Black Mirror had become a grim, horrid dud … until Brooker used the new season to lash out at his bankrollers like a petulant child. Is this the ultimate act of self-sabotage?
A few weeks into the pandemic, Charlie Brooker didn’t know what to do with Black Mirror. “At the moment I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart, so I’m not working away on one of those,” he told the Radio Times in May 2020. “I’m sort of keen to revisit my comic skill set, so I’ve been writing scripts aimed at making myself laugh.”
It’s weird to think that the pandemic came at exactly the right time for Black Mirror. 2019’s three-episode season five was a near-unanimous dud; a pointlessly grim Black-Mirror-by-numbers exercise, overwrought and overacted, that went through the motions so wearily that it felt like the end of something. The good news, then, is that Brooker was able to fully reboot what Black Mirror is during his time away. The less good news is that he probably didn’t reboot it enough.
