Hearth and home are also at the center of “Playtest,” the episode that was being filmed at Harpsden Court, which Brooker characterized as a “horror romp” in the vein of “Evil Dead 2.” In the episode, Cooper, a young American backpacker, played by Wyatt Russell, is stranded in London, the last stop on a round-the-world trip, after his credit card is hacked. To earn money for a plane ticket back to the U.S., he responds to an online ad posted by a video-game company to test a new “interactive augmented reality system” that uses a neural implant called a “mushroom” to generate audiovisual hallucinations based on the user’s deepest fears. Brooker spends the opening minutes establishing his protagonist’s troubled family history. Cooper’s father has recently died after a descent into Alzheimer’s, and his relationship with his mother is strained. Early one morning, he gathers his bags and tiptoes down the stairs of his childhood home so as not to wake her. It is typical of Brooker’s grimly ironic narrative sensibility that Cooper’s escapism should bring him to a technologically enhanced haunted house, a dark parody of home.

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At Harpsden Court, someone called out, “Quiet, please! The time is nigh!” Brooker and Jones put on their headphones and huddled around the video monitors, which stood in front of an open fireplace. In the scene, Russell is slouched against a four-poster bed, pleading with two members of the video-game company to turn off the augmented-reality system. Earlier, Brooker had suggested that Russell play the scene with even greater abandon than he had in previous takes; he wanted to insure that his frenzy was commensurate with the ghastly situation in which he found himself. As Russell took another stab at it—“Stop!” he howled repeatedly, his voice at full stretch, while two impassive musclemen lugged him away—Brooker flexed his eyebrows and winced. This seemed to signal approval.

Brooker grew up a Quaker in the small Oxfordshire village of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, a short drive from Harpsden Court. His father was a social worker. His mother worked at a gift shop; her parents were actively involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Brooker speaks of certain shows from his childhood as though he were yet to recover from them. A 1982 episode of “Q.E.D.,” the BBC’s popular science program, explored what would happen if a one-megaton nuclear bomb exploded over St. Paul’s Cathedral, in central London. In the episode, the viewer sees a map of the city, a large portion of it shaded red, while a matter-of-fact narrator tells us, “Everywhere inside this seven-mile radius—for example, at the shops in Holland Park Avenue—the effect on directly exposed flesh is the same: it behaves like the meat in the butcher’s window.” The film cuts to time-lapse footage of fat oozing off a strung-up pig carcass.

“I still sort of expect to die in a nuclear holocaust,” Brooker told me over lunch, which we ate on the ground floor of a double-decker dining trailer for the cast and crew a few fields over from Harpsden Court. “I think that’s where the pessimism comes from,” he continued. “I remember a history teacher who taught us a whole lesson and then at the end said, ‘It doesn’t matter anyway, ’cause we’ll all blow ourselves up.’ I was like, ‘Oh right, thanks. Does that mean I don’t have to do the exam?’ ”

Brooker’s video-game habit was inaugurated one afternoon in the late seventies during a trip to the local swimming pool, where he encountered his first arcade machine. “The notion that you could control what was on the screen was just magical,” he told me. Even when he didn’t have enough money, he would move the joystick as he watched a game’s demo and persuade himself that he was playing. “I don’t think that feeling ever really went away,” he said. “I have to buy every new games console that comes out.”

In 1999, Brooker was introduced to one of his heroes, Chris Morris, the creator of the spoof current-affairs programs “The Day Today” and “Brass Eye,” which many consider a high-water mark of British television comedy. Morris, an admirer of TVGoHome, was especially taken with the recurring character Nathan Barley, “an upper-middle-class London media prickhole” whose day-to-day activities—networking, d.j.ing at pubs, getting overpriced haircuts—form the basis of a fly-on-the-wall documentary series. Morris proposed to Brooker that they turn Barley and the vacuous new-media scene he exemplified into a sitcom.

“Nathan Barley,” which Brooker described as feeling “a bit like sci-fi at the time,” now appears to have been the R. & D. department for “Black Mirror.” Gadgets abound; Barley’s cell phone, the Wasp T-12, which can also function as a camera, a projector, and a set of “MP3 decks,” predates the first iPhone by a couple of years. “It’s got apps, only they’re physical,” Brooker said. “We hadn’t thought these things were going to be on the screen.” Working on the series, he recalled, he and Morris would have “conversations that lasted for ages about the typeface on a poster in the background.”

As showrunner on “Black Mirror,” Brooker is similarly scrupulous. The believability of each episode depends on maintaining the complex internal logic of its dystopic world, so he watches for the kinds of inconsistencies that can be unwittingly introduced during filming and editing. In “Playtest,” an employee of the video-game company assures Cooper that the spectres he sees during the trial are merely holograms and can’t harm him, a claim that comes to seem increasingly suspect. During a fight scene between him and a woman who may or may not be a hallucination, a bottle of wine is knocked to the floor. Brooker, Jones, and Dan Trachtenberg, the episode’s director, pondering the levels of reality to which different props and characters belonged, discussed at length whether the bottle would shatter. (They eventually ruled that it would.) In “San Junipero,” another new episode that involves simulated reality, two characters are caught in a downpour. As filming got under way, Brooker began to doubt whether it would rain at all in this particular world. He spent a week and a half debating the point with the director before conceding that he was “just being a prick about it.”

Brooker was determined to make the devices and screens and interfaces used in “Black Mirror” seem authentic. “In Hollywood, if the hero receives an e-mail there’ll be a giant animation of a fucking envelope spinning around,” he said. “We try to avoid those kinds of histrionic computers.” In “Be Right Back,” the episode about the software for the bereaved, the female protagonist, whose husband has recently died in a car accident, receives an e-mail from an online bookseller with the subject line “Martha, people in your position bought the following.” When she opens it, the message shows an array of grief-counselling books, each accompanied by customer reviews. We glimpse the screen, and Martha’s irritated response to it, for only a second. (In the future world of the episode, deleting an e-mail simply requires making a fist in the air and opening your hand again, as though crumpling up a piece of paper and tossing it away.) But the vignette stands for an accumulation of such intrusive moments—the death of solitude by a thousand digital cuts.