So many movies, television series and books about the future posit postapocalyptic collapse and feral scavengers scuttling across a scorched landscape.

But there is a television series that takes a more confident view of what comes next. "Black Mirror," a British anthology series, is less about dystopia than mystopia � most of its stories are mysteries woven around the perils of digital progress and computer technology unbound.

It's a hypnotically enigmatic series that was first shown on DirecTV and has more recently become available on Netflix. "Black Mirror" was partly inspired by "The Twilight Zone," only there is no Rod Serling-like narrator to put some distance between the viewer and the screen, and that immediacy makes these vignettes all the more unnerving. The series creator, Charlie Brooker, also adds a hint of the black humor of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," most notably in the holiday special which ran on Christmas Day on DirecTV.

The episode is sardonically titled "White Christmas." It stars Jon Hamm of "Mad Men" and, needless to say, it does not offer seasonal merriment or a duet by Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. It's a chilling parable, well imagined and artfully told, and set in a future so familiar it's almost the present 2.0.

One of the more shocking episodes of "Black Mirror" was the first, which ran on Channel 4 in Britain in 2011, but it was an outlier that focused less on high-tech excess than on human nature and political expedience in the current mass-media age. The premise is satirical, or seems to be: A terrorist takes a princess hostage and demands that the prime minister of Britain have sex with a pig on live television. After a variety of blunders by the government, the media and law enforcement, the prime minister feels he has no choice but to comply.

The episode's power is in the way it pushes the cynical amusement of the British public � and that of the viewer � into actual distress and sorrow; the story shifts from farcical to chilling and then back again.

There aren't many successful anthology series on television at the moment, so one asset of "Black Mirror" is that it offers a digestible narrative form at a time when viewers are overwhelmed with many multiseason series they must keep up with, or fall behind and lose their place. "Black Mirror" is like a collection of short stories or a case of single-serve splits of Champagne: More is better, but one is sometimes enough.

The ravaging amorality of pop culture and mass media is a persistent theme � several episodes underscore the Orwellian potential of television and especially shows like "American Idol." (Brooker also made a miniseries, "Dead Set," in 2008, about a "Big Brother" reality series during a zombie apocalypse.) The satirical depiction of entertainment and news coverage is more familiar and heavy-handed. The better episodes pivot on wouldn't-it-be-great scenarios, picking a seemingly useful scientific advance and then playing out how it can go wrong.

In one, people can choose to be implanted with a device that gives them the ability to remember events perfectly and replay them in their minds like a home movie. (Good for finding car keys, not so good for cheating on a spouse.)

In another, a young widow discovers a service that will comb through all existing digital data and recreate a computer-generated dead ringer for her dead husband.

In "White Christmas," science has found a more foolproof way to impose a restraining order or punish a criminal � a block that blurs and mutes unwanted people (friends, relatives, enemies) so they are reduced to indistinct, harmless shapes emitting muffled sounds.

But the tale begins opaquely on Christmas morning in a remote cabin marooned in snow and ice, where two men seem to be in exile, even from each other. The setting is Britain, but Hamm is an American, the more outgoing, chatty one egging his taciturn roommate, played by Rafe Spall, to loosen up and swap personal tales.

Fans of "Black Mirror" know that whatever the two men say, there is more to their story than that. For newcomers, "White Christmas" can be a welcome shock, a purgative guaranteed to counteract overdoses of holiday cheer.