AI Upscaling Old Shows Looks Weird. It's Still Worth It.

A Different World, the Cosby Show spinoff that aired on NBC from 1987 to 1993, arrived on Netflix in February 2025 with its full run labeled HD. Fans were thrilled for about one episode. Then they started noticing things. Faces melt into waxy smears. Background signs dissolve into gibberish. Dwayne's glasses reportedly vanish clean off his face in one season four episode. The internet quickly declared the whole thing nightmare fuel. Here is the unpopular opinion: the outrage is pointed at the wrong target, and AI upscaling old shows is the only reason any of this survives on the screens we actually watch.

The documentation of the mess is genuinely funny. Developer and blogger Scott Hanselman, who works on AI at Microsoft, posted TikTok videos walking through the damage frame by frame. In a TikTok video examining the upscale, Hanselman said: "You can make one blurry pixel into four pixels, or four pixels into sixteen pixels but you gotta have that information come from somewhere." The show was produced for old broadcast resolution, either 480p or 360p, and the upscaling software has to invent detail that was never captured. According to Hanselman, the AI cannot read, so instead of guessing the words on a background poster it just sharpens the blur, and the result looks like hieroglyphics. PCWorld's rundown of the complaints catalogs the symptoms: waxy skin, garbled signage, squished background faces, whole scenes with the texture of a watercolor painting.

Blame the supply chain, not the algorithm

Here is the part the pile-on keeps skipping: it is not clear Netflix did the upscaling at all. The licensing rights to A Different World sit with the Carsey-Werner production company, and as Gizmodo noted, the rights holder may be the party responsible for the HD master, not the streamer. The same company owns Roseanne, another 1980s sitcom with the same ugly AI upscale fingerprints, and all 222 episodes of that show were AI-upscaled to HD for airings on CMT, TV Land, Peacock and Cozy TV. The anger lands on Netflix because Netflix is the app on your TV. The decision was probably made upstream, by whoever needed an HD master to license the show in the first place. Yelling at the storefront about a factory defect rarely fixes the factory.

The alternative was never a pristine restoration

Now the actually unpopular part. Ask what the alternative was supposed to be. A careful frame-by-frame film restoration of a long-running sitcom costs serious money, the kind of money a streaming licensing deal for a catalog comedy is unlikely to justify. Without the cheap AI pass, the real options were the original mushy standard-definition master stretched across a 65-inch panel, or the show sitting in a vault where nobody watches it at all. Nobody was going to fund a museum-grade restoration here. The upscale is janky, and it is also the only HD version of this show that was ever likely to exist. James Cameron ran into the same wall with the 4K remasters of Aliens, The Abyss and True Lies, and PCWorld reported that he told the nitpickers to get a life. Crude, but the economics underneath are real: the flawless version people picture in their heads was not a realistic option for this kind of release.

None of this means the current results are good. Melting faces and unreadable signs are genuine flaws, and the technology should improve at exactly the things Hanselman flagged. JoBlo's coverage of the latest examples shows the artifacts are still easy to spot. But the discourse treats AI upscaling old shows as vandalism, when it is closer to triage. Old shows either get the cheap AI pass or they fade into unwatchability on modern displays, and a show nobody can stand to look at is a show nobody discovers. A sequel series is reportedly in the works at Netflix, which means a new generation is about to meet these characters for the first time. Complain about the hieroglyphics all you want. Just stop pretending the choice was ever between this and perfection. It was between this and nothing, in the same way this site's defense of AI relationships argued the real choice is rarely the ideal one people imagine. Old favorites keep coming back in new packaging, whether it is an AI touch-up or a theatrical encore with new footage attached, and the grumbling is part of the ritual now.