Black Mirror: The National Anthem

A refreshing sense of enthusiasm attends this series from Charlie Brooker. Not because it reinvents the Twilight Zone milieu but because it offers provocative drama with ample doses of dark comedy and a sense of the foreboding that accompanies our rapid embrace of technologies offering instant everything — notably communication, gratification and recall.

Imaginative and edgy: Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror is made up of three self-contained episodes.

Social advances created by technology often contain the seeds of dystopian social elements. In most aspects of life, there's an equilibrium in which gain, accepted without question, conceals potential losses. We expeditiously ignore the downside for the up. OK, I'm a Luddite, reluctant to compromise my privacy or rely on gadgets promising sugarplum notions of individuality.

Black Mirror — comprising three self-contained episodes — is a provocative journey through a glass darkly, reflecting the repercussions that might flow from the surrender of restraint to ambrosian algorithms.