oh mayne that last episode was dopeness... made up for a couple of the weaker ones..
and made me look forward to the next installment of this series...
I used to love twilight zone and this is like the millenium version of it..
Netflix series black mirror
- Thread starter BDR
- Start date
oh mayne that last episode was dopeness... made up for a couple of the weaker ones..
and made me look forward to the next installment of this series...
I used to love twilight zone and this is like the millenium version of it..
thanks murk city I think I got it now..
I watched all this new season in one sitting.
This new season was pretty lackluster.
Though "BLACK MUSEUM" was definitely the highlight.
Nothing really challenging, memorable or highly thought-provoking like the previous seasons.
And some situations, like in "CROCODILE" were downright silly.
Though how that situation was "solved" in the end was hilarious.
This new season was pretty lackluster.
Though "BLACK MUSEUM" was definitely the highlight.
Nothing really challenging, memorable or highly thought-provoking like the previous seasons.
And some situations, like in "CROCODILE" were downright silly.
Though how that situation was "solved" in the end was hilarious.
Black Museum by far the best one.
All the pain he caused those people and he got his. Well done and the daughter was fucking incredible acting and looks wise
metal head was cool suspense thriller
it was a pretty good season they didn't really go far out there like in the past though
metal head was cool suspense thriller
it was a pretty good season they didn't really go far out there like in the past though
She was in Top Boy and is also in Black Panther. Damn good actor.
yea i recognize her from top boy that's the kind of black woman id just rub down with shea butter after her shower and listen to her talk about how all them bitches be hating on her then kiss the back of her neck and rub her thigh a little then go fix her a plate of greens.
that terrible chick would've been in love with me by the end of that year though.
That or in a shallow grave.
That makes it worse! Why would you want a terrible chick that can't move on?
]
just watched... damn that was good. dude was a sadistic ass SOB
For This season, episode 3 was the most fucked up.
watching arklight now lmao at her mom catching fucking
watching hang the dj damn they had ol girl fuckin every 36 hours while dude was stuck for a year
Black museum made me clap out loud
Average season overall
Average season overall
Between this and The Punisher this week, I'm set.
I enjoyed the entire season.
I think that some people have too much anticipation for a major twist. After 4 seasons of a show how many twists can they keep coming up with.
Sometimes a show just tells a story. And in all honesty these were six pretty good stories.
I liked all of the eps and yes some were better than others. But for people to bash this entire season as horrible is crazy.
My top 4 eps this season were USS Calister, Hang the DJ, Black Museum and Metalhead in no specific order. The other two eps were still entertaining.
I think that some people have too much anticipation for a major twist. After 4 seasons of a show how many twists can they keep coming up with.
Sometimes a show just tells a story. And in all honesty these were six pretty good stories.
I liked all of the eps and yes some were better than others. But for people to bash this entire season as horrible is crazy.
My top 4 eps this season were USS Calister, Hang the DJ, Black Museum and Metalhead in no specific order. The other two eps were still entertaining.
I like some episodes and others I don't
This could be pretty cool if they do it right. Kind of reminds me how The Walking Dead Telltale games were setup.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...o-plan-choose-your-own-adventure-black-mirror
Netflix Is Planning a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ‘Black Mirror’
Netflix Inc. is about to let you decide how your favorite show will end.
The streaming service is developing a slate of specials that will let viewers choose the next storyline in a TV episode or movie, according to people familiar with the matter. The company expects to release the first of these projects before the end of this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are still private.
Viewers will get to choose their own storylines in one episode of the upcoming season of “Black Mirror,” the Emmy-winning science-fiction anthology series. The show is famous for exploring the social implications of technology, including an episode where humans jockey to receive higher ratings from their peers. The fifth season of the show is expected to be released in December.
The foray into choose-your-own-adventure programming represents a big bet on a nascent form of entertainment known as interactive TV. As Netflix expands around the world, it’s looking for new ways to lure customers. By blending elements of video games with traditional television, the company could create a formula that can be applied to any number of series.
‘Puss in Book’
Netflix upended the business model of television by delivering new episodes of a season all at once -- letting viewers watch shows on-demand rather than live. But so far, the two-decade-old company has done little to change the way shows are conceived or produced. It releases the same 25-minute sitcoms, hourlong documentaries and two-hour movies as other TV networks.
