Black Mirror’s rumored season 6 is a great chance for a new approach

Everything’s been quiet for Charlie Brooker’s landmark tech-horror series Black Mirror Since its third, three-episode season five, Netflix has been streaming it since 2019. The series’ interactive movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch briefly caused a sensation in 2018, but it’s been a long time since the show has had the impact or cachet it had back in the glory days of its beloved 2016 episodes “San Junipero” and “Nosedive,” much less the shock value it had when the series first premiered with the searing political satire “The National Anthem” in 2011.

Variety has learned that Netflix is currently in production of the sixth season. Black Mirror’s home since 2016. It also offers some insight on why season 6 was delayed — Brooker and creative partner Annabel Jones left their old production company, and it took some time for them to regain the rights that would let them pursue Black Mirror. The trade publication didn’t cite specific sources, but says a season 6 is currently in casting, that it will have more episodes than season 5, and that they’ll be longer, with each installment “treated as an individual film.”

The wording is flexible enough to allow for some hedging. Black Mirror episodes have always been “treated like” individual movies, with each one setting up a different world. Usually, episodes take place in a future featuring some new technology that’s an iteration on familiar tech from our time, like “Nosedive”’s society-wide ratings systems, or “Metalhead”’s killer hunter-robot, based on Boston Dynamic’s dog-bots. However, if you take that quote literally, and have longer episodes, this might just be the right approach. Black Mirror Must remain relevant.

The series was initially launched in 2011 and it was considered ambitious due to the way its futuristic visions were crafted. However, no matter how interesting and detailed the individual episodes may have been, there was a feeling of repetitiveness that began to plague the series. Every new installment found scare-elements in basic technology, regardless of their uniqueness. Writer Daniel Mallory Ortberg encapsulated criticism of the series into one devastating tweet: “What if phones, but too much?” (The account associated with that tweet is now gone, but he incorporated the thought into an equally dismissive piece for The Toast.)

Copycatting horror movies is commonplace. Black Mirror’s specific tone and “Everything new will kill you somehow” approach to technology, individual Black Mirror The episodes felt a bit too familiar and boring to make them scary and unsettling in the same way that the great ones. Brooker has since moved in a more positive direction — his most recent Netflix projects were the comedy special To 2020: Death Interactive trivia cartoon with a funny twist Cat Burglar. If he’s going to back to Black Mirror, movie-length episodes might give him the time to get more mileage out of the world-building that’s always been the series’ strongest suit, and spend more time on the character-building, which is often its weakest.

This is the biggest problem with lots of people. Black Mirror The best thing about episodes is the fact that many of them take place in real life. Twilight ZoneApproach, which relies on oppressive atmospheres and third-act twists. However, this approach is more character-focused and focuses on the actual way people navigate. Black Mirror Problems, rather than focusing all of your attention on them, can give you new life and energy. Bandersnatch is innovative in the ways it used its choose-your-own-adventure options, but it also tells a more complete story (or series of stories, depending on how you “play” it) than most Black Mirror episodes, and it’s a possible model for the depth a Black Mirror Story could go on.

Brooker’s writers and editors are still in competition with each other, though. Black Mirror copycat movies that have proliferated since the series launched — Unfriended And its sequel Spree, The art of hatchingAnd so on. But there’s always still room to do the genre right, and a more expansive palette might help.

There is no date yet for launch. Black Mirror Season 6.