AI Anxiety Is Plaguing Our TV Shows

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Greetings from Copenhagen! I’m currently visiting my sister, who moved out here a little over two years ago—right around when The Bear sent Marcus the pastry chef (Lionel Boyce) to travel around the city and learn about fancy pastries. After I interviewed Boyce that season, he pointed me to a hole-in-the-wall fried chicken joint called Poulette that he filmed a scene in for the show—and it’s somehow still a hidden gem in the city. (I visited for myself. True to his word, it’s game over if Poulette brings these sandwiches stateside.)

One thing I’ve learned during my time here is that Denmark spends a lot less hours watching TV than we do in America. Maybe that’s why Copenhagen is often rated as the happiest city in the world. The struggles of managing streaming services and accidentally forgetting to cancel a subscription at the end of a free trial period isn't a daily frustration to the Danes. But if you’re as unhealthily obsessed with TV as I am, then you’ve come to the right place.

Right now, I’m completely focused on Alien: Earth. According to Variety, the FX sci-fi drama based on Ridley Scott’s iconic monster film franchise garnered over 9.2 million streaming views in its first week across Hulu and Disney+ alone, which doesn’t even account for how many more viewers watched on FX’s linear cable channel. Sheesh! To put that number into perspective, that places Alien: Earth’s popularity in between strong Emmy contenders such as The White Lotus (6.2 million viewers tuned in for the season 3 finale) and The Pitt (which averaged over 10 million viewers per episode).

Now four episodes in, Alien: Earth is still killing it in the monster department. The Xenomorphs are zooming all around and ripping people to shreds. It’s as entertaining and messy as any theatrical Alien experience before it. There’s also a thrill to the new monsters that showrunner Noah Hawley added to the fray—especially the sentient eyeball. And even though it’s the year 2120, Earth and its divided corporation states seem delightfully no more capable at stopping a global threat of any kind than we do right now.

Speaking of threats to humanity, there’s nothing scarier right now than AI. Alien: Earth hits at this emerging technology as well—though it isn’t exactly skewering the sycophantic chat bots as much as the hilarious new South Park episode did last week. Instead, Alien: Earth jumps ahead to depict AI as an entirely new state of being.

In the FX series, a tech genius experiments on sick children by placing their consciousness into synthetic AI bodies. Basically, this character solves the problem of aging, as long as his subjects are willing to leave their humanity behind. I can’t say we will reach that point before some other external problem facing our planet wipes us all out, but that’s also what Alien: Earth is exploring in its four episodes so far. It’s a race to find out what’s the greater threat to humanity: our own recklessness in pursuit of progress, or giant killer scorpions from space? (Spoiler alert! It’s a tighter competition than you might think.)

As AI continues to infiltrate every aspect of our lives, the question of what to do about it is seeping into our TV shows and movies as well. Alien: Earth argues that it’s (potentially) an inevitable advancement of humanity and a necessary tool to beat the robots at their own game when the time comes. South Park basically called it useless. And when I finally convinced my fiancée to watch Tom Cruise jump from one plane to another in Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning after it debuted on video-on-demand this week, we saw the actor make it his personal mission to fight against AI at all costs.

Still, I don’t think any TV show or movie has quite captured the dread and uncanny feeling of interacting with AI just yet. I’m waiting to uncomfortably laugh about AI from a smart, witty series, much like how Severance recontextualized tone-deaf corporate jargon into a captivating sci-fi mystery. For now, we’re still at the phase where we’re deciding whether AI is friend or foe. Oddly enough, it just might turn out to be a little bit of both.