Netflix has already released a handful of episodes of choose-your-own-adventure animated programs designed for kids. Within the first couple minutes off “Puss in Book,” the viewer must choose whether the pugilistic feline fights a god or a tree. After watching one version, the viewer can go back and choose the alternate scenario.
Netflix also is about to release a new animated series based on the popular video game “Minecraft.” Telltale Games, the company that was working with Netflix on the show, recently laid off most of its staff. But the show, based on one of the world’s most popular video games, is mostly finished and will be released later this year.
Video Games
The “Black Mirror” episode is the first of several experiments with live-action interactive programming for Netflix, and the first interactive show designed for adult viewers. The Los Gatos, California-based company has closed a deal for at least one more live-action project, and is negotiating the rights to others, said the people.
Two of the projects are adaptations of video games, though Netflix has no plans to start releasing video games -- contrary to recent reports.
This new type of narrative can complicate the production, and dealmaking. While a traditional movie has a 100-page script, a two-hour experience needs to have a longer script and production to account for all the different scenarios. Writers and producers are still determining how the extra demands affect their pay, among other matters.
Former journalist Charlie Brooker created “Black Mirror” in 2011 for the British TV network Channel 4 and oversaw four seasons alongside Annabel Jones. Netflix got on board in 2015, acquiring the rights to past episodes and the rights to release future seasons.
Two of the four previous seasons of “Black Mirror” have debuted in December, including the most recent six episodes. Production of the fifth season began earlier this year.
How Complex?
The stories that branch off from the main narrative of “Black Mirror” will be more complex than the options in the kids’ programming, though it remains to be seen just how complicated the show will be. Consumer experience is paramount at Netflix, which employs executives who test everything from the quality of mobile networks in Mumbai to Brazilians’ preferences for subtitles versus dubbing.
Producers of interactive TV are hoping Netflix’s growing investment is a sign that their time in the spotlight is approaching. HBO, one of Netflix’s fiercest rivals, released its first interactive TV show earlier this year. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the longer version of “Mosaic” was available in a separate app.
While many TV viewers have voted for candidates in reality programs like “American Idol” and “The Voice,” no narrative TV show that asked viewers to engage with the plot has become a big hit.
That could soon change, said Jim Spare, the chief operating officer of Eko, a company that produces interactive shows. The widespread availability of high-speed internet, the prevalence of touch screens and interactive games have all laid the groundwork for shows that ask the viewer to engage.
“The time is right for interactive TV to become a mainstream experience,” he said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...o-plan-choose-your-own-adventure-black-mirror
Netflix Is Planning a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ‘Black Mirror’
Netflix Inc. is about to let you decide how your favorite show will end.
The streaming service is developing a slate of specials that will let viewers choose the next storyline in a TV episode or movie, according to people familiar with the matter. The company expects to release the first of these projects before the end of this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are still private.
Viewers will get to choose their own storylines in one episode of the upcoming season of “Black Mirror,” the Emmy-winning science-fiction anthology series. The show is famous for exploring the social implications of technology, including an episode where humans jockey to receive higher ratings from their peers. The fifth season of the show is expected to be released in December.
The foray into choose-your-own-adventure programming represents a big bet on a nascent form of entertainment known as interactive TV. As Netflix expands around the world, it’s looking for new ways to lure customers. By blending elements of video games with traditional television, the company could create a formula that can be applied to any number of series.
‘Puss in Book’
Netflix upended the business model of television by delivering new episodes of a season all at once -- letting viewers watch shows on-demand rather than live. But so far, the two-decade-old company has done little to change the way shows are conceived or produced. It releases the same 25-minute sitcoms, hourlong documentaries and two-hour movies as other TV networks.
Netflix has already released a handful of episodes of choose-your-own-adventure animated programs designed for kids. Within the first couple minutes off “Puss in Book,” the viewer must choose whether the pugilistic feline fights a god or a tree. After watching one version, the viewer can go back and choose the alternate scenario.
Netflix also is about to release a new animated series based on the popular video game “Minecraft.” Telltale Games, the company that was working with Netflix on the show, recently laid off most of its staff. But the show, based on one of the world’s most popular video games, is mostly finished and will be released later this year.
