Big Brother Messing With You: The Thriller Series ‘The Capture’ Mines Deepfake Tech for Real Suspense

A Russian black-ops agent moves through London’s Heathrow Airport, clicking and swiping on what looks like a smartphone while his eyes clock the security cameras. He tricks the automated kiosk that checks passports with an ID not his own, then sends multiple deepfakes across security footage in real time so police hunting for him scatter, trying to find the person the security system thinks is in multiple places at once.

Welcome to The Capture, the British conspiracy thriller series now in its third season. Airing on Peacock and Apple TV+, the series called “outlandish” upon its 2019 debut has become “the most prescient show on television,” thanks to the proliferation of AI and other tech. It holds a 97% “Fresh” rating on RottenTomatoes.com, with The Guardian calling it a “superlative drama” with “twists too swift to be predictable and a wide ensemble of juicy characters.”

While the acclaim feels “massively” validating for series creator Ben Chanan, the original spark for The Capture still unnerves him. “People are now starting to see finally the problems that deepfakes cause for us. In a world in which you can’t verify video evidence, how can we use it? How can we put people away because of it, and how can we trust anything if anything could be faked?”

Here, Chanan breaks down how he tackles an up-to-the-minute suspense series without feeling dated.

The Capture focuses on Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger, Mickey 17), an ambitious Metropolitan Police detective first drawn into the world of manipulative mass surveillance after faked footage wrongly implicated a solder in an assault and kidnapping. In season two, she tackled a deepfake conspiracy against a rising politician, and in season 3, she finds her own reputation under fire as the sole witness to a crime that London’s widespread new surveillance system can’t verify.

“How do we sort fact from fiction?” she asks. “How can we believe what we see?”

Those questions first piqued Chanan’s interest around 2012, when he directed the BAFTA-winning documentary The Plot to Bring Down Britain’s Planes. He interviewed various counterterrorism officials in the United Kingdom and the United States.

“I got to understand a little bit of what kept them awake at night,” he said, particularly the difference between evidence and intelligence. “Sometimes law enforcement and spies have intelligence that someone is going to commit a terrorist attack, but they don't have enough evidence to put them away. And I thought, what if somebody were to invent a way of turning intelligence into evidence? … Would it be morally wrong to reconstruct it? I thought that was an interesting moral gray area, and I like moral gray areas.”

As fantastical as some of the technology seems, Chanan said the writers’ room works hard to keep The Capture grounded. They’ll constantly pitch ideas for what might be too farfetched “so we know where the line is,” then make sure the victims are relatable, such as the “everyman” soldier or, in Carey’s case, one viewers have grown to know.

“We always come at it from that very ground-level personable aspect, and interestingly, we also shoot it like that. I mean, in season three, the directors started to use drone shots, and it was something that I was always a little bit resistant to, because I've always felt we've seen this from the ground level, and it's not one of those big operatic shows. It's kind of like you walk in the room with Carey.”

A plot-heavy story needs exposition, which The Capture handles in part through its procedural nature but also through knowing its characters, which by now feel like family. “You’ve got to be clever with those expositions, like putting a character in the scene who doesn't know [something], so that they can explain it to them,” Chanan said.  “I think they talk realistically to one another. There are always plot scenes with character, and every now and then, there’ll be a line or two here and there, kind of like a joke or a little bit of comic relief, that feels well earned.”

Relying on the talented cast, which includes Ron Perlman (The Saviors) as a cynical CIA section chief handling covert operations and Indira Varma (The Other Bennet Sister) as a transactional investigative journalist, also helps.

“That's the joy of knowing who you're writing for as well,” he said. “[Grainger] knows the plot back to front herself, and she's very story-oriented. I can avoid doing loads of exposition by knowing she will make the lines clear through her delivery and through what else she's giving me. She’s extremely good at nonverbal storytelling.”

The Capture naturally has lots of scenes monitors and screens, but itbuilds intrigue by homing in on what the characters see—often showing their reactions first.

“I think the key thing when you're editing a scene like that is always show the person watching first, so you see them lean in, and it makes you lean in, and then you cut to the screen,” he said. “The simple question is, What are they looking at? If it’s of life-and-death importance, then suddenly, you lean in, and it doesn’t matter [whether] they’re watching something on a screen.”

Given the subject matter, the writers’ room asked ChatGPT to write an episode of The Capture “more for kind of fun and curiosity,” Chanan said. The AI program churned out something quickly that wasn’t as good as the writers’ work. “But it probably will be soon, and I think it’s terrifying the way we’re just shrugging our shoulders and letting jobs go by the wayside. … I tend not to use it. My instinct is, it’s cheating.”

If you’re plotting a tech-heavy story, don’t let your worries about being outdated pump the brakes on your ideas before you start, he adds.

“I was afraid when I started [The Capture], that it was already kind of passe … Obviously, George Orwell warned us about a surveillance state [in the novel 1984]a long time ago, and so I worried that people kind of knew it all. [But] actually, it's not enough that Big Brother’s watching you—Big Brother has to be f---ing with you as well. That was kind of our private tagline. …

“There's always that fear that, oh, somebody's done this before, or by the time this comes out, it won't be relevant and all that. You can drive yourself mad worrying about whether something's going to be relevant or not,” he said. “I think if you've got good characters and you put your own twist on it, just make it—make it yours.”