![]() Perhaps it’s no surprise that Brooker’s starting point for Black Mirror was his childhood obsession with America’s The Twilight Zone, with its socially progressive parables, twist-y endings and shivers delivered down the viewer’s spine.Īiring in the early 1960s, it drew inspiration from timely touch points: the Bomb outer space racism and the Red scare. “It must be something like that.”īrooker, 45, is an English media critic, satirist, TV personality and screenwriter whose piercing contributions to Brit cultural life may have been a bit too U.K.-centric to have made the leap to American shores. How to further explain the essence of Black Mirror? Ask Charlie Brooker, its creator, co-producer and the writer of most of its episodes. A few may put you off.īut it’s fair to say that all come loaded with a potent “Uh-oh!” payoff. Most are shot through with a streak of mordant humour. Some episodes are grim, some perversely playful. “Shut Up and Dance” exposes a teenage boy who, after his computer is hacked, will do anything to keep his private life private.īlack Mirror is set in the present, or in an all-too-plausible near-future, with tales that are, by turns, descriptive or cautionary or devilishly speculative. “Nosedive” takes social-media “likes” to the nth degree of crazed approval-seeking. “Men Against Fire” chillingly confronts prejudice on the battle front. Netflix has just released six new episodes that supplement seven previous hours created for British television.Īmong the new crop, “Hated in the Nation” unveils what is literally a killer app that lets people choose the day’s most disliked individual- who will then be put to death. The anthology series Black Mirror takes you through a high-tech looking glass with jittery tales sure to lodge in your brain for years to come, as it reclaims the hallowed realm of The Twilight Zone for a new millennium. The fateful misinterpretation of the phrase “to serve man.” Even after a half-century, these memes can still deliver a jolt of recognition.īut if you’re drawing a blank instead, that’s OK. The rest? Well, it’s based on nostalgia for the original and all the Easter eggs that go along with it.įans can start scoping them out when The Twilight Zone premieres on April 1.NEW YORK - William Shatner’s bumpy flight. “To me, Twilight Zone, no matter how dark the episode, is ultimately optimistic about humanity.” The Twilight Zone maintains hope and avoids tech, placing itself as hyper-modern only in its tackling of relevant social issues. “At its core, Black Mirror is cynical about humanity - that’s not a dig, I love the show,” Nanjiani said. “One of the easy rules that we made for ourselves is that we don’t have to explore technology - Twilight Zone covers everything else the imagination can think of.” Since one of the episodes reviewed by critics involves a camcorder, it does seem that Peele’s show is intentional about staying away from the bleeding edge of tech (even if podcasts do become a major plot driver of another entry).Įpisode star Kumail Nanjiani also weighed in on how the show differentiates from the current paradigm of twisty genre anthologies. “ Black Mirror is an absolute masterpiece, and we wouldn’t have moved forward with our show if we didn’t identify what is unique to Black Mirror and what is unique to Twilight Zone,” Peele said. Dodging that show’s place in pop culture was paramount, and doing so required plenty of respect for its specific strengths. So how do you avoid comparisons to the other modern entries in the highly specific form? Peele spoke to Entertainment Weekly about The Twilight Zone and its close compatriots that all draw from the same source material - and how to make sure that the reboot stayed true to the spirit of the original.īlack Mirror, the British anthology show now owned by Netflix, made a big splash upon its arrival and has been reinventing itself ever since (releasing movie-like episodes and even ones where the audience decides what happens). Be they revivals of the series (like the new CBS All Access show from Jordan Peele) or other sci-fi weirdness obsessed with twists and social commentary (like Black Mirror, for example), Rod Serling’s creation is the urtext. The Twilight Zone is an iconic fixture of genre anthology storytelling that’s influenced tons of shows since its solidification into the pop culture hall of fame.
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