Video Games
The “Black Mirror” episode is the first of several experiments with live-action interactive programming for Netflix, and the first interactive show designed for adult viewers. The Los Gatos, California-based company has closed a deal for at least one more live-action project, and is negotiating the rights to others, said the people.
Two of the projects are adaptations of video games, though Netflix has no plans to start releasing video games -- contrary to recent reports.
This new type of narrative can complicate the production, and dealmaking. While a traditional movie has a 100-page script, a two-hour experience needs to have a longer script and production to account for all the different scenarios. Writers and producers are still determining how the extra demands affect their pay, among other matters.
Former journalist Charlie Brooker created “Black Mirror” in 2011 for the British TV network Channel 4 and oversaw four seasons alongside Annabel Jones. Netflix got on board in 2015, acquiring the rights to past episodes and the rights to release future seasons.
Two of the four previous seasons of “Black Mirror” have debuted in December, including the most recent six episodes. Production of the fifth season began earlier this year.
How Complex?
The stories that branch off from the main narrative of “Black Mirror” will be more complex than the options in the kids’ programming, though it remains to be seen just how complicated the show will be. Consumer experience is paramount at Netflix, which employs executives who test everything from the quality of mobile networks in Mumbai to Brazilians’ preferences for subtitles versus dubbing.
Producers of interactive TV are hoping Netflix’s growing investment is a sign that their time in the spotlight is approaching. HBO, one of Netflix’s fiercest rivals, released its first interactive TV show earlier this year. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the longer version of “Mosaic” was available in a separate app.
While many TV viewers have voted for candidates in reality programs like “American Idol” and “The Voice,” no narrative TV show that asked viewers to engage with the plot has become a big hit.
That could soon change, said Jim Spare, the chief operating officer of Eko, a company that produces interactive shows. The widespread availability of high-speed internet, the prevalence of touch screens and interactive games have all laid the groundwork for shows that ask the viewer to engage.
“The time is right for interactive TV to become a mainstream experience,” he said.
Black Mirror creator reveals the secret inspirations behind ‘San Junipero’ and other episodes
Laurie Sparham/Netflix; Inset: Eric Charbonneau/REX/Shutterstock
Black Mirror
Show Details
TYPE
TV Show
GENRE
Sci-fi
NETWORK
Netflix
Get the Latest on TV, Movies, Music and More.
A Daily Digest of News That Matters. Delivered Straight to Your Inbox.
CHRISTIAN HOLUB
November 20, 2018 at 06:06 PM EST
Each product we feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. If you make a purchase using the links included, we may earn commission.
In just a few short years, Black Mirror has become the pop-culture prophet of our times. The anthology show’s stories about the unforeseen dangers of technology at first seemed out of step with the dominant optimistic worldview that smartphones and social media would save humanity. But now that we’ve had time to realize the addictiveness of phones and social media companies’ growing power over our personal data (power that is perhaps being wielded unethically), the Black Mirror view of technology’s dangers feels increasingly relevant.
The new book Inside Black Mirror, out this week from Penguin Random House, tells the behind-the-scenes story of the show and its unintended prophecies. Featuring interviews with co-showrunners Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, as well as a host of various cast and crew members, the book goes in-depth on each episode of the show and how concepts made it from page to screen.
“It’s a big team effort, and I think it’s useful for fans of the show and people interested in writing to see how the process works,” Brooker tells EW. “Some people probably think the show is created by some furrow-browed Unabomber types who despise all technology and want to live in a wooden box. It’s not that all, we’re quite self-deprecating, I think we’ve got a good sense of humor and we’re goofy.”
Ahead of the book’s release this week, EW caught up with Brooker to discuss stories and revelations from a few specific episodes.
Penguin Random House; Andrew H Walker/Variety/REX/Shutterstock
“San Junipero” (Season 3, Episode 4)
This season 3 standout has been justly celebrated for its sci-fi same-sex romance story with a happy ending, but Brooker says he’s surprised more people don’t comment on the fact that the protagonists are actually old women in a virtual reality simulator. That’s key to the whole thing; in fact, the episode was actually inspired by Brooker’s viewing of a 2010 BBC documentary called The Young Ones.
ADVERTISING
“They took celebrities who had been famous and were now old, and they moved them into this house for a week that had been redecorated to look like the ‘60s, and played music from that era. It was like they threw their walking sticks away,” he says.
