New BLACK MIRROR Episodes Are Coming to Netflix in October; Here's What They'll Be About
After hearing people hype it for years, I finally binged the entirety of Charlie Brooker's twisted television series Black Mirror earlier this year. It's a gorgeous piece of work, full of insightful, deep, probing questions about the nature of humanity and our relationship with technology, and it has some of the best acting, writing, and directing I've seen on TV in a long time. The show was picked up by Netflix for a new season of twelve episodes, and now we've learned a lot more about what to expect, thanks to a panel at the Television Critics Association press tour.
Vulture brings the news that season 3 will actually be split in half, with six episodes hitting the streaming service this October, and the other six arriving sometime next year. Also, for those who thought the earlier episodes of the show were a bit too depressing, the people behind the project — creator Charlie Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones — say there will be a "variety of tone" this time, and it won't be a "bleakfest." Jones said, “I think within this series of six, there are a few stories that are maybe much more playful. Challenging, but playful or sarcastic.” I largely liked what the series has done thus far, but I have to admit that sounds like a welcome change of tone to me.
The stories include: a police procedural, a romance, a thriller, a “horror romp,” and a military tale. “They're not retribution pieces,” Jones added. “I think we're trying to dramatize very contemporary concerns. In our current climate, and with the technological advancement in the last few decades, we're in a sort of place that feels very new and alien, and we're evolving as a species, and we don't quite know how or what the ramifications are yet. So a lot of the stories have that at their heart, a general unease that we haven't yet explored or come to terms with.”
We already knew some of the big names that were associated with the new season, including 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg, but now we have a list of episode titles and some more details about what we'll see:
“San Junipero” stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis in an '80s-centered episode directed by Owen Harris. Wyatt Russell and Hannah John-Kamen star in “Playtest,” an episode directed by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane). “Nosedive” features Bryce Dallas Howard, Alice Eve, and James Norton in an episode about social anxiety directed by Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement). Rashida Jones and Mike Schur (Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine) co-authored "Nosedive" because they were big fans of the show. Brooker called the episode “a social attire about identity in the social-media age. It's kind of like a cheerful pastel nightmare, that story.” He added that “technology is never the villain in this show. It's always about human failings and human messes, basically, that technology has helped facilitate."
I can't wait to dig into these new episodes. For more, read the full piece at Vulture.