Is ‘Black Mirror’ Becoming The Very Monster It Used To Critique?

Once upon a time Black Mirror was pioneering anthological Sci-Fi on TV for a new generation that was relatively radical in its politics and took what it was trying to say seriously. 

Now, over a decade after its infamous pig-porking pilot aired on the UK’s Channel 4 in 2011, the series has become the very thing it initially sought to challenge — sensationalist, ridiculous, distracting fodder. 

— Warning: Spoilers for ‘Black Mirror’ Season 6 lie ahead — 

Speculative Fiction: What Is Black Mirror? 

In the tradition of anthological Sci-Fi series like The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, Black Mirror explored technology’s impact on society. Created by Charlie Brooker, the first two seasons even featured an episode written by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, along with stand-out performances from Daniel Kaluuya, Hayley Atwell, and Domhnall Gleeson.  

While often credited as a Sci-Fi series for convenience, Black Mirror’s genre sensibilities align firmly with Speculative Fiction, as first named in 1948 by author Robert Heinlein. Often lumped in with Sci-Fi due to aesthetic overlap, Speculative Fiction differs from Sci-Fi in its broader political and societal scope, and is exclusively concerned with speculating and imagining the future based on current technological and sociological trends. While Sci-Fi concerns itself with imagining entirely new worlds and possibilities, Spec-Fic is rooted in projections of our current time — the “not too distant” future. 

Speculative Fiction also tends to be about the exploration and criticism of oppression by the state and other institutions. It’s for this reason, stories like George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower are considered foundational in the genre. But more recent examples even include TV series like Severance, The Peripheral, and Netflix’s Black Knight. This is the tradition in which Black Mirror operates, not in the distant imaginary worlds of Science Fiction, but in the uncomfortably close, politically savvy projections of Speculative Fiction.  

Most of us can probably agree that Black Mirror’s pilot episode, ‘The National Anthem’, is an unforgettable episode of TV. Over 45 minutes, Brooker takes the viewer on a ride that begins with the kidnapping of a beloved royal and ends with the Prime Minister accepting he must have sex with a pig on national TV to save her. As time ticks down, the episode shows how the grotesque ultimatum affects the news cycle, everyday citizens, social media, and those closest to the PM.  

While other episodes in the series explore the potential highs and horrors of not yet invented gadgets, ‘The National Anthem’ stands out as one of the few episodes entirely about speculating about the social nefariousness of current tech. The twist, that the kidnapper released the princess 30 minutes before the PM’s “special” broadcast, is almost worse than the act itself. The harrowing reveal cemented the episode as a visceral, brutal projection of how the combined technological ripple effects of surveillance and social media enable a level of unthinkable voyeurism at every level of society.  

As shocking as the episode is, the shock is not the act of the PM fucking a pig, but what happens because the PM is expected to do so — balancing the social, political and personal ramifications. With his pilot episode, Brooker condemned the notion of sensationalism for its own sake by showing how such sensationalism, enabled by the institutionalisation of technological advancements, robs people and politics of their humanity in a near-perfect example of Speculative Fiction.  

Channel 4 Vs Netflix 

For a very long time, the condemnation of technological sensationalism was the purview of Black Mirror. Episodes like ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Fifteen Million Merits’ hammered home that the spectre of a society determined by the faceless exploitation of people through the deadly symbiosis of technology and capitalism, was just around the corner, and in some cases already here. Under Channel 4, there was a certain quasi-radical nature to Black Mirror’s stories that openly and seriously critiqued the wide ramifications of Big Tech and its impact on our culture. 

It’s no coincidence that the Channel 4 episodes come laced with dissent. It’s the UK’s only non-profit, non-government owned independent broadcaster, and it’s greenlighting of unique, diverse, progressive and generally ‘odd’ shows that may have been passed on by other broadcasters have cultivated kind of punk ethos: Channel 4’s slate of originals also includes The Inbetweeners, Humans, Skins, Utopia, Derry Girls, It’s A Sin and even the original run of Big Brother. So it was arguably this broadcaster that permitted Black Mirror’s relatively radical bent in which episodes were not primarily about “bad apples” misusing technology, but about the lack of morality inherent in techno-capitalism and its infrastructure.  

Of course, Netflix ended up buying the episodes and rights to the show in 2016, with Brooker having made six seasons since. While many fans, including myself, were initially relieved to see the show find a new home — under Netflix’s purview the show underwent a subtle defanging. Over six years, Netflix shifted Black Mirror from a series exploring the collective impact of technology on society, to a show mostly about how individuals either benefit from or exploit technological advancements under capitalism. 

Gone are the days of Seasons 1 and 2 where episodes like ‘The National Anthem’ and ‘White Bear’ left viewers with the uncomfortable, nuanced understanding that even the worst people are ultimately victims traped in an inherently exploitive system.

At a surface level, Black Mirror appeared to continue its tradition of social critique. Episodes like ‘Hated In The Nation’, ‘Nosedive, Rachel’, ‘Jack and Ashley Too’, and ‘Men Against Fire’ gesture at how technological advancements worsen social inequities. The difference is that responsibility began being placed at the foot of the individual, suggesting that people can simply make better life choices. Gone are the days of Seasons 1 and 2 where episodes like ‘The National Anthem’ and ‘White Bear’ left viewers with the uncomfortable, nuanced understanding that even the worst people are ultimately victims trapped in an inherently exploitive system. In ‘old’ Black Mirror, no strata of society was immune from the impact of capital-driven technological intervention, and most importantly, it was serious about it. 