Although Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) spend most of their time in the virtual-reality resort of San Junipero in an ‘80s-themed setting, some other eras are briefly glimpsed. Inside Black Mirror contains concept art for how the main arcade/bar would look in different decades — see some of those pictures below. At one point, Brooker even wanted them to travel to the ‘20s and play with some flapper fashions, but it was the ‘80s setting that captured director Owen Harris’ imagination. Among other things, it allowed the episode’s creative team to complicate the typical optimism of ‘80s-centric nostalgia.
“By setting it in that period, we could do a same-sex story in which they get married, which wouldn’t have been legally possible then,” Brooker says. “That’s another thing i’m surprised doesn’t get picked up on more.”
Penguin Random House.
Penguin Random House
Penguin Random House
“15 Million Merits” (Season 1, Episode 2)
An early highlight of the show’s initial run, “15 Million Merits” painted a portrait of a dystopian future society in which most people live a drab, proletarian existence of physical labor, but are fine with it because the harder they work the more “merits” they get to spend on personal entertainment. It’s never grabbed as many headlines as its pig-centric predecessor “The National Anthem,” but it was always meant to be a different kind of episode.
“That’s one I still think gets slightly overlooked,” Brooker says. “It was very deliberate how we rolled the series out. We went from ‘The National Anthem,’ which had this outrageous darkly comic premise, to this very, very stylized world in our second episode. It was meant to be a slightly dreamlike world we’re creating. We don’t explain much about what’s going on there, we never explain exactly what this world is. Some people think it’s a prison. Are they underground? Are they in space? You don’t know.”
In addition to its skill at predicted technological developments, Black Mirror also has a knack for casting actors who go on to achieve stardom. “15 Million Merits,” for instance, stars Daniel Kaluuya, who has since earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his lead performance in Get Out and appeared in other critically-acclaimed films like Black Panther and Widows. In fact, his work on Black Mirrorapparently led directly to his other achievements.
“When it comes to Daniel, when we saw his audition it was a bit of a no-brainer,” Brooker says. “It’s a very tricky part because for the first 15-20 minutes he hardly says anything, he’s sort of depressed. When he comes to that big speech at the end where he has this huge explosion and rails against everything in that world, he was so incredible in that scene, such a towering performance, that I remember thinking, ‘As soon as anyone sees this, surely this guy will get snapped up by everyone.’ I was waiting for that, and then it felt like it didn’t quite happen; he was in Sicario and working, but I thought he was a leading man. And then I remember seeing the trailer for Get Out like, ‘Oh my god it’s Daniel!’ I later discovered later that it was because Jordan Peele had seen him in ‘15 Million Merits’ that he was cast in Get Out. That was like, oh that’s good. Obviously he would have got there on his own because he’s such a talent, but it’s very gratifying that was literally the thing Jordan Peele saw that made him go, who is this guy? That’s brilliant, and it was born out, because how f—ing good was he in Get Out? He’s just an exceptional talent.”
“Black Museum” (Season 4, Episode 6)
Brooker credits the show’s casting directors and the anthology format itself for the show’s ability to give “fairly meaty roles” to either promising newcomers or accomplished veterans without worrying about long-term commitments. The final episode of season 4, for instance, featured Letitia Wright before anyone had gotten the chance to see her star-making performance in Black Panther.
“She did an audition for us, and there was this voice reading lines off camera that she was responding to,” Brooker recalls. “It was an American accent, but Annabel and I were going, ‘We recognize that voice, where is that voice from?’ And it was Daniel Kaluuya! He was reading off-camera for her, and the character he was reading was American so he was doing his U.S. accent, and they were just doing it in her trailer for Black Panther. We got her just in time, because now she’s much more in demand.”
Although guest contributors have always been a part of Black Mirror, the switch to Netflix in recent seasons has also opened the show up to even more outside voices. Inside Black Mirror talks about how Parks and Recreation showrunner Mike Schur and actress Rashida Jones helped write the season 3 opener “Nosedive” (in which a woman becomes consumed with boosting her crowd-sourced rating on an app), while Jodie Foster directed the season 4 episode “Arkangel” (about a mother installing parental control technology into her daughter’s brain). Brooker says celebrity magician Penn Jillette also contributed to “Black Museum.”
