Charlie Brooker is worried about everything. He enters a room and the first thing he's thinking about is how easy it is to get to an exit – and how many people might attack him on the way there. On a high stage, he's wondering what it feel like to fall off. For the Black Mirror co-creator any new situation offers up a veritable buffet of potential disasters.
That's why Brooker gets a little miffed when people point to Black Mirror and conclude that he's overly worried about the impact that technology is having on our world. "One thing that people say about the show that slightly annoys me is when people think that it's inherently anti-technology or that it is warning people of the dangers of technology," he told the audience at WIRED Live. "I'm a neurotic and I worry about everything. I could worry about germs on a glass just as much as I worry about social media."
But as Brooker and co-creator Annabel Jones prepare the launch of season five – expected in early 2019 – the pair described how episodes often come from a place of optimism, rather than untempered worry, and how joining Netflix in 2015 let them be more experimental with the series.
Although it's often held up as a dystopian satire on the way that technology has torn apart the delicate social fabric of the modern world, for Jones, the series is much more positive than usually it gets credit for. "We have done episodes that aren't dystopian," she says, pointing to San Junipero, the standout episode from season three, which explores a Californian simulated reality where the elderly live on after death. "That's incredibly positive and optimistic," she says.
Jones also holds up Be Right Back – the season two episode where a young woman creates a artificially intelligent version of her dead boyfriend – as another case of the show being more emotionally varied than it often gets credit for. "It's a beautiful episode about grief and loss and love in the digital age," she says. "It was sad, but it was beautiful. It was a love story."
Changing things up between episodes, and keeping viewers coming back is one of the challenges of the anthology form, Jones says. When you're essentially filming six unconnected miniature feature films per season, with no recurring characters or cliffhangers between episodes, you've got to find a way to make viewers click on the next episode. "You can't constantly have bleak endings or it gets very predictable and boring for everyone," Jones says. "In an anthology you have to be unpredictable."
After two seasons on Channel 4, in September 2015, Netflix bought bought Black Mirror and doubled the length of the following two seasons, up to six episodes each. Along with the new platform, seasons three and four brought with them more ambitious and far-reaching plots shot in new locations. The move, Jones says, particularly suited the show's format. "Suddenly you can let the story dictate the length of the episode," she says, now that episodes didn't have to be squeezed or stretched to fill a one hour TV show.
Read more: Charlie Brooker on where Black Mirror will take us next
But shifting to streaming brings with it unique problems. Should the season start on an optimistic note, or with a gritty gut punch? And what if viewers ignore the order altogether – how do you make the season just as enjoyable for people who dip in and out at random? When it came to picking the order for season three, Brooker says he disagreed with how the episodes should stack up. "There was a lot of debate over what order the seasons go in," he says. He wanted 'San Junipero' to go first, but Netflix thought that 'Nosedive' – the episode where people are rated for every interaction they have – would give viewers a better introduction to the series.
Ultimately, Netflix got its way, and Nosedive opened the season. And even though viewers can episodes at will, Jones thinks that ordering still has an impact on the way that people watch. "I think that most people probably do watch it in the order because it's curated and it's in that order for a reason," she says.
So what about season five? The sci-anthology is returning for its next season on Netflix, but so far Brooker and Jones are keeping the release date under wraps, as well as any hints about what we might be about to see. "We like to keep it a surprise what we're doing," Brooker says. "The number one way to fuck that up would be to tell you what we're doing."
And although we’ve seen sparks of optimism from Black Mirror in the last two seasons, there are still some things about technology that put Brooker on edge a little more than usual. Mostly, he's worried about small changes that have unintended consequences. He uses a subtle tweak to Twitter that meant that clicking on a tweet also displayed all the replies below as one example. "It was like the line of shit that hangs off a goldfish's arse," he says.
YouTube's recommendation algorithm is equally flawed, he says. "If you walk out the room – as an irresponsible parent – and you come back in and [your kids] are watching someone hammer a nail into Pepper Pig's eye, or someone ranting with an extreme political stance," that's a problem, Brooker says. The solution? Tech firms should employ full-time worriers. "Surely all the companies should employ very neurotic and worried people, put things in front of them and say 'what could go wrong with that'?" he says.
And despite the show's acerbic take on the modern world, Brooker is no more immune to the downsides of technology than any of us. "I wake up and I immediately reach for my phone without thinking - and I'm addicted to the ceremony," he says. "I can find myself slipping in a miniature coma 100 times a day [...] I'm not aware of time passing and it does feel like my brain snaps out of it and i have to step back into things."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
