In a world where we've grown reliant on technology, Black Mirror shows just how vulnerable we might be. The Netflix sci-fi series explores our relationship with tech, and what could happen if things go off the rails.
Its latest season is out today with six episodes, including a sequel to season four's "USS Callister," which follows an executive who clones AI versions of his colleagues for a video game. There's romance, heartbreak, workplace drama and reclusive computer hackers to watch out for.
On top of that — real-life advertisements of fictional products from the series — like the Nubbin device shown in several episodes, and Thronglets, a video game featured in another, launched today as part of the marketing campaign promoting the show's return.
Black Mirror creator and co-showrunner Charlie Brooker joined NPR Morning Edition host A Martínez to discuss how he came up with ideas for the new season, and what he hopes viewers take away from it.
Below is an extended version of our interview with Brooker, edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Martínez: So, Charlie, compared to the other six seasons of Black Mirror, are there any new themes in season seven that you're addressing that you have never, ever addressed before?
Brooker: Oh, yes. Very much so. Well, without wanting to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't seen it, there's an episode about — I don't know if I'm allowed to say the word — about the degradation of tech services over time. There's this particular word that describes that, that the writer Cory Doctorow coined.
We've got an episode where Rashida Jones plays a regular woman who, there's a medical emergency and her husband signs her up to a service that can kind of cloud stream part of her brain. But the problem is, it comes with a subscription tier and she starts spouting adverts. So that's a sort of very Black Mirror idea that maybe doesn't go in quite the direction people will expect it to.
And then beyond that, we've got episodes about AI and sort of remastering old movies. We've got a story where Paul Giamatti is literally stepping inside old photographs using a high tech sort of means. So there's a lot of weird and wonderful stuff going on.
Martínez: Can I tell you, Charlie, as much as I looked forward to talking to you about Black Mirror because it's one of my favorite TV series, I was also dreading talking to you because you have to be probably one of the toughest interviews because, well, we can't really talk about too much because it's going to give away stuff. But then if we don't talk too much, we don't have an interview.
Brooker: I know, it's weird, isn't it? Luckily, though, the entire world is turning into a Black Mirror episode. So there is that.
We've got some episodes that are kind of a bit of a gut punch, which is a very Black Mirror thing to do. We've got others that are more sort of, I guess you'd say, emotive and reflective and hopefully have got a bit of original Black Mirror DNA in them. But you can see the things that I was channeling across the season, we can certainly talk about the things that were obsessing me.
Martínez: So what were the things that were obsessing you?
Brooker: Well, we've got an episode which is about — sounds so dry to say — the degradation [of] tech services, but also a sense, I think, that everyone has, that everyone and everything is being sort of squeezed somewhat and that everything is getting more desperate and everything's getting more of a hard kind of struggle that's channelled in there.
There's an episode where we're dealing, on the surface, with gaslighting, but coming at it from a slightly sort of tech perspective. Gaslighting, obviously, is a term that everyone is now familiar with. But I think we're all sort of being a bit gaslit constantly at the moment and [there] seem to be competing versions of reality.
And we've got stories that are kind of about: I was thinking, I'd watched the Peter Jackson documentary about the Beatles, Get Back, where he and his team were using really high-tech means to sort of bring the past back to life, making it almost more vivid than it was at the time. And there's a couple of stories this season which are almost about using technology to sort of almost literally re-enter versions of the past, which felt like a new sort of rich theme for the show to mine.
Martínez: That's the episode with Paul Giamatti. To be actually able to enter a photograph. I mean, is that something that you've heard is a few years away, 10 years away or 20 years away? Is that something you've heard about?
Brooker: I would imagine that's probably five minutes away in some form. I mean, maybe not to the degree of sophistication that we show it unfolding in the actual episode itself. You can see the speed with which these things evolve. I think we've all seen videos where somebody feeds a Van Gogh self-portrait to an AI and presses a button, and then you've got an animated video of him rapping or whatever.
So the notion that you could sort of walk inside some kind of virtual reality recreation of an old photograph, I suspect, is really very much not far away.
Martínez: In that episode that you mentioned with Rashida Jones, where she is basically part of this tiered system of operating, in some ways, I think we all live in tiers, right? In every single thing that we subscribe to, there's always something better or something worse. You either have an ad-free experience or you don't. And that ad-free experience is supposed to be better than the one that has the ads.
Brooker: Yes. It's almost inescapable. I've got an Amazon Alexa device in my house with a screen on it. And it was a useful sort of in-house intercom and digital photo frame. And it's just started showing adverts, and you can't switch them off. So I didn't realize I was buying a billboard for my house.
But it's weird. You're right. You can't help being British, growing up acutely aware of the class system and it's just sort of got this new version of it constantly where there's the premium version, the standard version and the kind of rubbish version of everything. Apart from everything else, it's just exhausting making these decisions. You feel a real sense of indignity, I think, as a consumer of these products, when they start sort of morphing in that way.
Martínez: Right. Because I think the feeling is that if you're in the lower tier, you're not having as good of an experience and maybe you're not having as good of a life unless you upgrade, right? Unless you pay more for that higher tier and the experience is better. But then all of a sudden how high do the tiers go? I mean, it's infinite, right? The sky is infinite.
Brooker: It is infinite. In a way, one of the things I'm channeling was [one time] when I was flown to the USA, and as I got on the plane, I got randomly upgraded. Like I'd never been in business class before, and I was marveling at like, 'Oh my God, I've got a big screen here and I've got proper cutlery and wow, they've brought out a tablecloth for my food.'
