Production hasn’t yet begun on the fifth series of Black Mirror, but that didn’t stop Netflix from releasing a trailer for it this week. And perhaps all this advance warning is a good thing. Increasingly, I need more and more of a run-up before I can subject myself to Black Mirror. It is often so gratuitously bleak that I find myself having to psyche myself up before pressing play. Personally, I really appreciate Netflix getting the word out as early as possible. If I begin to steel myself for it now, I might actually be ready by the time it starts streaming.
Especially because – even by Black Mirror’s standards – the last series felt, at times, pointlessly nihilistic. Four of its six episodes were so uncompromisingly grim that I genuinely felt grateful that one of them – Metalhead, the one where Maxine Peake is hunted down by an army of indestructible robot dogs – was only 40 minutes long. Another one, Crocodile, about a murderous architect, lasted a full hour. I felt every single second of it.
Then there was Arkangel, which had a finale that made it feel like a Black Mirror episode written by someone who’d only overheard the premise of Black Mirror being discussed by two people standing on the other side of a busy motorway. Black Museum was as close as television has ever got to a Saw movie, which isn’t necessarily a compliment. It wasn’t just that these episodes were upsetting. It was that all the shocks felt unearned. It felt like desolation for the sake of desolation.
And that’s what made the other two episodes stand out so much. USS Callister tied a modern, relevant story about angry misogyny to the optimistic palette of the 1960s Star Trek series, making it feel vital in a way the others didn’t. And Hang The DJ was a masterclass in world-building that benefitted from bucketloads of heart. At its core were two characters you were actually invested in, rather than a cipher with a hammer looking for a baby to murder.
Character has been key to all of Black Mirror’s successes. At its least imaginative, Black Mirror acts as a warped worst-case scenario machine that coldly lurches its cast around disasters from too much of an uncaring distance. But when it gets things right, as with Hang the DJ, Nosedive, Be Right Back or the still-peerless San Junipero, it takes time to dig below the skin of its characters. These are episodes motivated by feeling, not circumstance. And you’re much more likely to buy the technological flammery of any given episode if you can relate to how the characters feel. Unless the only thing they’re feeling is the Black Mirror baseline of constant, panic-inducing, scream-at-the-sky-to-a-Radiohead-song terror, at least.
The good thing about Black Mirror is that, as an anthology series, every episode is ultimately an experiment. Charlie Brooker can nudge the levels this way or that as he pleases and, if he happens to overcook them, he has an opportunity to reset next time around. This theoretically means that there’s much more room for tonal variation than with a traditional television series. But it also means that when it lingers on bleakness for too long, as it arguably did with series four, then it’s all the more disappointing.
I want series five to experiment further. Black Mirror will never be a people-pleaser, but I’d argue that the horror would hit a lot harder if there was a little more humanity in the mix. You need to give us something before you snatch it away from us. Too often, Black Mirror just snatches from the outset, so we don’t know what we’re missing. Brooker has the entire colour spectrum to play with. Hopefully in series five he’ll stop splashing around in grey.