Flash forward to the freshly dropped Season 6 and Brooker is arguably continuing to attempt that critique. But this time, his critiques of corporate greed are shambolically restrained. The episodes ‘Joan Is Awful’ and ‘Loch Henry’ see Brooker attempt a critique of Netflix’s — I mean, Streamberry’s harvesting of big data to generate quick original content. In the episode, a young woman called Joan (Annie Murphy) sees a version of her life play out on Streamberry in which she’s portrayed by an AI generated likeness of Salma Hayek, ending with her and Hayek breaking into Streamberry where they take a baseball bat to the server. And in ‘Loch Henry’, a young man decides to produce a true crime Streamberry documentary about series of serial murders committed in his home town and discovers his little tottering Scottish mother was an accomplice to these murders. This becomes the exploitive angle on which his documentary is produced. In both stories, a harrowing scene drives home that these characters agreed to their fates when they agreed to the Terms and Conditions. 

Both episodes are also, in a word, silly. Melodramatically, silly. Almost as if to critique the very streaming service footing the bill for his show, Brooker had to frame the critique in an over-the-top scenario that, on almost every level, beggars belief. Past episodes, like ’Fifteen Million Merits’ and ‘The Waldo Moment’ were similarly hyperbolic in their premises, but took the ideas at their core seriously. This meant that the overall message was not divorced from reality, even if elements of the episodes themselves appeared to be. ‘Joan Is Awful’ and ‘Loch Henry’, while definitely entertaining, utilise comedy to a degree that distract from really going hard on the exploitive relationship between corporations like Netflix and Big Tech. Weird. I wonder why? 

From Commentary To Carnage 

Black Mirror has always been a sensational show. It kicked off with a beastiality episode, after all. But this often sadistic sensationalism was rarely for its own sake, and often served as a catalyst for a wider focus on mass behaviour. Under Netflix, however, Black Mirror has almost exclusively become a series about how sadistic individuals continue to be so, regardless of and even because of technological advancements.  

If the show isn’t detracting from systemic commentary with slapstick comedy, it’s establishing misdirection with its own unique brand of individualist masochism. The third episode of Season 6, ‘Beyond The Sea’, is a perfect example. The premise establishes an alternative version of 1969 in which astronauts have access to an Avatar-like technology that allows them to be present on their lifelong mission into deep space, while their clones remain at home. Every day the pair have sessions in which their consciousnesses flit between bodies. All is well until an anti-tech cult kills one of the clones, permanently robbing one of the astronauts of his ability to visit Earth. Out of pity, his colleague offers the bereaved man short sessions using his avatar on Earth. The episode ends with the first man killing his colleague’s family in his grief, leaving them both stranded alone in space with nothing waiting for them back home. 

At no point is this episode interested in the wider ramifications of an innovation that would allow people to be in two places at once, or even just in the act of consciousness transference. The anti-tech cult is treated merely as a ploy to force the men into sharing a single clone. Scenes where members of the public seem in awe of the mechanics such an advancement would require serve purely to tease the reveal that the men on Earth are clones of the men on the ship. The episode is a far and bloody cry from explorations of how the PM being expected to fuck a pig — and no, I will never stop talking about this — impacted each and every citizen. Without a wider logistical exploration of the impact this technology would have, we get a take-home message that’s essentially “men are bad!” while being treated to a bunch of sensationalised violence. 

Episodes now focus on individual abuses of tech by craven and disturbed people, hardly bothering with wider political implications. 

‘Beyond The Sea’ is hardly the first episode like this: ‘Crocodile’, ‘Loch Henry’ and ‘Arkangel’ share similar sadistic individualist approaches. These approaches that steer away from societal commentary, opting for shock alone to keep viewers engaged. Mostly gone are the days when Black Mirror had something to say about the world we live in. Episodes now focus on individual abuses of tech by craven and disturbed people, hardly bothering with the wider political implications, the exploration of which is what the genre and its own success is built on.  

In many ways, part of the reason the first two seasons of Black Mirror have hardly aged in a decade is because they’re about those wider implications of social advancement. More recent episodes focus on specific trends and innovations like AI and Netflix true crime documentaries — on the tech itself rather than how the tech affects people in a greater context. The series has become about how technological advancements enables the most disturbed individuals to be more disturbing and violent, rather than critiquing the systems that allow such behaviour, ultimately placing pessimistic stock in the very phenomena it’s early episodes questioned: our obsession with watching ghastly acts. 

Black Mirror isn’t necessarily tired or unable to compete with a world as weird as it is, it’s just not the kind of media that benefits from being produced by a company like Netflix. Speculative fiction is fundamentally rooted in creative critiques of fascism, capitalism, sexism — something that isn’t meaningfully possible when one of the largest corporations in the world is footing the bill. 

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This is an opinion piece written by Merryana Salem, a proud Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian writer, critic, teacher and podcaster. Follow them on Twitter.