I think, partly, your enjoyment of that is defined by the fact that knowing, on the flight back I was in economy. I was in coach on the flight back, and I was instantly angry. I felt instantly like, 'How dare they do this to me?' It's terrifying how quickly that seizes you.
Martínez: You get a taste of the higher tier. You can't go back, right?
Brooker: You can't. And so, these things are constantly sort of dangled out of reach or there are new versions.
You could argue it gives you more choice, in that what are you willing to forego? What pleasures, what conveniences will you forgo for a more economical service? But there's something about the way it feels very much imposed on us. And it's also just yet another… it overcomplicates everything.
Martínez: Is technology screwing with our brains, maybe very much like a drug would in that you chase that high and then you need more because you can't just go back to life the way it was. Like if you've got a phone, all of a sudden there's an upgrade. You need that upgrade because you don't want to go back to life the way it was with the old phone.
Brooker: Yeah. I can't work out: was reality always boring and we were just waiting for phones to come along and distract us? Is that what's happened? Or have the phones kind of mesmerized us and rewired our brains?
It's terrifying, isn't it, when you lose your phone? I used to chain smoke and it's exactly the same thing. I now wake up and reach for my phone immediately. I think it's partly because you drop into a soothing mini-coma every time you're fiddling with a phone. Basically, it feels like you're doing something and you're not really.
I mean, I call it soothing. Often these days, you're sort of doomscrolling, which is the opposite of soothing, but then you're locked into that, right? Because you're constantly doing it, hoping for some kind of reassurance.
Martínez: Wondering, Charlie, do you work with scientists, futurists, inventors, computer experts to make sure that some of these storylines are believable enough?
Brooker: I wish I could say yes, but no. I mean, I am quite sort of techy and geeky, so I keep up with what's in the ether. I always want to come at the stories from a slightly sort of Twilight Zone space, like what's the hook, what's the riff I'm playing in this episode? That's where I'm coming from, from a story point.
And then I'm sort of thinking, Well, technologically, how would that happen? I guess most scientists or tech experts would probably explain why, you know, that wouldn't happen that way or that wouldn't work like that. So hopefully it's got enough verisimilitude about it that it feels tangible. But I haven't sort of run it by an expert and checked things basically for fear of them telling me that I've got it all wrong.
Martínez: Yeah. What do you think is the biggest danger in people's relationship with technology? Is it our dependence on it or maybe our eventual replacement by it?
Brooker: I think almost everyone with any kind of job, can look at ChatGPT and that world and get quite worried that you could end up being replaced. And I think that obviously would be a massive shame.
I like to think that as creatures, we want human connections.
I can also see the value of AI as a tool, as it's a tool being operated and overseen by people. And I think the danger is, obviously, if people get written out of the equation somehow, either emotionally, physically, financially, then we're in real trouble.
Doing Black Mirror, I think often people assume it's sort of written by the Unabomber that I'm sort of some anti-tech, sitting at a log cabin and like, you know, scowling. But no, I used to be a video games journalist. This would be a terrible job to do if you hated technology. And a lot of these things are miraculous, really miraculous inventions that we've created and incredibly powerful tools. It's just, you know, they come with unforeseen consequences and they're powerful tools.
Martínez: Yeah. I never saw Black Mirror as you being anti-tech. I mean, I think what Black Mirror is, to me, is something that might happen if maybe we allow it to dominate us.
Brooker: I suppose really in almost all of our episodes, the problems come in when a human is misusing something or they're not thinking through the consequences of what they're doing or they're driven by fear or they're driven by jealousy or weakness or something. That's usually the problem, whereas the technology itself is a neutral tool.
And also in the show, we have to show technology that you would want to use yourself. That's sort of, for me, the measure of a really good Black Mirror episode: when you can absolutely, as a viewer, see the value of the tech we're showing you and you sort of wish it existed or you wish you could have it. I mean, you probably will in 10 months' time.
Martínez: Is there a story that you ever maybe started writing but then just abandoned and why? I mean, what wouldn't qualify, say, as a Black Mirror story?
Brooker: I don't tend to sort of start and then abandon them. Quite often, I start and then they dramatically change or I've got half of an idea and then I glue two ideas together and you get a new story.
And quite often I'll have a concept that I'm sure I can write a story about, but I can't quite see how to get into the story yet. I've got several of those always sort of knocking about in my head. And then usually what you're waiting for is some other sort of thought, observation, moment, whatever. Could come up randomly in conversation that suddenly sort of gives you your "in" as it were.
We've got an episode this season called "Hotel Reverie," which is actually quite a swooning, romantic episode. It's about Issa Rae going inside a vintage British film, an AI-generated old black and white movie. It actually came about, originally, I was thinking of a horror movie idea, and so quite often what happens is it just sort of transmogrifies completely into something else rather than something that I've abandoned.
Martínez: What do you want to come out of Black Mirror? I mean, do you want Black Mirror to maybe change the way we use technology, the way governments regulate it, especially maybe with A.I. regulation? What would you like to come out eventually if people have a lesson for Black Mirror?
Brooker: I don't tend to look at it that way. I'm not trying to sort of influence policy. I slightly get confused sometimes when people describe the show as a warning about sort of, you know, the potential uses of technology. It's more me worrying in what I hope is an entertaining way.
And again, sometimes I'm literally just trying to entertain. That's why we have some episodes that are kind of a romp. Other ones are kind of angry, and they're sort of despairing.
I'd be loath to sort of boil it down to a lesson I'm hoping that the viewer goes away with because I think I'll leave that down to the viewer.
That said, we're often showing cautionary uses of technology, but hopefully there's some optimism also mixed in into the casserole as well.
This story was edited for radio by Phil Harrell and edited for digital by Obed Manuel.
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