AMC is a network that’s typically associated with high-profile prestige dramas like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, and also it has The Walking Dead, but today it announced that it has picked up its very first primetime animated drama: Pantheon, an adaptation of a series of short stories written by Ken Liu, with Turn and Terra Nova’s Craig Silverstein on board as showrunner. The series is about a teen girl named Maddie who has a problem with bullies, at least until she gets help from a mysterious online stranger (so it’s the reverse of how online strangers normally behave). As it turns out, though, this particular stranger is actually her dead father, whose brain was uploaded to “the Cloud” in an “experimental destructive brain scan.” Now he’s a “new kind of being” called a “UI” or “Uploaded Intelligence.” From there, Maddie finds herself involved in a global conspiracy to turn more people into UIs, which sounds to us like she’ll have to fight an army of internet ghosts.
This also sounds a little reminiscent of a fun story we reported on in 2018, when a starup called Nectome tried to convince people to sign up for a fatal new procedure that would—in theory—embalm your brain in such a way that it could be uploaded to a computer someday once that technology was available. Nectome wasn’t actually uploading anyone’s mind into The Matrix, it was just packaging them in a way that would—in theory—make that possible in the future. It was weird, certainly, but if you have the money to throw away on something like that, we certainly won’t judge you for injecting extremely deadly computer chemicals into your brain.
Anyway, this all comes from a press release, which says AMC has ordered two, eight-episode seasons of Pantheon, but there’s no word on when it might premiere.