What TV series are you watching right now?

[Hopscotch]

What I'm not watching is this - seeing the first two minutes was too much already:

Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsk's AI revolutionary war series is a horror
Guardian   2 Feb 2026

"...On This Day . . . 1776 is a series of short videos depicting America's revolutionary war. What makes On This Day notable is that it was made by Darren Aronofsky's studio Primordial Soup. What also makes it interesting is that it was created with AI. The third thing that makes it interesting is that it is terrible..It is as ugly as sin...[and] looks like it was shooting for photorealism, but then either chickened out or blew up along the way....like so much generative AI at the moment, an awful lot of the episode consists of shots where we see the characters from behind....because the back of an AI-generated head is far less likely to send people into screaming fits of trauma than an AI-generated face...[with] the uncanny dead eyes of people ripped out of The Polar Express...the whole thing still looks like a mangled cross between an animatronic sex toy convention and those old Taiwanese news cartoons...On This Day . . . 1776 is genuinely very horrible to watch, and everybody involved should be ashamed...."

[Jeff Tanyard]

What I'm not watching is this - seeing the first two minutes was too much already:

Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsk's AI revolutionary war series is a horror
Guardian   2 Feb 2026

"...On This Day . . . 1776 is a series of short videos depicting America's revolutionary war. What makes On This Day notable is that it was made by Darren Aronofsky's studio Primordial Soup. What also makes it interesting is that it was created with AI. The third thing that makes it interesting is that it is terrible..It is as ugly as sin...[and] looks like it was shooting for photorealism, but then either chickened out or blew up along the way....like so much generative AI at the moment, an awful lot of the episode consists of shots where we see the characters from behind....because the back of an AI-generated head is far less likely to send people into screaming fits of trauma than an AI-generated face...[with] the uncanny dead eyes of people ripped out of The Polar Express...the whole thing still looks like a mangled cross between an animatronic sex toy convention and those old Taiwanese news cartoons...On This Day . . . 1776 is genuinely very horrible to watch, and everybody involved should be ashamed...."

   

[PJ Post]

I took a look at the trailer and The Flag episode (is it an episode?). Some of it looked good, some of it looked meh and some of it looked like AI - but, the bigger issue appears to be the filmmaking itself. The revolutionary war was epic. Five to eight seconds clips are fine, but not really epic. It feels more like a commercial than a docudrama. The pacing is off, as well. It feels anxiety-inducingly rushed.

With that said, I don't think AI is the problem here.

[Lorri Moulton]

If you want to watch an alternative, I recommend The Crossing.