“Now that we’re on Netflix, we have a big profile, so we’re in the very lucky position where sometimes people are coming to us and saying ‘I’d like to be in your show’ or ‘I’d like to work on your show,’” Brooker says. “Like, Penn Jillette came up with a story idea for one of the things we did in ‘Black Museum.’ Sometimes there are slightly odd places these things come from. That was quite unexpected, and I ended up basing the Rolo Haynes character in the episode on the way he speaks, as a result.”
“Metalhead” (Season 4, Episode 5)
The terrifying, multi-purpose robotic “dog” that chases Maxine Peake’s character through the black-and-white wasteland of this season 4 standout bears more than a little resemblance to the real-life robots being developed by Boston Dynamics (and the new book gives an inside look at how the show’s producers developed their version of the robot). In this case, Black Mirror hasn’t predicted the basic technology at work, but one thing “Metalhead” keys into is changing attitudes around new technology.
“The general view has shifted,” Brooker says. “If you watched a video of a Boston Dynamics robot 10 years ago, you’d have gone, ‘That’s awesome!’ But now there’s all sorts of other things in your head and it’s like, ‘Hang on a minute.’ It’s gonna have ears like an Echo that can hear everything I say, and it’s gonna have built-in facial recognition, and some Russian bots will probably be controlling it.”
Brooker, though, is actually encouraged by this increased caution.
“As a species we tend to learn from making mistakes,” he says. “I think we’re currently on a transitional period where we’re starting to question, hang on a minute, am I hooked on this phone? How can I believe what I’m reading? Am I being myself on the internet? I think we’re seeing the pitfalls, which hopefully means we’ll get better at using it, because this technology isn’t going away. Hopefully we’re becoming more conscious and mindful of what we’re doing. It’s a bit like someone who’s been binge-eating ice cream for 10 years going, ‘Hold on, my waistline is expanding here.’ It doesn’t mean you stop eating ice cream, you just think a bit more carefully about how you consume it. That’s my hope anyway. You look at some of the stuff that’s going on now and it’s hard to see how we steer through it. I don’t know; we never present answers to stuff on the show, because we don’t have any.”
Laurie Sparham/Netflix; Inset: Eric Charbonneau/REX/Shutterstock
Black Mirror
Show Details
TYPE
TV Show
GENRE
Sci-fi
NETWORK
Netflix
Get the Latest on TV, Movies, Music and More.
A Daily Digest of News That Matters. Delivered Straight to Your Inbox.
CHRISTIAN HOLUB
November 20, 2018 at 06:06 PM EST
Each product we feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. If you make a purchase using the links included, we may earn commission.
In just a few short years, Black Mirror has become the pop-culture prophet of our times. The anthology show’s stories about the unforeseen dangers of technology at first seemed out of step with the dominant optimistic worldview that smartphones and social media would save humanity. But now that we’ve had time to realize the addictiveness of phones and social media companies’ growing power over our personal data (power that is perhaps being wielded unethically), the Black Mirror view of technology’s dangers feels increasingly relevant.
The new book Inside Black Mirror, out this week from Penguin Random House, tells the behind-the-scenes story of the show and its unintended prophecies. Featuring interviews with co-showrunners Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, as well as a host of various cast and crew members, the book goes in-depth on each episode of the show and how concepts made it from page to screen.
“It’s a big team effort, and I think it’s useful for fans of the show and people interested in writing to see how the process works,” Brooker tells EW. “Some people probably think the show is created by some furrow-browed Unabomber types who despise all technology and want to live in a wooden box. It’s not that all, we’re quite self-deprecating, I think we’ve got a good sense of humor and we’re goofy.”
Ahead of the book’s release this week, EW caught up with Brooker to discuss stories and revelations from a few specific episodes.
Penguin Random House; Andrew H Walker/Variety/REX/Shutterstock
“San Junipero” (Season 3, Episode 4)
This season 3 standout has been justly celebrated for its sci-fi same-sex romance story with a happy ending, but Brooker says he’s surprised more people don’t comment on the fact that the protagonists are actually old women in a virtual reality simulator. That’s key to the whole thing; in fact, the episode was actually inspired by Brooker’s viewing of a 2010 BBC documentary called The Young Ones.
