Darren Aronofsky’s ‘1776’ AI Video Series Is Unbalanced and I Can’t Look Away

I’ve been quietly obsessed with Darren Aronofsky’s AI-driven video project, On This Day…1776, ever since it landed unexpectedly on YouTube in late January.

As a narrative, the ongoing series of short videos traces certain events throughout the birth year of the United States, when the outcome of the impending revolution was truly precarious. As a Hollywood-adjacent initiative, it’s also meant to be a testing ground for what creative professionals might be able to accomplish with generative AI tools that are evolving by leaps and bounds.

Over the first half of 2026, and especially as we approach the country’s 250th anniversary on July 4, what has emerged is an increasingly surreal mix of technical ambition, instant patriotism, and a penchant for the grotesque.

It’s that TV show that you’re sure is the worst thing ever, but you can’t stop watching the hate because you want to see what weird twist will come next. And some of them are really crazy.

Produced by Aronofsky’s AI-focused studio Primordial Soup and promoted by Time Studios, On This Day… 1776 gained media attention – and backlash – with the simultaneous launch of its first two episodes. People simply hated it because it was heavily AI generated. The flaws in execution were all too obvious. It was a betrayal of the humanity of Aronofsky’s own films. Even though I tried to be open-minded, I couldn’t help but summarize like “an infernal broth of AI slope and bad human choices. »

For a while, it seemed that the criticism was too much to bear and the project had been abandoned. Time Studios had promised weekly episodes, but almost a month passed before the third was released. (No splash – it just showed up on the YouTube page, as every episode has since.)

It seemed to have fallen off everyone’s radar. The initial episode garnered 199,000 views – not exactly a viral sensation, but not nothing. The four episodes from mid-May to mid-June each have fewer than 2,000 views as of this writing.

For every episode since the beginning – 11 so far, most under five minutes long – a handful of these views are my own.

Like I said, I’m obsessed. My binge-watching focused on three things: whether the show could stick to the weekly schedule (tough fail), how it presents the story (wacky and increasingly wacky), and what the AI ​​looks like (often impressive, often questionable).

In May, speaking about Project 1776 at the Cannes Film Festival’s AI Summit, Aronofsky said: “I encourage you to watch it because it’s an experiment to see how it’s going to progress.”

Challenge accepted.

Before I get into that, let me also say that whatever my judgment of this series, it is not a referendum on AI video as cinema or its general place in the arts. Whether you like it or not, generative AI is about to become a staple of cinema, since storyboard to provide the sets and settings around the human actors for the creation of full feature films movies.

I’m here to see if On This Day…1776 succeeds or fails on its own terms. The series is a no-brainer, and I’m here to review it as I would any other series, like, for example, Widows Bay. What is the story it tells? And does it tell this story well?

AI meets the theory of the Great Man of History

On this day… 1776 is not your high school American history class. It’s not textbook, although it has more than a few heavy, leaden moments.

It runs – as promised – through 1776 in chronological order, hitting some of the biggest moments, including the fledgling Continental Army scaring the British fleet out of Boston Harbor, while often digging into deep cuts that don’t have specific dates, like the forced recruitment of German villagers into the Hessian Army. But that cheats a bit with the calendar. The March 5: Masacre Day episode focuses on the Boston Massacre, even though that bloody event occurred six years earlier. (It also didn’t appear on YouTube until March 17, a date that was actually significant in 1776 because it marked the departure of the fleet.)

There is a global perspective built into the series. We see developments throughout this year from several perspectives: American revolutionaries, British soldiers, French royalty, Hessian mercenaries. The extended sequences are spoken in French and German – subtitled – or with a spicy Scottish accent. (The production is careful to point out that SAG-accredited human voice actors handle the dialogue. Other humans involved include the writer, director, editor and composer, all of whom are credited at the end of each episode, starting with the fourth.)

There is an ensemble cast that is largely a parade of great men from history: Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George III, John Adams. If there is a main character, it is George Washington, an imposing and central figure in 1776. A rare exception is the curiously two-part saga featuring a hapless unknown German drafted into the Hessian ranks just after his marriage.

We spend some time with Betsy Ross in the Flag Day episode (which arrived a few days late), but she has no lines. She’s too busy sewing.

