‘The Capture,’ the most thrilling show deserves more love

Jacob Stolworthy, The Independent

When The Capture hit screens in 2019, it was branded “preposterous”, “implausible” and “utter bobbins”. The BBC drama mined technology for horror, presenting a world in which ordinary footage can be easily manipulated and turned against us at the click of a button. In the show, characters are yanked into interrogation rooms and shown surveillance videos of them going about their day — only to see themselves doing heinous crimes they didn’t actually commit. It all felt like an outlandish proposition; perhaps a problem for another generation. But with AI firmly planting its computerised flag in the sand — and deepfakes now dominating social media — that world is a reality. In seven short years, The Capture has become the most prescient show on television.

“I remember reading some reviews of series one that were like, ‘Oh, this is so ridiculous, we’re so far away from this,’’ lead star Holliday Grainger tells me days before series three premieres on BBC One. “And in just a few years, it’s not just special tech guys in the military that are doing deep fakes, it’s anyone on TikTok. You can literally do it in your front room. The technology has evolved so quickly that the first series is almost passé.”

The Capture follows Grainger’s Rachel Carey, a dogged detective inspector who unearths a conspiracy surrounding deepfake tech, known as Correction. And while some of the show’s early plot twists had been branded unbelievable, creator Ben Chanan found that, while writing follow-up seasons, he had to dream up zanier ideas in an attempt to stay ahead of real life. “When I did series one, I thought, ‘People already know there’s a load of CCTV cameras. We just needed something else to make it scary — ie Big Brother’s not just watching you.’ Now, we’re constantly playing a game of, ‘Are we ahead or are we behind?’”

Each series introduces a new figure, footage of whom has been altered to make them guilty of crimes they had nothing to do with: Fantastic Beasts actor — and potential future Bond — Callum Turner played soldier Shaun Emery, accused of kidnapping and assaulting his barrister, in series one; The Lazarus Project’s Paapa Essiedu, recently cast as Professor Snape in HBO’s Harry Potter show, played politician Isaac Turner, who was “seen” colluding with enemy world leaders in series two. But really, this is Grainger’s show — and series three knows it. The new episodes place her at the centre of the latest conspiracy kicked off by a terror attack, the ripples of which run deeper than even Carey can imagine. To utter another word would risk spoiling the opening episode’s surprises.

In Carey, The Capture has a career-driven protagonist for the ages — a straight-shooting detective unafraid of standing up to her superiors (Lia Williams’s inscrutable DSU Gemma Garland) or the shadowy figures lurking in the wings (Hellboy’s Ron Perlman shows up as a ruthless CIA chief named Frank Napier – as if you needed another reason to watch). The show has been a ratings hit – 5.66 million average in year one; 3.81 million in year two – yet has fallen short of becoming a water-cooler success like, say, Line of Duty. More fool us: The Capture matches the thrilling highs of that procedural and boasts more surprising twists than Noughties favourite Spooks. It’s the kind of show that demands your attention and will leave you trailing in the dust if you dare to check WhatsApp for one second.

“You can’t be on your phone in the background because you will miss it,” says Grainger. “It doesn’t purposely repeat or spoon-feed the audience. Obviously, in a cop show, there has to be a lot of exposition, but Ben doesn’t dumb it down. He’s quite unapologetic in his use of jargon.” This is a far cry from a lot of what we see on Netflix, whose shows are claimed to be produced with the expectation that viewers might be watching while scrolling through their phones. According to producer Justine Bateman, showrunners have been given notes that the episodes they’ve written for the streamer “aren’t second-screen enough”.