To my three or four tumblr followers, and to my few Facebook friends who would actually read something I write about a TV show they haven’t seen, I have to tell you something. And that is: “Holy shit, you should watch Black Mirror.” It’s a Channel 4 show that airs only on DirecTv in America. So that means you should torrent it if you can’t find a good way to give money to the show. But whatever way you can watch it, you just SHOULD.

It’s an anthology show that is sort-of-maybe-kind-of-possibly-could-be-ok-obviously-it-is-inspired by The Twilight Zone. Every episode has a different premise and cast. It’s about modern technology and what can happen if we’re not careful with it in our present or future use. There are only two seasons so far. There are only three hour-long episodes per season. I’m writing in broken up sentences because I haven’t been so excited about a show in a long time, at least not one like this. That’s because there is only one other show that I know of on TV that is anything like Black Mirror, and it pales in comparison.

I’ve only watched the first season of American Horror Story. I thought the first season (which will be heretofore referred to by it’s post-mortem moniker Murder House) was fun, addictive, sexy, and totally heavy handed in every way. It’s a show that should be scary, but it can’t be too scary, because then it would scare away too many people. But alas! It’s an anthology show. If you don’t like this season, then the next season will be totally different, so you might end up liking just a chapter or two of American Horror Story. That means there has to be something distinctly different about the seasons, with loose style threads connecting them, all while trying to coax back previously disappointed viewers while maintaining your core viewership. And from what I’ve heard about AHS: Asylum, and AHS: Coven, not much has changed in terms of its scary-factor, and it’s still very much a Ryan Murphy production (if you didn’t know that he also created Glee and Nip/Tuck, now you do).

I will try Asylum when it gets on Netflix, for sure. Because despite the faults I think American Horror Story has, it is still so, so cool that an anthology show can be embraced by so many people, especially since the number of viewers has grown through its third season (I guarantee this is because of Murder House being on Netflix, but the snake fellatio might have had something to do with it too.) But if Asylum doesn’t do it for me, I won’t continue, because why should I watch a show with the word “horror” in its title when it does little to elicit that response?



Which is where Black Mirror comes in.

Black Mirror isn’t scary like Murder House was at points. There aren’t ghosts walking around. There isn’t a lot of bloody murders and rehashed Black Dahlias. It’s scary in a way that cuts straight to the bone, right before embedding itself there for hours. It doesn’t keep you awake at night because every bump you hear in the night could be death incarnate. It keeps you awake because somewhere, an alarm is set on a phone, and without that tiny little device, your whole world would be different, and it will never be the way it was before ever, ever again. And that thought will marinate in your brain all week as you look at screens, navigating your way through ones and zeroes. Every time you close your laptop or turn off your TV, you’ll think, “Good for you,” and for a few minutes you will do something in the world, uninhibited by the presence of the eponymous black mirror in your pocket, on your desk, on your wall. And then, like everyone else, you will return to it, and life will continue like you didn’t even leave.

Horrifying isn’t the best word to describe Black Mirror. Terrifying is a much better choice. From the first beat of the first season, creator Charlie Brooker does an excellent job at setting up the worlds he’s created with each new episode, despite the fact that we find ourselves in wildly different environments every hour. The first episode, The National Anthem, takes place in what must be present day London. There is no reason for the story to take place in the future, though ten years ago it would have made for a sly parable of where we could possibly end up “if things get out of hand.”

The story goes as such: A princess from the Royal Family (much like Kate Middleton) is taken prisoner, where she is forced to make a video for the Prime Minister. In it she gives the kidnapper’s ransom demand, which involves the PM personally. I can’t go any further in telling you what it is, because hearing it for the first time is such a delightful treat. I thought it would be something else, an old trope that I’m sure others will guess at, but Black Mirror impressed me in the first five minutes by setting up a demand so hilarious and fucked up that I definitely believed that someone would do it tomorrow. Watching the world react to the demand is very true-to-life, mimicking every major story that we’ve seen since twitter was invented: so-called journalists reciting the views of completely random people floating on the internet, who probably spend more time complaining about The Walking Dead than they do worrying about what the Prime Minister is up to.

In short, the hour descends from dark humor to extremely dark humor, humor so dark that it’s not funny at all; it’s “humorous” only because of its presentation of reality. Everything spirals to shit. Somewhere in the middle are sprinkles of hope for a different ending, but they are all obliterated by the storm that the kidnapper has thrust upon the world. I was afraid that the next two episodes would not hold up to the same standard, but again, Black Mirror surprised me.

The second episode, Fifteen Million Merits, is set in the probably-pretty-distant future, where humans are drones who ride stationary bikes so they can keep the lights on for the world, all while collecting “merits” for their deeds that will buy them food or subscriptions to porn websites or reality shows, or even skip a forced advertisement for a small fee. Their bedrooms are giant screens. Everyone has an avatar. Only the special people, who save enough merits, can get a chance to go on a reality show a la The X Factor, where they might be discovered, therefore giving them a chance to get off the bike forever, and live the life of a glorious celebrity, some of whom even have windows where they can look outside.

