It’s going to sound like typical Lauren hyperbole when I say that Black Mirror is the most important television show I’ve ever watched. But it isn’t exaggeration. I mean that.
Are y’all familiar with Charlie Brooker? I’m sure my British friends are. He’s a comedian—sort of—he’s extremely funny, but that isn’t his endgame. He’s a writer and a social commentator. He’s cynical and smart and has a TV show where he talks about TV and how it’s messed up society but he also loves TV. And in Black Mirror, he uses a TV show to ask huge, important questions and do it with really, really great style.
The show is…like The Twilight Zone for the 21st Century. It’s speculative fiction in its purest form—by which I mean built around speculation, asking “What if?” I actually can’t say much about it, because the best way to watch it is knowing next to nothing about it. But I can say that each episode is a stand-alone story, a mini-movie, and that the through-line of the show is the ‘black mirror’—the screens in our lives: TVs, computer screens, phone screens, whatever.
It’s a show about our relationship with technology, actually. A show about how we use technology and what our using it does to us and reveals about us. And it’s far and away the most disturbing show I’ve ever seen.
I am not usually a fan of disturbing. Too many creators use it as an end unto itself; they think ‘edgy’ means ‘important’ and so they make things as edgy as possible for its own sake. I hate that. But there is a way to craft stories that are disturbing because they have to be. Because they want us to think. Because there’s no other way to ask the questions we really need to ask, no other way to create the urgency that needs to be present in these conversations. And Black Mirror is so adept at doing that that I can’t think of another piece of art that even comes close.
And this is art: from a technical perspective, the show is flawless. Perfect casting, perfect acting, perfect production, perfect music use, perfect direction. It uses the potentialities of the television medium to the utmost degree. But what really makes the show so important (I keep using that word; if you watch it you’ll see why) is the content. It’s the ideas. Each episode takes one central idea (sometimes a very simple one) and fully explores one potential manifestation of it. That’s about all I can say without getting into spoiler territory.
I don’t recommend this show to everyone. If you’re the kind of person who prefers your media intake to be escapist or even just thought-provoking but not to this extent—and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that; we all use media for different reasons—then you will not want to watch this. You need to know going in that it’s going to upset you, and that every episode (except perhaps the last, which is definitely messed-up, but not as much so as the others) is…horrific.
But if you’re willing to go there, you should watch this. It’s available on DirecTV now, as well as findable on the internet, and I really invite those of you who are intrigued to check it out. I’m going to talk some more under a cut, but if you’re thinking of watching it DO NOT READ WHAT’S UNDER THE CUT. It will spoil you, and I have never, ever seen anything that would lose so much power by viewing it spoiled as this show. DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU THINK YOU MIGHT WATCH IT.