ADVERTISING
“They took celebrities who had been famous and were now old, and they moved them into this house for a week that had been redecorated to look like the ‘60s, and played music from that era. It was like they threw their walking sticks away,” he says.
Although Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) spend most of their time in the virtual-reality resort of San Junipero in an ‘80s-themed setting, some other eras are briefly glimpsed. Inside Black Mirror contains concept art for how the main arcade/bar would look in different decades — see some of those pictures below. At one point, Brooker even wanted them to travel to the ‘20s and play with some flapper fashions, but it was the ‘80s setting that captured director Owen Harris’ imagination. Among other things, it allowed the episode’s creative team to complicate the typical optimism of ‘80s-centric nostalgia.
“By setting it in that period, we could do a same-sex story in which they get married, which wouldn’t have been legally possible then,” Brooker says. “That’s another thing i’m surprised doesn’t get picked up on more.”
Penguin Random House.
Penguin Random House
Penguin Random House
“15 Million Merits” (Season 1, Episode 2)
An early highlight of the show’s initial run, “15 Million Merits” painted a portrait of a dystopian future society in which most people live a drab, proletarian existence of physical labor, but are fine with it because the harder they work the more “merits” they get to spend on personal entertainment. It’s never grabbed as many headlines as its pig-centric predecessor “The National Anthem,” but it was always meant to be a different kind of episode.
“That’s one I still think gets slightly overlooked,” Brooker says. “It was very deliberate how we rolled the series out. We went from ‘The National Anthem,’ which had this outrageous darkly comic premise, to this very, very stylized world in our second episode. It was meant to be a slightly dreamlike world we’re creating. We don’t explain much about what’s going on there, we never explain exactly what this world is. Some people think it’s a prison. Are they underground? Are they in space? You don’t know.”
In addition to its skill at predicted technological developments, Black Mirror also has a knack for casting actors who go on to achieve stardom. “15 Million Merits,” for instance, stars Daniel Kaluuya, who has since earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his lead performance in Get Out and appeared in other critically-acclaimed films like Black Panther and Widows. In fact, his work on Black Mirrorapparently led directly to his other achievements.
“When it comes to Daniel, when we saw his audition it was a bit of a no-brainer,” Brooker says. “It’s a very tricky part because for the first 15-20 minutes he hardly says anything, he’s sort of depressed. When he comes to that big speech at the end where he has this huge explosion and rails against everything in that world, he was so incredible in that scene, such a towering performance, that I remember thinking, ‘As soon as anyone sees this, surely this guy will get snapped up by everyone.’ I was waiting for that, and then it felt like it didn’t quite happen; he was in Sicario and working, but I thought he was a leading man. And then I remember seeing the trailer for Get Out like, ‘Oh my god it’s Daniel!’ I later discovered later that it was because Jordan Peele had seen him in ‘15 Million Merits’ that he was cast in Get Out. That was like, oh that’s good. Obviously he would have got there on his own because he’s such a talent, but it’s very gratifying that was literally the thing Jordan Peele saw that made him go, who is this guy? That’s brilliant, and it was born out, because how f—ing good was he in Get Out? He’s just an exceptional talent.”
“Black Museum” (Season 4, Episode 6)
Brooker credits the show’s casting directors and the anthology format itself for the show’s ability to give “fairly meaty roles” to either promising newcomers or accomplished veterans without worrying about long-term commitments. The final episode of season 4, for instance, featured Letitia Wright before anyone had gotten the chance to see her star-making performance in Black Panther.
“She did an audition for us, and there was this voice reading lines off camera that she was responding to,” Brooker recalls. “It was an American accent, but Annabel and I were going, ‘We recognize that voice, where is that voice from?’ And it was Daniel Kaluuya! He was reading off-camera for her, and the character he was reading was American so he was doing his U.S. accent, and they were just doing it in her trailer for Black Panther. We got her just in time, because now she’s much more in demand.”
Although guest contributors have always been a part of Black Mirror, the switch to Netflix in recent seasons has also opened the show up to even more outside voices. Inside Black Mirror talks about how Parks and Recreation showrunner Mike Schur and actress Rashida Jones helped write the season 3 opener “Nosedive” (in which a woman becomes consumed with boosting her crowd-sourced rating on an app), while Jodie Foster directed the season 4 episode “Arkangel” (about a mother installing parental control technology into her daughter’s brain). Brooker says celebrity magician Penn Jillette also contributed to “Black Museum.”
