“It’s the ultimate commentary on shit television by virtue of being head and shoulders above everything else,” she wrote in an e-mail.
It’s like The Twilight Zone, only rated R.” Zadie Smith considers it one of the best things to appear on British TV in decades. On Twitter, Stephen King described “Black Mirror” as “terrifying, funny, intelligent. (The deal was reportedly worth forty million dollars.) “Black Mirror” answers to a mood of global unease about the breakneck pace of technological development Brooker’s audience already knows what it is like to witness the sudden arrival of the future-or, as he put it in his weekly column for the Guardian, to recognize how “nuts-deep into the future we already are.” Last month, on the day the third season was released, a cyberattack crashed several popular Web sites, including Spotify, Reddit, and Netflix. Last year, Brooker and his longtime collaborator Annabel Jones signed a contract with Netflix to make twelve new episodes. streaming rights for the first two seasons. The show, which first aired in Britain, on Channel 4, in 2011, became an international hit, with licensing rights sold in more than ninety territories.
What if people had a microchip embedded in their necks that recorded their lives and allowed them to replay memories at will? What if there was a software program that enabled a bereaved person to communicate with a lost loved one by creating an avatar using the deceased’s digital footprint? What if an Anonymous-style group of hacktivists began blackmailing members of the public with unsavory snippets of their Internet browsing history? What if a popular cartoon character, controlled by an actor at the helm of a live-motion-capture system, successfully ran for Parliament on an anti-establishment platform? Others entertain unsettling day-after-tomorrow hypotheses. Some episodes use existing technologies as the basis for their nightmare scenarios. As an anthology show, it is made up of stand-alone episodes, each featuring its own fictional world and cast of characters. Like TVGoHome, “Black Mirror” is powered by an engine of speculative dread.
Seventeen years later, it is hard not to see the Web site, which Brooker retired in 2002, as the prototype for “Black Mirror,” his acclaimed and eerily clairvoyant series about the unintended consequences of technological innovation. The creator of the most amusing sketch is slowly fellated by a prostitute with a mouthful of honey, while the loser parachutes into the middle of the raging battle below armed with only a dustbin lid, a clockwork pistol, and a webcam glued to his forehead.īritain has always been fond of its cranks and cynics, and soon TVGoHome was drawing more than a hundred thousand readers a month. Troublesome teenagers strapped arm, leg and hip to their fathers in order to feel his erection rousing against them as he is shown wild pornography over their shoulder.Įdge-of-the-seat gameshow in which two ageing bachelors are flown over an African warzone and commanded to draw a cartoon goose on the back of a shovel with a lump of coal. Hilarious hidden-camera action as insular nerds spend weeks being led up the garden path by sophisticated androids posing as attractive women, secretly wired to explode as soon as the word “love” is spoken. Once, after a breakup, he turned his set on its side so he could watch while lying down. Marooned on his sofa “like a woozy sea lion,” he spent weeks at a time scowling at the reality shows, talent competitions, and celebrity vehicles that were beginning to dominate Britain’s programming. “ ‘I’ve got these coloring-in books, and I color things in.’ ” He wanted to write for television, but was hampered by self-doubt. “They’d look at you like you’d said, ‘I do coloring in,’ ” he once told a reporter. At parties, it was an ordeal to explain how he earned a living.
But Brooker, a gaming addict who’d left Westminster University without a degree, was feeling directionless. Among other items, he contributed a regular comic strip about video-game culture, “Cybertwats,” and a back-page column, “Sick Notes,” in which he would solicit hate mail from subscribers and respond in kind.
He’d spent most of his twenties freelancing for PC Zone, a little-read gaming magazine, where he was able to indulge his obscene and misanthropic sense of humor. In 1999, at the age of twenty-eight, Charlie Brooker, the British satirist who is now a television auteur, was at a low ebb.