When the British television series “Black Mirror” first debuted in 2011, it drew in viewers with its techno “Twilight Zone” vibes. Here was a dark, ultramodern anthology series that harnessed all of our technological anxieties and spun them into twisted parables on the relationship between man and machine. But over the past two seasons — and its wildly popular second life on Netflix — the show’s cult appeal has proved deeper than its digital gimmickry. Its stories are grounded close to home, in the very near future. The result is a human drama (and sometimes, satire) that feels considerably more visceral, immediate and human than your old-fashioned dystopian nightmare.

On Friday, Oct. 21, “Black Mirror” returns after nearly two years with six new sci-fi scenarios. For its third season, the show has left the British network Channel 4 and gone directly to Netflix’s global streaming platform, where it plays with an expanded budget, an extended episode run (six per season instead of the original three) and a trove of new technological inspirations, including augmented reality games and Twitter death threats. In a phone conversation earlier this month, the show’s creator, Charlie Brooker, and his longtime collaborator Annabel Jones talked about getting the audience to take a leap of faith, watching tech companies seemingly jump on their fictional ideas and their construction of one of the show’s most iconic episodes — “Be Right Back,” in which a grieving woman’s dead husband is resurrected in the form of a new artificial intelligence product that scans the deceased’s phone records and social feeds to mimic his voice (and eventually, his physical presence). These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Let’s talk about “Be Right Back.” What was the germ of the idea for that episode?

CHARLIE BROOKER One night I was up late, checking social media, and I thought: “What if none of these people were real? How would I know?” I’d been reading a bit about artificial intelligence, as well. Eliza, one of the first artificial intelligence programs, only did very simple things, like ask “How are you feeling today?” And if you said, “I’m a bit blue,” it would say, “What is it about blue that is making you feel blue?” But it was amazing how quickly people would drop their guard, even though they knew full well it was a computer program. Those two things came together, and I wrote it in the middle of the night, over a couple of nights.

How did you decide that his presence needed to jump from the device and into a human form?

BROOKER It sort of mirrors online dating, what happens in this story. She starts off swapping written exchanges with this person, then that graduates to talking on the phone, and then he turns up in the flesh. And sure enough, he isn’t all he promised to be.