s still in play), that was slightly outside of my comfort zone, rooted in reality, all of the scenarios based on scientifically possible concepts, — up until they weren’t.

The TV industry is past the era of creating concepts that span five seasons — at best, most good series are lucky to get three seasons in the streaming world — but every writer wants to be hopeful, so you pitch an idea that could last that long, built on a bible of your own making and stories that, at least for the purposes of pitching, span numerous seasons.

To make the speculative aspects that would eventually unfold in the series work, I would first have to amplify (to an advanced degree), the “lie” of what normal people had been accepting as truth for years, before then expanding into the really trippy parts that they, hopefully, couldn’t possibly imagine.

Yeah, so much for that.

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Lies obliterated truth.

Yes, you know what I’m taking about. And from a technology standpoint, AI was and is changing everything so rapidly, truth is what people make it.

I have no idea how to turn that script into a book that wouldn’t feel dated by the time I got halfway through it.

As for real worries, the person at the center of the NYT story on deepfakes is named Hany Farid, based in Berkeley. “For more than two decades, Farid, 60, had been the world’s leading expert in the field of digital forensics, but in the last six months he’d stopped trusting his own eyes,” wrote Eli Saslow in the Times.

Farid has a truism about the times we live in now: “Anyone can create a video of anything or anybody, doing or saying anything.”

Scary.

Also: That’s precisely what “The Capture” speculated in 2022.

But the Times story is current. And Farid’s worries abundant:

“I feel like I’m going blind,” Farid said, and he worried that A.I. was obscuring the truth, distorting reality, fracturing democracies and slowly breaking him, too. He and his wife had begun making plans to leave California and trade the tech culture of Silicon Valley for a farm in rural Vermont.

Here’s a passage that really stood out to me:

“I miss the days when it was a grainy video of a shark swimming up the street,” Farid said one night, as he sat on the back deck of his house with his wife, Emily Cooper. He put down his phone and poured a whiskey. “The technology is getting so good. It takes me to a dark place.”

“Because you can’t tell just by looking anymore?” Cooper asked.

“Because nobody can,” Farid said. “I don’t trust anything. Every image I see, I’m drawing lines for shadows and doing geometry in my head, trying to figure out what I’m looking at. It’s over. Within a year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless.”

Well, that will wake you up. Or keep you up.

“Our whole visual system will be utterly useless.”

Damn. Okay.

Which brings me back to “The Capture.” If you have Peacock, or have been thinking about getting it (or doing a binge in a trial period), now you have three full season of that series, at the very least (I’ve found other good series on the streamer, which you can find references to in the archive).

I liked where the first episode of S3 was going, though if I’m being completely honest the final minute gave me pause; a red flag about where a series that just had the great fortune of having its speculative fiction turned into predictive fiction, might stumble trying to tackle what it means, for example, when “our whole visual system will be utterly useless.”