The first two episodes are biting commentaries, to state the obvious. If these premises were given to less talented individuals, the stories could seem hokey and heavy handed. Charlie Brooker is clearly an excellent puppet master though; for what his show lacks in subtext he makes up for in terrific acting, directing, production design, and the way the writers lay out rules of his worlds. That isn’t to say that Black Mirror shouts its morals at you, but the stories are critiquing things we have all been saying for years, things George Orwell, Rod Serling, and Ray Bradbury explored ages ago. The reason Black Mirror works is that these stories are presented slowly, surely, and confidently. It does not underestimate its audience’s intelligence, and if the ending can be guessed, fear not; watching it will be better than you could have ever imagined it being executed.

Its third episode, The Entire History of You, is a perfect example of how a tale as old as time can be freshly retold through great acting and concept design. The show, which just a week earlier, showed us the completely fluorescent dystopian future, pedals back to show us what actually looks like a pretty nice not-so-distant future. Every character we meet in this episode has a beautiful house, with great stuff and great people to fill it with. They all also have a camera embedded in their head, which records everything they do. They can rewind, replay, and save events for later to watch in their head, or with the tap of a fob, projected on a futuristic screen. They call this camera a “Grain,” which lives just behind their ear. This technology can do almost anything: zoom in, listen from afar, lip read, save endless amounts of video, and replay it a million times. It’s possible that past writers would have suggested that everyone was grained by force, but it’s quite the contrary. To be grained is elective, and it’s extremely popular. To get it removed is totally fine, though to do so could be frowned upon by the same types of people who might frown upon someone for deciding to ditch their cell phone in 2013. They can imagine what it’s like to live without it, they just don’t want to.

Most (but I hope all!) of us have been in romantic relationships, and that is directly where this episode lives. The implications of having this type of device are endless when it comes to our closest companions. Past arguments reexamined, old sex experiences re-lived, touching moments of love and impulsivity replayed as many times as you like. Jesse Armstrong, the writer of this episode and the co-creator of Peep Show, makes sure that we know how versatile the Grain is, and how many things it can show us that can change the way we see our world. What’s more impressive is all of the things it doesn’t show us that we are forced to imagine on our own. The legal world would be turned upside down, college lectures would all recorded and catalogued, no recipe or thing you have read is ever far away. Things are forgotten only for a second before your finger can swipe at the fob in your pocket that controls the Grain, making every second of your life a permanent eternity that can be referenced, catalogued, proved, and reviewed for evidence of your right or wrong-doing forever. There is no need for memory anymore. There is only recall.

The conflict and the conclusion of the episode is seen from a mile away, but again, the slow burn to the conclusion is too fun to watch to care about the predictability of the ending. After all, Armstrong gives us everything we need to know in the first ten minutes of the episode. The genius is that we only really start to see it all unfold after it’s rewinded and re-watched (a “re-do,” as the characters say). Watching re-dos of extremely personal moments is only made more uncomfortable by the fact that there is already something capable of this, and it’s called Google Glass. The future is already here, and there is no doubt that it will be used for these purposes. We have to ask ourselves what we would do. Would we want to be right so bad that we would give up ambiguity? Could you ever forgive someone completely, when what they did can be seen again not just on a screen, but exactly the way it was seen in your head?

Black Mirror succeeds in every way because of these questions. It’s the same reason that The Twilight Zone was so effective. Could you allow your neighbors to die so you could have enough rations in your bomb shelter? Would you sell your soul for a chance to prove that you’re the best at something? Do you really know your neighbors, and if so, do you trust them? (Bonus: How the fuck would you kill Talking Tina, and why didn’t you just use gasoline? Nothing survives fire!) Black Mirror bothers you every time you log into Facebook, and right now as I write this I am feeling slightly disgusted by just how many hours of my life were taken up today by screens. Tomorrow is another day, but I won’t change. Maybe Black Mirror knows that.

There isn’t much more than a glimmer of hope at the ending of these episodes, but it is still there. Maybe Charlie Brooker knows that the light at the end of the tunnel is far too small and too far away, and maybe he knows that even if you got there, the light wouldn’t be what you hoped it would be. Black Mirror isn’t telling us to be better people, to ditch our screens, to regress. I think more than anything it is asking us to think about time: how fast it goes when we wish we could stop it, how slow it drags when we wish it to be over, and which one of the these we’re feeling with every second we spend gazing into our black mirrors.

By Brad Moore

BLACK MIRROR is two series, with three hour-long episodes in each series. It airs on Channel 4 in the UK and exclusively on DirecTv in the US. The first series is available on Amazon, and the second series just wrapped up earlier this year. I haven’t watched the second series yet but I’m sure it’s fantastic.

I personally downloaded these episode through torrent sites, but as an aspiring content creator I would recommend that you try your best to find a way to somehow help give the show your money. Since this is very difficult, I won’t (and can’t) judge you for taking the illegal way out until they find a better way to distribute it. I have already looked up if there will be a third series: it hasn’t be ordered by Channel 4 yet, but Brooker says he has scripts he could use for a third series if they want it. I am pleading to the Gods that this happens.