'The Capture' Is Peacock's Most Captivating Offering
Peacock's arrival marks the fourth major streaming service in eight months to debut for viewers since November of 2019. Like it's precessors, Disney+ and HBO Max, it is the product of a single company, in this case, Comcast, using its best-known brand, NBC, to create a subscription app, in hopes of creating a destination where fans of their best shows will flock. But the ironic part of Peacock is that it's best shows aren't American. The flagship comedy, Intelligence, for instance, is basically as if Michael Scott was sent as the American liaison to the British version of The Office, except the office, in this case, is GCHQ. And the streamer's best drama, by order of magnitude, is The Capture, which already aired on BBC One last year.
The Capture is a police procedural that may remind viewers of 2018's Bodyguard over on Netflix. It starts in a courtroom, as the high-profile appeal of Lance Corporal Shaun Emery, played by Callum Turner (Fantatsic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald) is getting underway. Emery is a veteran of the Afghanistan war, charged and convicted of war crimes, killing innocent civilians. His brutality was caught by the helmet cam worn by one of his fellow soldiers, which shows he shot first and then pretended to be in danger upon realizing he was being recorded. But the appeal argues the camera had been running for an hour. The lag between video and audio was off by several seconds. When synced properly, Emery's exclamation of fear comes before he fires, proving him innocent.
This introductory set up has little bearing on what follows, but the point is made. When watching live or recorded footage, it is assumed what we see is an exact record of what happened: "the camera never lies." But what if it does? The widening availability of cheap CGI (computer-generated imagery) has made it possible for anyone to manipulate footage showing real people doing acts they never committed. "Deepfake technology," as it's referred to, is this type of synthetic media, which increasingly has viewers asking themselves, what do you believe? The recorded images or your own lying eyes?
