The original post: /r/television by /u/Spiritual_Sleep162 on 2026-03-08 18:03:35+00:00.
I’m maybe 15 minutes into the new AMAZON show and something feels very odd. Everything seems slightly… off.
First small thing: Ciara isn’t pronounced “Sierra”. It’s closer to “Kira”.
Ok, I get it Irish name, North American cast/crew. These things happen. But it is the same way text to speech would prenounce the name.
What’s really throwing me is the visuals.
The cast’s faces look oddly enhanced. There’s a bit of an uncanny valley thing going on. The way the leads move their faces also looks slightly unnatural, almost like there’s some kind of smoothing or processing happening.
Then there’s the lighting. Sometimes it’s very hyper-stylised, and other times the colour grading looks weirdly over-processed, and the two styles don’t feel very consistent with each other. It reminds me a bit of the look you sometimes see with AI generated video, which is generally fine, but it does stand out.
But the strangest thing is the background separation. The show uses extreme shallow depth of field with very heavy subject separation. The background blur sometimes shifts or warps in odd ways, which creates this really artificial separation between the actors and the environment.
At times it almost looks like the actors are composited onto the background.
Is this just a stylistic choice with very fast lenses, or are they using something like LED wall/virtual production sets and trying to hide it?
Curious if anyone else noticed this or if it settles down later in the show. Maybe I’m just overthinking it this early in the show.