Black Mirror

As a whole, this is the most fulfilling season of Black Mirror yet. The good episodes are really good, and I only came away from one with a feeling of disappointment.

Black Mirror continues to be as bracingly original and thought-provoking as ever before, a Twilight Zone-influenced gem for the technology age that Brooker only seems to get more creative at fleshing out.

The very best aspect of Black Mirror, the thing that makes the show so compelling, is that Brooker and his collaborators have developed a real knack for taking these seemingly far-flung narratives and making them feel extremely relatable.

People call Black Mirror the 21st century's Twilight Zone. That's certainly high praise, but the show ultra-eerie third season lives up to that promise. [21/28 Oct 2016, p.95]

This is risky, unique television, the kind you don’t see on every network, although don’t be surprised if they don’t all try to copy it soon.

The real genius of Black Mirror lies in its dissection of humanity--how our emotions, compulsions and fears inform our use of technology. Season 3 masterfully carries on this tradition, skewering Internet vigilantism, invasion of privacy and the false personas we present on social media.

The payoff--Black Mirror promises no happy endings but the conclusions are always thought-provoking--is worth it.

No show of this sort scores only home runs, but mirror's batting average is very high. [24 Oct-6 Nov 2016, p.17]

There are 13 stories--all good, some better--waiting for newcomers on Netflix. They're waiting to frighten, to invite you think about your life, to make you wince, and to make you laugh. Look, that's the signpost up ahead. Your next stop: Black Mirror.

The brilliant Black Mirror returns Friday for a third season--and its best one yet--on Netflix with six new episodes.

Black Mirror leaves you feeling like you should turn all your screens off while making you incapable of doing anything but hitting “play next.”

Though Season 3's content remains iron-clad, the proliferation forces things closer to the territory of having "forgotten" episodes, watering down the power of Brooker and his team's vision. More is seductive, but beware dilution.

Typical of the Netflix large-portions ethos, a few of the new episodes are too long, and compared with the lapidary early seasons, they feel diluted. Still, Black Mirror hasn’t lost its currency.

The series might be made up of disparate stories that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, but the more time you spend ruminating on Black Mirror and turning it over in your head, the more those stories start to seem like part of the same thing, a world we’re all marching toward, like it or not. The episodes work sans context; they’re better when consumed as different viewpoints on the same unnamable future.

With more narratives to unspool, perhaps it’s inevitable that the quality level can’t remain consistent throughout. ... If someone decides to create a TV time capsule that represents this decade, I can easily imagine Black Mirror being placed in it.

Like "The Twilight Zone," Black Mirror cleverly creates these slightly skewed worlds with limited special effects and in a truncated amount of time, trusting the audience to catch up with stories that are often joined in progress. It's the sort of brainy science fiction to which many aspire and few consistently deliver.

The new episodes aren’t perfect. Brooker, who has joint or solo writing credit on every installment, is more successful at building devastating second acts than he is at earning his endings, and several episodes turn again and again to social media’s terrors, as if vigilante justice and mob mentality didn’t exist before hashtags.

The Netflix episodes aren’t quite as cheeky as the notorious British episode in which the prime minister is forced to copulate with a pig on live TV, but overall, the third season honors the sensibilities of the British originals.

There are still great ideas--and one great episode, "San Junipero," that I'd put up against the best previous installments(*)--but on the whole it's much more uneven than the show's previous output.

The increased episode count of season three allows Black Mirror to show off its full range of tricks, but it’s the episodes that make a play for resonance—“San Junipero,” “Nosedive,” and “Men Against Fire”--that stand out. ... But even with these advanced features, Black Mirror remains subject to the hit-or-miss vagaries of the anthology format.

In its third season, which reflects its new home’s disdain for modesty with much longer episodes and its most extended season yet, there’s less consistency than in past outings but a more prominently demonstrated desire to swing for the fences.