Perhaps aptly for a show that is all about technology, Charlie Brooker’s quotes about the upcoming season of Black Mirror have been splashed all over the internet in these past weeks.
There’s been talk of Chat GPT, analyses of the upcoming season’s all-star cast (including Aaron Paul, Salma Hayek and Michael Cera among others) and even promises from Brooker to GQ Magazine, that fans can expect “some of the bleakest stories we’ve ever done.”
All of this, understandably, means that expectations are extra-high - and a lot of fans are eager to see what latest twisted stories Brooker’s mind has dreamed up. Perhaps this is why he tried to take the pressure off in the writers’ room by brainstorming ideas for a different show entirely: a show he dubs ‘Red Mirror’.
“That’s me putting a line in the sand and going, ‘I’m gonna think of some stories that are not to do with technology, it’s not set in the future; it’s set in the past,” Brooker explains.
“It’s like a sister brand, so to speak. And that’s a very good way of stopping yourself from trying to write what you think a Black Mirror episode is.”
Very meta. This new season of Red Mirror boasts episodes set in outer space, yes, but also period dramas (for lack of a better word) such as Mazey Day, where paparazzi stalk a starlet amid the ferocious celebrity culture of the Noughties. Or Demon 79, which transplants the action to a sleepy Yorkshire town in the Seventies (with the small addition of a demon): it’s a place that Brooker describes as an “alternative dystopian past”.
After a decade grappling with high-tech visions of the future, this switch in perspective was mainly due to Brooker’s experience of pandemic, which he describes as “a lot of staring at Zoom”.
“It felt like a lot of things plateaued a bit technology-wise, and I was keen to not fall into the trap of thinking I have to write about whatever’s in the Tech pages this week, because you end up having to write an episode about NFT’s,” he explains.
Instead, he turned to the small screen, drawing on his time spent watching true crime documentaries during lockdown to create a series that riffs heavily on television in all its forms. The first episode, Joan is Awful, sees an everyday media manager’s own life getting transplanted into a Netflix-esque TV series; in Loch Henry, a pair of aspiring documentary makers find themselves getting far more than they had bargained for as they unearth a local scandal.
These days, Black Mirror is bigger than ever: a far cry from the days when it occupied a small, niche slot on Channel 4. Its first ever episode The National Anthem, which aired in 2011, later led to the show going stratospheric after the infamous storyline – involving the Prime Minister being blackmailed into having sex with a pig, live on air – acquired eerie, modern-day parallels.
“I was sitting at my desk writing a Black Mirror episode, and my phone started going mad. And people were saying, Have you seen this? Have you seen this?” he says. It was a rumour about the then-Prime Minister David Cameron and a Bullingdon Club initiation ritual – which was quickly dubbed ‘Piggate’.
“At the time, it was one of the most joyous experiences anyone’s ever had on social media. For me, it was existentially terrifying, because I thought: ‘That’s too weird. That can’t be real. Therefore, none of this is real.’”
For a show that made its name commenting on society and technology from an outside perspective, is it now too mainstream?
The opposite, says Brooker. “I’d always tried and failed to be mainstream. So the difference between then and now, was [that] in my head, a lot of the stuff I was doing was really accessible and mainstream. Why wouldn’t people want to watch the story about a prime minister who’s blackmailed into fucking [a pig], what’s wrong with that?
“I think that the tenor of the episodes probably hasn’t actually changed as much as some people might think it has. It certainly got more exposure now. And it’s on a big global platform. Other than that, you can’t think about it too much, because you’d go mad.”
Brooker and his co-executive producer Jessica Rhoades insist that they don’t have a favourite episode out of the new season – as Rhoades says, “they’re all like your children, which is only to say that they are all a lot of work and energy at different times. But you have a favourite every other day.”
With Black Mirror now approaching its twelfth year on air, Brooker has given more than a decade of his life to the show – and with episodes including AI universes, sentient robot dolls, popularity rating apps and more, has writing it impacted his relationship with technology?
He says not. “I think I've always been geeky and fascinated by it, and I'm not anti technology,” he says. “I think it's a powerful tool, and it's just we the human idiots who misuse it occasionally.”
