The Scariest Thing out There Is You and Me
But ChatGPT is a pretty close second
I tried my best to not include spoilers for Black Mirror’s sixth season but if I did, don’t be mad at me!
When Black Mirror first aired in 2011, the anthology series’ creator Charlie Brooker described the show as being “about the way we live now — and the way we might be living in 10 minutes' time if we're clumsy. And if there's one thing we know about mankind, it's this: we're usually clumsy.”
At the time, Instagram was only just getting its footing, people actually walked outside instead of asking the not-yet-invented Amazon Alexa about the weather and most of us had never heard of bitcoin. Netflix, where you can watch Black Mirror now, hadn’t even come out with any original content (and certainly didn’t have the guts yet to unceremoniously kick me off my generous parents’ account).
Brooker and the brains behind Black Mirror had fertile ground for their show, which has typically honed in on the dangers of technology like data surveillance and virtual reality to create both realistic and dystopian terrifying worlds that we could very well be headed towards. But when I first heard the sixth season was coming in June, I thought well best of luck with that.
That’s because it feels like we’ve collectively lived hundreds of lives since even just 2019, when the latest season had aired. Back then many of us probably couldn’t define pandemic or insurrection, and one of the world’s richest men hadn’t yet bought Twitter (and royally f***ed it). I hadn’t yet considered throwing in the towel on what we may call “my career” thanks to ChatGPT, which can do pretty much all of my marketable skills (I can read and write but I can hardly boil an egg). In the last few years, it feels like we’ve inched uncomfortably close to some of the realities Black Mirror depicted in early seasons — we’re not quite there, obviously, but they’re much easier to imagine. Television doesn’t have to be used as comfort material, but I did wonder if people would want to follow Charlie Brooker into a technological hellscape the same month Apple was announcing those 3D camera goggles.
But with its sixth season, Black Mirror has solidified itself as a show somewhat unrecognizable from its early seasons’ form. Instead of waxing poetic about the dangers of our screens, the series has doubled down on its accusation that iPhone or no iPhone, the scariest thing about society is simply us — and it always has been.
It’s not that Brooker wasn’t always focused on our ugly sides; a black mirror literally shows our reflections. The latest episodes, though — and episodes from more recent seasons, like the fifth season’s critique of fandom starring Miley Cyrus — veer more heavily into warnings about our obsessions, our motivations and our culture overall.
Many critics say it’s not working. The Atlantic called the new season a “stale collection of shallow, unfulfilling stories,” and CNN said that the show is “only occasionally all it’s cracked up to be.” I am a much bigger fan of the earlier seasons, which came out before Netflix took over the series (if a Netflix producer is reading this who wants to collaborate with Rachel and I… I'm just kidding! You’re doing amazing). But I do think that Black Mirror needed to change: As the show’s scary possibilities get closer to bursting into our reality, it’s much more effective to remind us that there’s nothing scarier than a greedy human being.
Black Mirror isn’t alone in this struggle of reckoning how close entertainment has come to reality. Margaret Atwood, the author of the book that inspired Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, slyly said “I told you so” after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and the TV show has pivoted in later seasons, giving viewers a bit of an escape from the original, bleak-only premise. (Though its star still wishes the show would “stop being so damn relevant.”) Even Veep, a comedy, is a bit less funny when you realize how realistic much of it has become.
In one of the new Black Mirror episodes, “Mazey Day” starring Zazie Beetz as a desperate paparazzo, the show ditched the fear-of-phones factor completely to comment on our dicey obsession with celebrities. The episode rings especially true for people who were around in the early 2000s, when Britney Spears was poking her umbrella at the paps and photographers were subjecting stars to harassment even worse than we see today — all because we couldn’t stop consuming the content.
There’s a big twist in “Mazey Day” that nearly punts the episode from the Black Mirror genre completely. But that’s even more the case for the entirety of “Demon 79,” the last episode of the new season, which really feels like it could have just been a stand-alone movie (maybe it should have been — I don’t have time to watch a movie every time I want to watch TV1). In fact, there is almost nothing Black Mirror-y about it. The plot involves Nida, a shoe sales assistant, who unwillingly teams up with a devil in the form of a hot, popular musician she admires, and is forced to commit murder to avoid the apocalypse. It’s essentially a sci-fi thriller, and besides the main character watching some television, there’s hardly a screen in sight, let alone suggestion of the dangers of technology.
The earlier seasons focus so much on weird techy shit that they sometimes allow you to forget that humans are behind the technology after all. But now Brooker has pivoted into a fierce condemnation of us — and one that I fear may be a bit of a cop out. “Demon 79” shines a light on humanity’s dark side with a sympathetic character, the shy and gentle Nida who resists murdering, even if it will stop the world ending. But as she’s pushed to do so again and again, her opposition to murder starts to waver, especially when she meets someone who, she thinks, deserves to die.
