Before mobile phones, being filmed was very rare – and if you were, you acted naturally. Today, our relationship to the camera is very, very different

Not for the first time, I got something wrong. As someone who made a living being on camera, I developed theories about what it takes to be yourself on screen. My main thought was that everyone in the world would soon be able to do it, because they’d be getting so much practice.

Once upon a time, hardly anybody was filmed or videoed. When the head of my middle school announced in assembly one morning that there would be television cameras in the dinner hall at lunchtime, every child woke up. For once the headteacher had our full and undivided attention. Consternation was in the air. This would have been about 1979. Regional television news probably needed pictures to cover a story about school dinners or something. Nobody, but nobody, in the school that day missed that evening’s edition of Midlands Today. It was a big deal. I saw the back of my head, and was agog.

Billed as the first end-to-end AI-created series on a major streaming service, this Turkish show looks like the result of the prompt ‘make it cinematic’

Just as the world reels from Elon Musk’s AI-powered The Odyssey remake – though “remake” feels rather generous for a seven-minute splat of synthetic sludge – another bucket of AI gunk is dropped on to our faces. For Prime Video’s AI-generated TV series Castle Walls, produced by Turkish production studio Ay Yapım using a melange of generative video tools, has arrived, billed as the first end-to-end AI-created series to premiere on a major streaming platform.

It’s certainly more epic than Musk’s production, consisting of two 17-minute episodes. Set in the 11th century, the show revolves around the historic Alamut Castle, although it’s entirely absent of any real sense of time or place. I was briefly intrigued by the opening images, with their bold palette of blues and mustard browns and yellows – but as soon as the “people” appeared, looking like Vaseline-smeared Madame Tussauds creations slowly melting in the sun, everything came crashing down.

The Theranos fraudster is the subject of Nathan Fielder’s mind-bending You Can See Everything documentary. It is now driving audiences to watch Disney/Hulu’s 2022 series, The Dropout – and they’re seeing it in a whole new light

There are surprise smash hits, and then there’s You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s documentary-cum-psychodrama about the disgraced US entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes. It arrived in US cinemas with much buzz: this was, after all, an A24 production, helmed by one of TV’s leading performance-art pranksters. But You Can See Everything has surpassed all expectations to become an undeniable hit, and is now the highest-grossing US documentary in 15 years just two weeks after its release.

Co-directed by Lance Oppenheim, it is a surreal and masterly epic; at a press screening in London, the audience appeared to be alternately spellbound by its comedic elements and repulsed by the sheer grossness of some of its characters. That grossness, it should be mentioned, doesn’t pertain only to Holmes, who was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison (this has since been reduced several times) for defrauding investors, after the collapse of her sham blood-testing startup Theranos). It has also – perhaps unsurprisingly – led audiences towards other media inspired by Holmes’s downfall. Journalist John Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood, has returned to the bestseller lists; the ABC News podcast The Dropout, hosted by Rebecca Jarvis reported a 900% surge in listeners; while the Disney/Hulu TV series of the same name enjoyed a 700% bump in viewers, and is now ranked #47 on IMDb’s “Most popular TV shows” list, despite having been released in 2022.

There are ghouls, gremlins and the grotesque but through its five seasons the anthology show really focuses on the human condition

A man with a stern expression and a shock of slick black hair, wearing a crisp black suit, cigarette in hand, approaches the camera. In his clipped, precise patter, he’s about to welcome you … to The Twilight Zone.

This is how each episode of The Twilight Zone typically began, with its creator, Rod Serling, delivering a brief, cryptic opening monologue before throwing to a stand-alone story.