The Capture
Ben Chanan's BBC-made conspiracy thriller about deepfaked CCTV footage being used to frame innocent people for serious crimes — and the counter-surveillance unit that has to decide what to believe.
- Creators
- Ben Chanan
- Years
- 2019–present
- Seasons
- 2 seasons
- Episodes
- 12 episodes
- Status
- Ongoing
- Language
- English
Available on
Watch this if
Anyone who wants the deepfake / synthetic-media problem dramatized at procedural depth. The show takes the technology seriously enough that the threat model lands; the second season expands cleanly into state-level disinformation.
Skip this if
Viewers wanting a fast-paced thriller. The Capture is paced like a serious British procedural and assumes you can hold multiple plot threads at once. Some technical liberties exist but they're inside the bounds of plausibility.
Key takeaways
- The 'correction' premise — that intelligence services edit live CCTV in real time — is more plausible than viewers want to think; the show's value is in what that disrupts about evidence and trust.
- Holliday Grainger's DCI Carey is the most credible cyber-adjacent detective character on television; the procedural arc is built around her learning curve, which is the show's narrative spine.
- Season 2's Chinese-influence subplot is more topical in 2026 than it was on broadcast; the show was earlier than the conversation.
Notes
Pair with Mr. Robot for the prestige cyber-drama lineage and with Person of Interest (Nolan) for the same surveillance-and-trust dramatic territory. The BBC cyber-tech consultants who advised the show have publicly described the trade-offs they negotiated; that material is worth seeking out. The single best treatment of synthetic-media threat in dramatic form so far.