October 21 sees the return of Charlie Brooker’s brilliant and sometimes-a-little-too-close-for-comfort Black Mirror. But, unlike The Great British Bake Off, the new series won’t be found on Channel 4. No, you’ll be wanting to head to Netflix for the third instalment of Brooker’s critically-acclaimed anthology. And this is a change Brooker sounds incredibly happy about.
“[Netflix is] the platform that anthology shows have been waiting for,” he explains. “Traditionally anthology shows find it difficult to survive on TV because you don’t have recurring characters and an overarching storyline. The Twilight Zone struggled in the ratings for much of its life. Because we can launch all six [episodes] at once it’s more like an album, or a short film festival, or a book of stories.” As executive producer Annabel Jones continues: “It’s a word-of-mouth show. People want to talk about it once they’ve seen it. Netflix is perfect for that.”
So what of the six new episodes that will be on offer next month? Will they be as nightmarish as White Bear? As tender as Be Right Back? Mackenzie Davis stars in San Junipero, a philosophically provocative California-set episode, Joe Wright directs Alice Eve and Bryce Dallas Howard in Nosedive, “a playful satire about social media insecurity”, and 10 Cloverfield Lane’s Dan Trachtenberg helms Playtest, a video game “horror romp” starring Wyatt Russell. Other episodes include a police procedural, a military thriller and “an unfolding contemporary nightmare” with no sci-fi element, according to Brooker.
“I think if you said to people, ‘Picture the first episode of the new series of Black Mirror’, they would imagine someone frowning at a see-through phone in the future with drone strikes going off behind them,” says Brooker. “Hopefully we’re keeping viewers on their toes so they don’t just think it’s someone having their life ruined by a phone. Although that happens, too.”
Black Mirror hits Netflix on 21 October.
Read more from Charlie Brooker in the next issue of Empire Magazine, on shelves Thursday 29 September.