“Now that we’re on Netflix, we have a big profile, so we’re in the very lucky position where sometimes people are coming to us and saying ‘I’d like to be in your show’ or ‘I’d like to work on your show,’” Brooker says. “Like, Penn Jillette came up with a story idea for one of the things we did in ‘Black Museum.’ Sometimes there are slightly odd places these things come from. That was quite unexpected, and I ended up basing the Rolo Haynes character in the episode on the way he speaks, as a result.”
“Metalhead” (Season 4, Episode 5)
The terrifying, multi-purpose robotic “dog” that chases Maxine Peake’s character through the black-and-white wasteland of this season 4 standout bears more than a little resemblance to the real-life robots being developed by Boston Dynamics (and the new book gives an inside look at how the show’s producers developed their version of the robot). In this case, Black Mirror hasn’t predicted the basic technology at work, but one thing “Metalhead” keys into is changing attitudes around new technology.
“The general view has shifted,” Brooker says. “If you watched a video of a Boston Dynamics robot 10 years ago, you’d have gone, ‘That’s awesome!’ But now there’s all sorts of other things in your head and it’s like, ‘Hang on a minute.’ It’s gonna have ears like an Echo that can hear everything I say, and it’s gonna have built-in facial recognition, and some Russian bots will probably be controlling it.”
Brooker, though, is actually encouraged by this increased caution.
“As a species we tend to learn from making mistakes,” he says. “I think we’re currently on a transitional period where we’re starting to question, hang on a minute, am I hooked on this phone? How can I believe what I’m reading? Am I being myself on the internet? I think we’re seeing the pitfalls, which hopefully means we’ll get better at using it, because this technology isn’t going away. Hopefully we’re becoming more conscious and mindful of what we’re doing. It’s a bit like someone who’s been binge-eating ice cream for 10 years going, ‘Hold on, my waistline is expanding here.’ It doesn’t mean you stop eating ice cream, you just think a bit more carefully about how you consume it. That’s my hope anyway. You look at some of the stuff that’s going on now and it’s hard to see how we steer through it. I don’t know; we never present answers to stuff on the show, because we don’t have any.”
I just watched the Waldo episode recently.
If you read the reviews on The AV Club, the responses are so different if you sort them by oldest and read them contemporaneously vs by newest and reading them post-Trump.
https://tv.avclub.com/black-mirror-the-waldo-moment-1798179015
Everyone thought it was unrealistic in 2013 that Waldo could play the spoiler. Now people watch it and think it was short-sighted that Waldo winning was ruled out.
If you read the reviews on The AV Club, the responses are so different if you sort them by oldest and read them contemporaneously vs by newest and reading them post-Trump.
https://tv.avclub.com/black-mirror-the-waldo-moment-1798179015
Everyone thought it was unrealistic in 2013 that Waldo could play the spoiler. Now people watch it and think it was short-sighted that Waldo winning was ruled out.
Lol, I still haven't watched the movies
The Black Mirror Creators Made a 2020 Mockumentary for Netflix
By Megh Wright@megh_wright
Like most of us, the creators of Black Mirror wish a swift and painful death to the year 2020, and they’ve decided to channel that energy into a new comedy project for Netflix. The streaming network teased an upcoming release today titled Death to 2020, which is from Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones. The clip doesn’t reveal much aside from describing Death to 2020 as a “comedy event” that they’re “still making,” plus a cast that includes Samuel L. Jackson, Hugh Grant, Lisa Kudrow, Kumail Nanjiani, Tracey Ullman, Samson Kayo, Leslie Jones, Diane Morgan, Cristin Milioti, and Joe Keery.
In a recent interview with Vulture, however, Hugh Grant revealed that the project is a mockumentary in which he plays a “repellent” historian being interviewed about this year. Per Deadline, the press release for the special describes it as “a comedy event that tells the story of the dreadful year that was — and perhaps still is? This landmark documentary-style special weaves together some of the world’s most (fictitious) renowned voices with real-life archival footage spanning the past 12 months.” A release date hasn’t been announced yet, but considering there are only three more weeks left in this hell year, count on seeing whatever this thing is sooner rather than later.
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