Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker Keeps Finding New Ways to Freak Us Out

Black Mirror mastermind Charlie Brooker is used to reveling in dystopic misery, but sometimes even he is startled by real world events. On the day he Zooms me from his home in the UK, America’s east coast is covered in toxic Canadian wildfire smoke; he is curbing himself from making jokes about it. Then there was the pandemic, which contributed to the delay between Black Mirror seasons five and six—and left Brooker at home like the rest of us, soaking up countless hours of television.

He likens it to a creative reboot, and says he approached the sixth season of the anthology series determined to broaden its boundaries. “I don’t want to sit here feeling like I’m in a box, where I have to write an episode about NFTs or whatever’s on the tech pages today,” he says. And so Black Mirror returns to Netflix this week with five very different new episodes, crammed with an enviable ensemble of actors that includes Aaron Paul, Zazie Beets, Salma Hayek, Paapa Essiedu, Kate Mara, and Annie Murphy. Some of the tales are more directly tech-oriented than others. There are shots fired at streaming platforms, AI, deepfakes and our obsession with true crime, but the show also wanders into new territory. Brooker sets several episodes in the past, cramming them with nostalgic cultural allusions and self-reflexive easter eggs. One episode, labeled “a ‘Red Mirror’ film,” is a horror movie that doesn’t rely on technology at all, but it conjures up plenty of anxiety with its grim political backdrop.

“The point of the series always was to make episodes that are really distinctly different but psychologically linked,” Brooker says. He likes to describe Black Mirror as “a box of chocolates: you don’t know what you’re gonna get, but there’s always gonna be dark chocolate. I’ve tried to push that to quite an extreme this season.”

Spoilers ahead for season six of Black Mirror.

Black Mirror is often ahead of trends, but “Joan is Awful” seems perfectly timed. AI is suddenly such a pressing issue—especially in Hollywood, where it has become a key issue in labor negotiations.

I’m super aware of that. And in a way, I’m delighted that it’s so timely, even if it’s worrying stuff that it’s touching on. We wrapped filming and then about a month later, ChatGPT came out. It’s one of those things where as a writer, you look at that and go: Uh oh! But the more you use it, the more you can see what it can do and what it can’t do. It has value as a tool for writers, like artists using tools in Photoshop. The worry is obviously executives going: I’ll generate a load of crap IP with ChatGPT and then get a human to knock it into shape.”

One of the things I was thinking about [in creating “Joan”] was deep fakes and AI generated imagery. I’d been toying with an idea about a news network that just pumps out deep fakes and calls it drama. I couldn’t work out what the actual story was, but it was a scary idea. And then when I watched The Dropout with my wife, we were like, This feels like it happened 10 minutes ago! Imagine if Amanda Seyfried, while playing Elizabeth Holmes, switches on the TV and sees The Dropout.

A show within a show.

I wrote it quite quickly after that. And I was also thinking about “main character syndrome” on social media, where an average person fucks up and becomes the whipping boy for the day. So I sort of glommed those ideas together. It does feel very timely, and obviously for Salma Hayek and Annie Murphy, it spoke to them as actors. This is stuff that they’re already being confronted with and thinking about—how to have control over their own image and where that goes. It’s probably one of the most overt comedy episodes we’ve ever done as a Black Mirror, and at the same time it’s quite an existential nightmare.

The AI threat seems really pressing for actors, when the capability is fully in place.

And the capability sort of is there, isn’t it? It must be terrifying for the next generation of actors coming up. Are you suddenly going to be competing against all the Golden Age actors that have ever been popular? If you can keep casting Jennifer Lawrence or Tom Hanks in things forever and ever and ever, I can see that being a concern.