Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has revealed that his hit dystopian series will return with a “slight reset”.
After a four-year hiatus, it was announced in April that the hit anthology show would be coming out with a brand new season six.
In an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times, Brooker said he was ready to shake things up a bit after admitting he’d become a “bit bored” with his original formula.
“There are so many dystopian shows out there that are a bit Black Mirror-y, none of which I will watch because I get crushing professional jealousy and I’ll get annoyed,” he said, name-dropping Westworld.
“I didn’t want to be just hitting the same premises over and over again. Like, ‘What if this app ruined your life?’ Or, ‘Oh look! It turns out you’re in virtual reality.’ So there was a slight reset.”
The upcoming season, which welcomes a slew of new faces including Aaron Paul, Anjana Vasan, Annie Murphy, Auden Thornton, Ben Barnes, Clara Rugaard, Daniel Portman, Danny Ramirez, Himesh Patel and John Hannah, will see Brooker again take aim at his original target – television.
He shared that the episode titled “Joan Is Awful”, featuring Schitt’s Creek star Murphy, was inspired by a particular scene from Hulu’s miniseries The Dropout.
“Amanda Seyfried was playing Elizabeth Holmes and there was a bit where it shows her dancing to music,” he recalled.
“I thought, ‘That would be so weird if you’re Elizabeth Holmes watching this.’ They don’t know she did that, they just made that up as a sort of goofy character thing. If you’re Elizabeth Holmes that would be as disturbing as being exposed for all the terrible con tricks you’ve been pulling off. And that would really bug me.
“So ‘Joan Is Awful’ is about what has happened to Joan today being turned into a drama starring a Hollywood star. It literally goes up to the point of the Hollywood star putting on the TV and pressing play on a show called Joan Is Awful in her own home.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Brooker claimed that Channel 4 “effectively cancelled” the series before Netflix came in and swooped it up.
“When feedback came, we were told they weren’t very Black Mirror and they were no longer going to allocate the money for four episodes,” the showrunner said.
Executive co-producer Annabel Jones added: “We were trying to get a meeting to discuss why these ideas weren’t Black Mirror, so we could attempt to understand what the concern was.
“Given the show had won lots of awards and had been really positively received on the whole, it was strange. I think there wasn’t any clarity from the channel. We also felt unchampioned.”
Black Mirror season six premieres on Netflix in June.
