The Crackpot AI Patriotism of Darren Aronofsky's 'On This Day...1776' YouTube Project

I've been low-key obsessed with Darren Aronofsky's AI-drenched video project On This Day…1776 since it landed out of the blue on YouTube in late January.

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

Through the first half of 2026, and especially as we've closed in on the country's 250th anniversary on July 4, what has emerged has been an increasingly surreal blend of technical ambition, snapshot 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 hate-watching because you want to see what weird twist comes next. And some of it is truly bonkers.

Produced by Aronofsky's AI-centric Primordial Soup studio and promoted by Time Studios, On This Day…1776 drew a burst of media attention -- and backlash -- with the simultaneous debut of its first two episodes. People hated it simply because it was heavily AI-generated. The flaws in the execution were all too apparent. It was a betrayal of the humanity of Aronofsky's own films. As much as I tried to be open-minded, I couldn't help but sum it up as "a hellish broth of machine-driven AI slop and bad human choices."

For a while, it seemed like the criticism had been too much to bear and the project had been shelved. Time Studios had promised weekly episodes, but nearly a month went by before the third one dropped. (No splash -- it simply appeared on the YouTube page, as every episode has done 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 under 2,000 views as of this writing.

For every episode since the start -- 11 so far, most well under five minutes long -- a handful of those views are mine.

Like I said, I'm obsessed. My compulsive viewing has centered on three things: whether the series could meet the weekly schedule (hard fail), how it presents the history (wacky, and getting wackier) and how the AI looks (often impressive, often dubious).

In May, speaking about the 1776 project at the Cannes Film Festival's AI Summit, Aronofsky said this: "I encourage you to watch it because it's an experiment to see how it's gonna progress."

Challenge accepted.

Before I get into those particulars, though, let me also say that regardless of my judgment of this one series, this isn't a referendum on AI video as cinema or its general place in the arts. Whether you like it or not, generative AI is on the verge of becoming a fixture in movie-making, from storyboarding to providing the settings and scenery around human actors to creating full-on feature films.

I'm here to look at whether On This Day…1776 is succeeding or failing on its own terms. The series is a given, and I'm here to review it as I would any other show, like, for example, Widow's Bay. What is the story that it's telling? And is it telling that story well?

AI meets the Great Man of History theory

On This Day…1776 is not your high school American history class. Textbook it is not, even if it has more than a few stodgy, leaden moments.

It does -- as promised -- work through 1776 in chronological order, hitting some greatest-hits moments, including the fledgling Continental Army scaring the British fleet out of Boston Harbor, while often digging up deep cuts that don't have specific dates attached to them, such as the forced recruitment of German villagers into the Hessian army. It cheats a bit with the calendar, though. The March 5: Massacre Day episode focuses on the Boston Massacre, even though that bloody event happened 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 fleet's departure.)

There's a global perspective woven into the series. We see the developments throughout that year from multiple angles: American revolutionaries, British soldiers, French royalty, Hessian mercenaries. Extended sequences are spoken in French and German -- with subtitles -- or with a tangy Scottish accent. (The production takes pains to point out that SAG-credentialed human voice actors handle the dialogue. Other humans involved include writer, director, editor and composer, all of whom are credited at the end of the each episode, starting with the fourth.)

It's got an ensemble cast that's largely a Great Men of History parade: Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George III, John Adams. If there's a lead character, it's George Washington, who was a towering and central figure in 1776. A rare exception is the curiously two-episode saga featuring an unfortunate, unknown German conscripted into the Hessian ranks just after his wedding.

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

"Mindblowing" improvements, Aronofsky says

In his May comments at Cannes, Aronofsky called the production advances from January to the April 29 episode (the sixth one, and the most recent at that moment) "mindblowing." It wasn't just the AI models getting better, he said, but also the Primordial Soup pipeline and the unspecified artists working on the project.

I'm not convinced. Maybe it's more of a back-end thing, as the production team gets more comfortable with the tools. But on the business end, where I'm watching? Sorry, no.

Faces remain inconsistent from both scene to scene and from frame to frame within the same scene. Ben Franklin looks a little more doughy, then less so; a little older, then a little younger. Lip sync is also maddeningly off almost all the time, like a badly dubbed foreign film. The historical figures still feel too much like props: Washington striding into a room feels staged, not lived. And there's often a plasticky quality to the images.

There's a constant feeling that Primordial Soup is showing off: Look at the macro detail in this fabric! Watch someone blow picture-perfect bubbles! It's technically impressive, but also wicked distracting. Time Studios refers to On This Day...1776 as an "animated series," which feels like an odd description given its relentless pursuit of photorealism.

Yet somehow the more recent episodes do feel improved in a way that's hard to pin down.

Episode 10, the Betsy Ross one, has a stirring montage of red, white and blue flag threads forming and reforming into Uncle Sam, Amelia Earhart and her airplane, the moon landing, the flag raising at Iwo Jima, an elephant and donkey facing off, Jimi Hendrix, Arlington Cemetery. It feels like something you'd see on the Jumbotron at a political rally. It's one of the most impressive sequences in the series so far.

I think it's confidence. The Primordial Soup team seems to be feeling more and more empowered to get weird. To indulge their inner David Lynch. To move beyond diorama history and toward a specific vision, however demented.

One of the early episodes gave us George Washington having a bad dream, playing out the misgivings that he really did record in private correspondence. As he's getting ready for bed, we get an all too vivid look at his false teeth. In the extended dream sequence, a musket ball hits him squarely in the forehead, lingers a moment and falls off.

That Boston Massacre callback? It's done in a vertical video format, as if someone had recorded the episode on a smartphone. That's hardly the only anachronism. In later episodes, we get glimpses of "Join or die!" spray-painted on a statue, and in another, a call for "No more kings."

Trippy and getting trippier

The April 29 episode was trippy from start to finish. An account of debates within France's ruling class over whether to aid the American colonists, it opens with a tracking shot of a housefly zipping through palace rooms before it's finally swatted onto a map with a gruesomely comic flourish. In another scene, a fish flops across a table in front of a dismayed royal. Bewigged ministers debating in a palace room suddenly find themselves aboard a ship on a roiling sea, table and chairs included. (The episode ends with a guillotine beheading. Whee!)

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

But nothing prepared me for the newest episode, which dropped June 30 as I was wrapping up this review. It is, I kid you not, rendered in a thoroughly 21st-century anime style, complete with a garish WWE-style showdown between Thomas Jefferson and George III as Jefferson wrestles with the soul-stirring phrases that would make the Declaration of Independence the defining document of the American experiment. Your high school history teacher probably never paired "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" with:

George III: "Kneel before your king!"

Jefferson: "Kneel before this, bitch."

In this episode, as in the real events of history, Jefferson does get the last word, and the W.

On This Day...1776 is less a history lesson than a work of historical fiction, staying largely faithful to the real people and events while never hesitating to veer off in service of the story it wants to tell. It's a costume drama that's still getting comfortable in its breeches, buckle shoes and tricorne hat, a period piece eager to prove its relevance to the present day.

Aronofsky has described On This Day…1776 as an "experiment" being carried out with generative AI models and tools whose "potential as storytelling instruments has become undeniable."

Unfortunately, there are many, many unanswered questions about how much of what we're seeing is the unvarnished product of the AI tools themselves (how elaborate the prompts must be!) and how much is the work of the human artists and technicians using them. Is an episode's director an auteur or a spectator? What goes into 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 falters repeatedly. And while it may never win over the large "AI-isn't-art" camp, its better moments are aren't half bad.

Not every experiment succeeds. But maybe, hopefully, we learn something along the way.