Maybe it was in her nature after all, the show suggests — but this isn’t a novel idea. Sometimes, it feels as though Black Mirror is abandoning its unique perspective on the dangers of innovation in a way that diminishes its point. Take “Beyond the Sea” starring Aaron Paul and Kate Mara in an episode I found devastating and entertaining, despite it being a little too Don’t Worry Darling for my taste (IYKYK). The show is set in an alternative past but is dealing with technology far from what we’re dealing with in the present (maybe? I don’t know what Google is working on nowadays). Yet while the episode wrestles with what it means to be human and what we’ll do in the face of loss, I don’t think it grapples with the technology that enables the plot in the same way the Emmy-winning episode “San Junipero” from the fourth season did.
Still, Black Mirror makes me most uncomfortable when — tech or no tech — it makes the viewer complicit, as it does with “Loch Henry.” The episode kicks off with a couple traveling to a quiet Scottish town to work on a nature documentary, but when Davis fills his girlfriend Pia in on a local story of gruesome murders that upended his family, she convinces him to change course. Together, and with the help of Davis’ childhood friend, they investigate the case of a serial killer whose crimes turned their tourist destination of a town into an empty one.
Without spoiling too much, I’ll say that the resulting documentary ends up on Streamberry — a production company used elsewhere in the season, too, that’s clearly a stand-in for Netflix itself (gotta appreciate Brooker’s guts) — and things don’t end up as Davis and Pia envisioned. The episode turns the spotlight on us, the viewers, and our willingness to feed our need for entertainment with actual peoples’ suffering. If you’ve ever listened or watched or read or scrolled through social media snippets of a true crime story, this one's for you.
The episode doesn’t veer into sci-fi or fantasy, as some of the others do. And it isn’t as chilling as episodes like season two’s “White Bear.” But it’s the one that made my skin crawl, since it really did feel like a mirror — one saying “you’re the scariest thing of all.”
B Plot
Question: Staying on theme, what’s your favorite anthology series?
Mallika: If White Lotus wasn’t my favorite before this year, Sabrina Impacciatore solidified it as my no. 1 when I found out that “Peppa Pig” line was improvised. Plus, it meant people finally started appreciating Meghann Fahy — some of you slept on the absolutely ridiculous show The Bold Type and it shows. Mike White, I’m sorry I once thought of you as just that guy who tried to shoot Nicole Kidman’s character during the two minutes he was in The Stepford Wives.
Rachel: Mallika, that is such a niche reference point for Mike White and I love it. I’m not going to lie, I struggle with anthology shows. So much of the joy of television for me is building relationships with characters over a long period of time. If I wanted a one and done, I’d watch a movie, babe! Maybe that’s why I also love White Lotus, which cheats a little bit and brings characters into multiple seasons. I’ve enjoyed the first seasons of numerous anthology series and felt no motivation to watch the next one when I realize I have to learn to love new characters, Fargo, Cruel Summer, True Detective is another story but… we’ll get into that later. I guess I’ll say Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, simply because I have managed to watch and enjoy multiple seasons. It helps when the same actors pop up again and again. I know I would also enjoy Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buschemi’s Miracle Workers for the same reason if I ever sat down and watched all of it. It’s on the list!
C Plot
The first teaser for Zoey 102 — a movie that will show us what (some of) the Zoey 101 characters are up to now — just dropped. This has us once again genuinely asking: Who is watching all these reboot shows? Despite Instagram forcing fan edits of Carly and Freddie making out in Paramount Plus’ iCarly sequel series down our throats, we actually couldn’t care less if they got together. Stop with the #Creddie, we beg of you!
Ryan Murphy, the creator of Glee who Netflix famously wooed with $300 million in 2018, is now leaving the streamer for Disney. Because Disney is obviously the better venue for trauma-porn plots of gay men having orgies and murdering each other. This will serve as a good test run for Sam Levinson, who might be overstaying his HBO (excuse us, Max) welcome with The Idol’s “tedious nipple-core.” Although the backlash-to-the-backlash has already begun for The Idol with folks praising Lily Rose Depp’s performance and saying the vitriol is out of proportion, Rachel, personally, is still rooting for Levinson’s demise.
Nine Perfect Strangers is coming back for a second season and, we mean this with love, we’re wondering why since no one liked this show. (This is solely based on anecdotal evidence.) We know we’re being haters this week but people keep sending us that post about the mental health expert saying it’s a red flag to relax by watching true crime shows and we’re taking that personally.
Okay, some good news: Variety paired up Natasha Lyonne and Melanie Lynskey for an installment of Actors on Actors. Perfect reaction here.
This is rich coming from someone who will watch six hours of Law and Order in one sitting.