“Staggering” improvements, says Aronofsky

In his May comments at Cannes, Aronofsky called the production progress from January to April 29 (the sixth and most recent at that point) “mind-blowing.” It’s not just the AI ​​models that are improving, he said, but also the Primordial Soup pipeline and the unspecified artists working on the project.

I’m not convinced. This may be more of a back-end issue as the production team becomes more familiar with the tools. But on the business side, where do I look? Sorry, no.

Faces remain inconsistent from scene to scene and from frame to frame within the same scene. Ben Franklin looks a little more pasty, then less so; a little older, then a little younger. The lip syncing is also infuriating almost all the time, like a poorly dubbed foreign film. Historical figures still seem too much like props: Washington entering a room seems staged, not lived. And there is often a plastic quality to the images.

There is a constant feeling that Primordial Soup is showing off: look at the macro details in this fabric! Watch someone blow perfect bubbles! It’s technically impressive, but also very distracting. Time Studios has referred to On This Day…1776 as an “animated series”, which seems like an odd description given its relentless pursuit of photorealism.

Yet somehow the more recent episodes seem improved in a way that’s hard to pin down.

Episode 10, Betsy Ross’s, features a moving montage of red, white and blue flag threads forming and reforming into Uncle Sam, Amelia Earhart and her plane, the moon landing, the flag raising at Iwo Jima, an elephant and a donkey face to face, Jimi Hendrix, Arlington Cemetery. It looks like something you’d see on the Jumbotron at a political rally. This is one of the most impressive sequences in the series so far.

I think it’s confidence. The Primordial Soup team seems to feel more and more empowered to get weird. To please their inner David Lynch. Go beyond the story of the diorama and towards a specific vision, no matter how crazy it may be.

One early episode showed us George Washington having a bad dream, playing out the worries he actually recorded in his private correspondence. As he prepares for bed, we get a very vivid glimpse of his false teeth. In the long dream sequence, a musket ball hits him directly in the forehead, lingers for a moment and falls.

This reminder of the Boston massacre? It’s done in a vertical video format, as if someone recorded the episode on a smartphone. This is not the only anachronism. In later episodes, we get a glimpse of “Join or Die!” » spray painted on one statue, and on another, a call for “No more kings”.

Trippy and increasingly trippy

The April 29 episode was trippy from start to finish. An account of the debates within the French ruling class over whether to aid the American colonists, it opens with a tracking shot of a housefly traversing the halls of the palace before finally being squashed onto a map with a horribly comic touch. In another scene, a fish flops onto a table in front of a dismayed royal. Ministers in wigs, debating in a palace room, suddenly find themselves on board a ship on rough seas, table and chairs included. (The episode ends with a decapitation by guillotine. Whee!)

The June 5 episode introduces us to a stressed-out John Adams who is dangerously close to being a clone of Larry from The Three Stooges.

But nothing prepared me for the final episode, released on June 30 as I was finishing this review. It is, I kid you not, rendered in a decidedly 21st century anime style, with a screaming WWE-style showdown between Thomas Jefferson and George III as Jefferson wrestles with the stirring phrases that would make the Declaration of Independence the defining document of the American experience. Your high school history teacher probably never associated “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” with:

George III: “Kneel before t your king! »
Jefferson: “Get on your knees before that, bitch.”

In this episode, as in the real events of the story, Jefferson has the last word, and W.

On This Day… 1776 is less of a history lesson and more of a work of historical fiction, remaining largely faithful to real-life characters and events while never hesitating to deviate in service of the story it wants to tell. It’s a costume drama that keeps getting used to its breeches, buckled shoes and tricorn, a period piece eager to prove its relevance to the present.

Aronofsky described On This Day… 1776 as an “experiment” conducted with generative AI models and tools whose “potential as storytelling instruments became undeniable.”

Unfortunately, there remain many, many unanswered questions about how much of what we see is the raw product of the AI ​​tools themselves (how elaborate the prompts need to be!) and how much is the work of the human artists and technicians who use them. Is the director of an episode an author or a spectator? What happens in the post-production process? Where is the line between human creativity and AI automation? Will it ever be more than glorified slop?

On this day… 1776 stumbles and hesitates several times. And while it may never convince the larger “AI isn’t art” camp, its best moments aren’t bad at all.

Not all experiments are successful. But maybe, hopefully, we’ll learn something along the way.