Everything was quiet for Charlie Brooker’s horror tech landmark series Black Mirror since the cut, fifth season of three episodes aired on Netflix in 2019. The interactive film of the series Black Mirror: Bandersnatch briefly caused a sensation in 2018, but it’s been a long time since the series had the impact it had back on the glory days of the 2016 favorite episodes of “San Junipero” and “Nosedive”, much more the shock value it had when the series premiered for the first time with the intense political satire “The National Anthem” in 2011.
Variety reports now that a sixth season of the series is underway on Netflix, which has been done Black Mirroris his home since 2016. It also offers some information on why season 6 was delayed – Brooker and creative partner Annabel Jones left their old production company and it took some time to regain the rights that would allow them to continue Black Mirror. The commercial did not cite specific sources, but says that a season 6 is currently in the cast, that it will have more episodes than season 5, and that it will be larger, with each installment being “treated as a stand-alone movie.”
This wording leaves plenty of room for compensation. Black Mirror The episodes were always “treated” as individual films, each creating a different world. Usually, the episodes take place in the future with some new technology that is a repetition of familiar technology from our time, such as. “Dive”society evaluation systems or “Metalhead”‘s killer hunter-robot, based Boston Dynamic dog-boots. But if this excerpt represents a more literal approach, with longer episodes, it might be just that. Black Mirror must remain relevant.
When the series was first released in 2011, it was considered extremely ambitious, given how extreme and well-crafted some of its bleak future visions were. But no matter how unique and well-watched the individual episodes were, the series began to suffer from a sense of repetition, with each new dose finding elements of horror in a key piece of technology. Writer Daniel Mallory Ortberg gathered criticism of the series in a devastating tweet: “What if the phones, but too many?” (The account associated with this tweet is gone now, but incorporate the thought into one equally discarding piece for Toast.)
With so many horror movies copying Black MirrorThe specific tone and the individual approach of the technology “Everything new will kill you”. Black Mirror The episodes started to look more or less stale and intimate to be scary and scary as they were the best. Brooker has since moved in a more positive direction – his most recent work on Netflix was special comedy Death in 2020 and the silly interactive cartoon Cat burglar. But if he returns to Black Mirrormovie-length episodes can give him time to get more miles away from the world building that has always been the series’ strongest costume, and spend more time creating characters, which is often the weakest.
The biggest problem with many Black Mirror episodes is that they often get a Twilight Zone approach, based on an oppressive atmosphere and reversals of a third act. But a more character-oriented approach, based on how real people navigate Black Mirror Problems, instead of paying full attention to the problems themselves, could give the series new strength and life. Bandersnatch is innovative in the ways it uses the adventure options you choose yourself, but it also tells a more complete story (or series of stories, depending on how you “play it”) than most Black Mirror episodes, and is a possible model for depth a Black Mirror the story could go on.
Admittedly, this still leaves Brooker and his writers competing with these genres. Black Mirror copy movies that have multiplied since the series was released – Without friends and its continuation, Spree, Incubation, and so on. But there is always room to get the genre right and a more extensive palette can help.
No release date has been announced yet Black Mirror season 6.
