After taking a four-year break, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror returns this weekend. The creator and writer of Netflix’s Emmy-winning anthology series has been vocal about his reasons for the long wait, saying essentially that the world itself felt too dystopian for his dystopian series.
When announcing its return with season six, releasing Thursday, Brooker said he set out to once again reinvent the series by “deliberately upending some of my own core assumptions about what to expect” from a Black Mirror episode. The result is five episodes — “Joan Is Awful” (which centers around a renamed Netflix-like streamer), “Loch Henry,” “Beyond the Sea,” “Mazey Day” and “Demon 79” — that will no doubt continue to subvert audience expectations.
And despite delighting viewers in the past with surprisingly hopeful episodes, like the Emmy-winning “San Junipero,” Brooker says the new installments are… bleak.
“I sort of circled back to some classically Black Mirror stories as well,” Brooker told GQ in a chat about the season. “So it’s not like it’s a bed of roses this season. They’re certainly some of the bleakest stories we’ve ever done.”
He continued, “It does feel like the dystopia is lapping onto the shores of the present moment; lots of people say it’s like we’re living in a Black Mirror episode, so there’s certainly a sense of looking in the rearview. We’re looking at an alternative past, though, so in a way I’m having my cake and eating it. We have eradicated lots of diseases and generally lots of things are going well that we lose sight of but it’s just a bit terrifying if you think democracy is going to collapse. That and the climate breaking down.”
Among the new episode offerings, however, is still an “out-and-out comedy,” along with another that was inspired by Hulu’s Elizabeth Holmes series The Dropout and one that tackles paparazzi culture. (No spoilers here about whether they are bleak or not.)
One of those aforementioned episodes features advanced AI-like technology, which sparked Brooker to elaborate further on his experience with ChatGPT (“The first thing I did was type ‘generate Black Mirror episode’ and it comes up with something that, at first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is shit,” he previously said).
“With ChatGPT when I first encountered it, I was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s it, my job done’. But now having toyed with it a bit more, you can see the limitations,” he says of the emerging and controversial technology for writers, and key sticking point in the writers strike. “There’s a generic quality to the art that it pumps out. It’ll be undeniably perfect in five years, but at what point it’ll replace the human experience? I don’t know if that’ll ever come.”
Despite his struggle to maintain hopeful in current times (“I do have faith in the fact that the younger generation seem to have their heads screwed on and seem to be pissed off,” he says) he hasn’t lost his optimism about technology in general. The creator has long maintained that the villain in Black Mirror is not the tech — it’s what people do with it.
“Usually there’s a weak and flawed human in the story to fuck things up rather than it being the technology specifically,” he says in another pre-season interview with Wired. “We did ‘Metalhead,’ which was about robot AI dogs going around killing people — fair enough, that’s the technology. But in the ‘Entire History of You,’ the memory playback episode, it’s this jealous and insecure husband who fucks up his own life. It’s not generally the fault of the technology within the stories.”
He continues, “I am generally pro-technology. Probably we’re going to have to rely on it if we’re going to survive, so I wouldn’t say [Black Mirror episodes] necessarily warnings, so much as worries, if you know what I mean. They’re maybe worst-case scenarios.”
Source: Hollywood
