CAUTIONARY REFLECTIONS Looking into Black Mirror

The central premise of a Black Mirror episode often provides a small – but telling – exaggeration of a trend or phenomenon in contemporary life, usually connected to technological innovation, and usually set not terribly far into the future.

Black Mirror uses a storytelling format that is not unprecedented in television’s history, but still manages to be surprising. Like a literary anthology of short stories – or like the original series of The Twilight Zone – the episodes of each Black Mirror season tell entirely unconnected tales, usually in very different genres. As each season begins its rollout, we can only guess at, or vaguely imagine, what these genres might be: fantasy, action, horror, comedy … there is absolutely no uniformity of style or tone from episode to episode, or season to season.

Of course, the label that most readily attaches itself to Black Mirror is science fiction. Yet ‘SF’ (as aficionados prefer to call it) is itself a contested and highly elastic genre. Against the conventional idea that science fiction is predominantly ‘space opera’ (voyages to other planets, encounters with aliens), the widespread rebranding of SF as ‘speculative fiction’ since the late 1960s has opened many other doors of possibility. Perhaps the one aspect that unites all types and shades of SF, old and new, is futurity: an imaginative projection of what our future, as a society or culture, could or might be like.

Charlie Brooker, the central creator and showrunner of Black Mirror since its inception in 2011, has always held to a speculative formula: his stories address ‘the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time’. So the central premise of a Black Mirror episode often provides a small – but telling – exaggeration of a trend or phenomenon in contemporary life, usually connected to technological innovation, and usually set not terribly far into the future.

Yet is science fiction – since its historic breakaway from the genre’s: they provide a potent way to reflect upon the state of society by showing it in a strange or ‘defamiliarising’ light. It is precisely this approach to the SF genre that is encapsulated in the title of .