Start Watching ‘Black Mirror’ Immediately
A dark and nerve-jangling TV show about the ways technology is shaping a grim potential future sounds like a losing proposition.
And, yet, lots of people are buzzing enthusiastically about Black Mirror, a British series that recently became available on Netflix: Each episode extrapolates familiar tech- and media-culture trends into a dystopian tale that leaves the viewer somewhere between frazzled and shell-shocked.
And you know what? It’s awesome!
The show’s creator has described it as a kind of semi-futuristic update of The Twilight Zone. That’s roughly accurate, but the sensibility strikes me as simultaneously more brutal, slick, and bleakly witty — Idiocracy crossed with sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard, perhaps.
The six episodes that have been produced so far all feature a standalone story with a different cast. (A seventh episode, starring Jon Hamm of Mad Men fame, will appear on British television and, in the United States, DirecTV on Christmas Day. It’s not presently clear when that episode will show up on Netflix.)
The particularly harsh premiere episode involves a politician pressured, partly by the real-time opinions of a hyper-wired public, to choose whether to perform an unspeakable act on television. It is, to put it mildly, a bold debut, practically daring the viewer to see it through to the end, let alone tune in again next time.
Other installments aren’t quite so draining. But they’re still distinct and memorable, imagining worlds in which it’s possible to reconstruct the dead from their digital traces, or everyone has total recall by way of implanted computer chips, or society has been formally arranged into a structure that roughly mimics a reality-competition show, and so on.
These quick summations don’t really do justice to the execution. For starters, the production values are consistently impressive, and the writing and acting as sharp as anything the “New Golden Age of Television” has produced.
The show is always tightly paced, and dotted with plot maneuvers that function less like a twist or shock than a revelation. Just when you think you’ve worked out how things could go bad, they go worse — and we recognize exactly why. And, to me at least, they manage to come across as cautionary, not just cynical.
That said, it’s not a show for the squeamish (or for any family that includes youngsters). But if you’re looking for something smart, challenging, and provocative without being preachy, Black Mirror deserves the ultimate compliment: This isn’t binge material.
Watch an episode, and let its echoes rattle around your brain for at least a day. Invariably it sinks in that this isn’t really a show “about technology” at all. The futuristic-yet-recognizable scenarios are just a way in.
The real story is always, finally, about us.
Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com or find me on Twitter, @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss.
