New Season of ‘Black Mirror' on Netflix Satirizes Streaming Services
This story arc should be familiar to anyone who has ever downloaded a free app or subscribed to a streaming service, which at this point is pretty much all of us. And it is at the very dark heart of 'Common People,' the first episode of Season 7 of 'Black Mirror,' the anthology sci-fi series that helped to give Netflix, which has distributed it since its 2011 debut, artistic cred. All of this season's six episodes arrive on Thursday.
Is mocking streaming services biting the hand that keeps renewing you? Charlie Brooker, the creator of 'Black Mirror,' was more equivocal. 'To be honest, I'm probably more nibbling the hand that feeds us,' he said on a recent video call.
In its past seasons, 'Black Mirror' has promoted a skeptical view, perhaps an utterly nihilistic one, regarding the ways in which entertainment is created and enjoyed. In the near future, we are all amusing ourselves to death, or worse. But with the exception of last season's episode 'Joan Is Awful,' written by Brooker and directed by Ally Pankiw, in which a Netflix stand-in creates humiliating shows adapted from its subscribers' lives, Brooker has never come for streamers so baldly.
Brooker first conceived of 'Common People' while listening to true-crime podcasts. He was struck by the disjunction of hearing a host describe a mutilated corpse in one moment and advertise a meal prep service the next. What, he wondered, would make a human integrate sponsorship into their ordinary speech?
At that point, he thought that the show would be, like 'Joan Is Awful,' a dark comedy, a funny story. 'He kind of tricked me,' Pankiw, who also directed 'Common People,' said of Brooker's pitch. 'I was like, OK great. Then I read the script and I was like, Oh, it's actually incredibly devastating.'
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