Black Mirror season 6 spoilers follow.
In the four years Black Mirror has been off our Netflix home screens, technology has tried its insidious darndest to catch up with the dystopian head-bender, finding new frightening ways to change our lives in ways that feel a bit ‘Black Mirror-y’.
Even in the past few months since the sixth season wrapped, a not-so-quiet revolution in tech has dawned with the launch of ChatGPT, sparking inescapable doom-mongering that artificial intelligence could replace entire workforces – before the bots take over the place completely.
Then in the week before the show’s Netflix release, Apple asked us all to strap VR goggleboxes on our heads to watch the next season of Severance. Why they can’t just fangle something useful like a smooth-edged TV or a washing machine – we could use those without looking daft! – is a question for another day.
Amidst these tumultuous tech headlines, this season of Black Mirror has arrived at an interesting moment.
But in spite of this, the season itself goes whole episodes shunning the deadened glassy surfaces of our TV, computer and smartphone screens, which have provided the show with its chilly name since it premiered back in 2011.
Black Mirror achieved international renown and its jargon entered the zeitgeist for its dystopian projections of the not-too-distant future. But in an era where much of what the show predicted has come to pass in some shape or form, Black Mirror has now become a radically different show.
The first episode from showrunner Charlie Brooker’s pen, ‘The National Anthem’, exploded onto our screens with an unforgettable premise. The fictional British Prime Minister was forced to have sex with a pig during a national broadcast – four years before David Cameron denied an unsubstantiated allegation that he had sexual relations with a pig’s head during the heyday of his university days.
Elsewhere, the framework motivating Bryce Dallas Howard’s desperate attempts at social climbing in ‘Nosedive’ were soon spookily replicated in China when the government rolled out a social-credit score system.
But in 2023 technology seems to have finally outpaced Brooker’s wildest imagination. As a result, the show has soft-relaunched its core premise, stepping away from stomach-churning prophecies of technology and towards a focus on the psychological horror that lies behind it.
Instead of mining the Big Tech of the present or looking to AI world domination in the future, much of season six is a retro affair, spinning tales of a fictitious past. ‘Loch Henry‘ concerns itself with a trove of vintage video cassette tapes to make a documentary, while ‘Mazey Day’ follows a ruthless paparazzo with the old-school cameras of the noughties.
An unfortunate by-product of this approach is that these moral-dilemma probes into true crime and privacy are conversations we have been having for years now.
An exception to this comes in the first episode, ‘Joan is Awful’, which follows a woman who becomes the focus of a so-called prestige drama on a Netflix spoof streaming site called Steamberry – proving Brooker isn’t afraid of nibbling the hand that feeds him.
Yet dramas like Vardy v Rooney, The Dropout – which inspired this episode – and this year’s breakout hit Jury Duty already question the repurposing, or even sheer exploitation, of an alive-and-kicking person’s life for “content”. The Truman Show came out in 1998 – albeit with a slightly different premise.
By the end of the episode, we step closer to a reality already drawing picket lines in Hollywood, as the creator of the ‘Joan is Awful’ drama is unveiled as a supercomputer: the “quamputer”, which sounds a bit like a technological Frankenstein that could only spring from the brain tissue of a Silicon Valley Megamind.
Described as “an infinite content creator”, Black Mirror‘s (currently) fictitious CGI dramas powered by AI are inadvertently one of the chief reasons the Writers Guild of America have put their pencils down this summer, again touching on how reality may have finally caught up with Black Mirror.
The show might just be a victim of its own success. The oddly prescient prior episodes mean Brooker’s output is now combed through to discern what’s in the tea leaves for the new few years of our own reality.
Brooker has questioned whether the show is indeed a warning about tech or just a series of warnings about how we could be the root of its ills. During an appearance on BBC Radio 4, he compared tech to an extra limb we’ve spontaneously grown and don’t know how to use, so just keep blundering into objects and bashing ourselves against it.
This focus, which suggests we’ve all been obsessing over the wrong thing as the source of our Black Mirror-related existential dread, puts an interesting and more unpredictable spin on the series as it goes forward.
In this hit-and-miss season, whether any of the bullseye episodes will enter the Black Mirror hall of fame to become as respected as ‘Shut Up and Dance’ or as treasured as ‘San Junipero’ remains to be seen.
But given that this season doesn’t leave you staring in fright at anything with a cable and wanting to cry or hide, Black Mirror has decided to dismount the ‘Fifteen Million Merits’ bicycle and find another way to earn a living.
In doing so, it’s set in motion a future where the show can explore absolutely anything it wants because the villain of the piece is in the regular, old-fashioned mirror now.
Black Mirror season six is available to stream on Netflix.
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Deputy TV Editor
Previously a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape for Digital Spy, when she’s not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas.
When she’s not bingeing a box set, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we’re all watching.
