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Telegraph
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Bandersnatch was Netflix's grandest TV experiment. So why erase it?
It's going on for six and half years since the release of Black Mirror's Bandersnatch – the feature-length interactive episode of Charlie Brooker's futureshock anthology series. But now there is one final twist in Brooker's tale of an emotionally unravelling Eighties video game programmer: the entire thing has just been scrubbed by Netflix in an act of digital disappearing that could have come straight from…yes, a Black Mirror script. The snatching of Bandersnatch is part of a move by Netflix away from the interactive TV model into which it invested millions between 2017 and 2022. In that distant and now long forgotten time-period, the streamer proclaimed its modern take on the old ' choose your own adventure ' format an area of enormous potential. 'We're doubling down on that', Netflix VP of product Todd Yellin had declared in 2019, shortly after Bandersnatch made its debut (Yellin left Netflix in 2022). Fast forward to 2025 and Netflix has embarked on a radically different strategy – having scrubbed not only Bandersnatch but a widely praised May 2020 interactive episode of Tina Fey's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, along with several kids shows that utilised the same technology. True, Bear Grylls's You Vs Wild hobbles on with the decision-making element expunged – meaning viewers can no longer actively choose to make Bear eat poison mushrooms and then loudly throw up all over his shoes. The barbarians are inside the gates. Films and shows leave Netflix all the time – in the majority of cases, because of the licensing deals through which the 'content' was secured in the first place. But Netflix owns Bandersnatch lock stock and dystopian barrel. More than that, it put huge resources into the cutting-edge 'Branch Manager' system that gave Charlie Brooker the freedom to write 150 unique scenes and over 60 decision points – along with the 10 official endings to the story (plus other rare outcomes only a tiny percentage of viewers have ever discovered). Netflix has been trialling the tech in kids shows when it approached Brooker and Black Mirror producer Annabel Jones about an interactive one-off. They had initially declined, fearing the results would smack of novelty. But when Brooker came up with the idea of a love letter to 1980s video games, they decided to give it a go – with Netflix encouraging the pair to think outside the box and push Branch Manager to its limits. 'When Netflix initially told us they had the capability to do this, and they asked us if we'd be interested in making an interactive film, we said no. We were determined, it was not for us. It might have felt gimmicky, so it wasn't something we were interested in,' Jones told Deadline. 'They asked us to push the technology, or to come up with ideas they didn't think they could quite pull off, and they would work out how to do them. We'd say, 'Can we do this?' And they'd never say, 'No.' They'd go, 'Well, we can't currently, but we'll work out if we can find a means of doing that.' Bandersnatch was widely acclaimed – 'like nothing I've ever experienced in a movie, a TV show, on Netflix, or anything else,' gushed Esquire – and Brooker clearly has affection for it, given that the latest series of Black Mirror features a sequel story, Plaything. It was also a dark, gritty love letter to the Eighties UK gaming industry. There really was a game called Bandersnatch – or, at any rate, there almost was. In 1984, Liverpool-based Imagine Software teased a new 'mega-game' of that name, though the plans unravelled when Imagine went out of business (it ultimately finally released as the underwhelming Brataccas). Black Mirror is understood to have furthermore riffed on the unhappy story of Matthew Smith, who designed the groundbreaking ZX Spectrum title Manic Miner only to leave gaming after the intolerable pressure of designing the much anticipated follow-up, Jet Set Willy in 1984 – an experience he described as 'seven shades of hell'. Playing Bandersnatch, the viewer is likewise sent to hell and back again and again. The instalment stars Fionn Whitehead as a young programmer hired to adapt a fantasy gamebook, Bandersnatch, into a video game. As the stress of completing the game plunges Stefan into burnout, he begins to feel that outside forces are controlling him (i.e. the viewer). Pretty soon, it all descends into chaos, and the walls start coming in. In one pivotal scene, fellow programmer Colin (Will Poulter) spikes Stefan's tea with LSD and rants about alternate timelines. He demands that Stefan choose one of the pair to jump from a balcony. If the player picks Stefan, he dies, and the Bandersnatch game is cobbled together and released to poor reviews. If Colin takes the plunge, the event is revealed as a dream – yet Colin is absent from future sequences. There are multiple endings. One sees Stefan have a breakdown and kill and dismember his father. In another,, the game comes out and flops, and the Imagine-like publisher Tuckersoft goes bust. All told, there are 150 minutes of footage divided into 250 segments – meaning there are one trillion different paths the viewer can take. There are five 'main' conclusions but another five to seven that are harder to reach and depend on making a number of seemingly random decisions. In other words, no two viewers will experience Bandersnatch in the same way – resulting in a meta experience that is both a commentary on the illusion of choice in video games and which recreates the feverish frame of mind of poor Stefan as he is driven around the twist. The result is a unique and fascinating experience. Why, then, would Netflix turn sour on the interactive format – to the point of erasing it from its history? The answer, of course, has to do with money. Scripting hours of additional footage exponentially increases a show's production costs. For instance, the total runtime of the 2022 interactive episode of Jurassic Park cartoon Camp Cretaceous was three times that of a regular instalment – and for what return? Plus, it is understood hosting the Branch Manager system on Netflix servers was expensive – and required constant updating as Netflix upgraded its homepage (the latest version of which rolls out on May 19). Instead of interactive TV, Netflix is betting big on video games – rolling out mobile titles based on hits such as Money Heist and Squid Game. It is also investing in AI-driven feeds on its home page and shorter TikTok-style content. Last year, newly appointed VP of 'GenAI for Games' at Netflix Mike Verdu indicated that the company felt it had pushed the choose your own adventure format as far as it could go. 'We're not building those specific experiences any more,' he said. 'The technology was very limiting and the potential for what we could do in that realm was kind of capped. But we learned a ton from that.' The difference in strategy is illustrated by how Netflix has chosen to market the new series of Black Mirror and that Bandersnatch sequel, Plaything. Netflix subscribers can download a tie-in mobile game, Thronglets, which recreates the empire-building PC simulation that drives the protagonist around the twist. It's great fun and has the same creepy ambience as the episode. But it is nowhere near as gripping as the original Bandersnatch, which started off asking you to pick a breakfast cereal for the lead character and then plunged into a vortex of madness and chaos – a world that has now been sealed shut and cast into the digital void. All told, it is a dark day for dystopias.
Geek Tyrant
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Netflix Removes BLACK MIRROR: BANDEERSNATCH From Streaming and Pulls the Plug on Its Interactive Era — GeekTyrant
Netflix has confirmed that Black Mirror: Bandersnatch , the genre-defying interactive choose-your-own-adventure movie, is being removed from the platform on May 12, 2025. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. The Reverend , the quirky choose-your-own-adventure follow-up to the hit comedy series, will also vanish on that date. With their departure, Netflix officially closes the book on its short-lived experiment with interactive storytelling. Back when Bandersnatch dropped in late 2018, it was an ambitious standalone Black Mirror experience that starred Fionn Whitehead and Will Poulter and gave viewers control over the narrative, branching into multiple endings across 312 minutes of total footage. The series was described as a 'mind-bending tale with multiple endings,' and the story followed a young programmer in 1984 who begins adapting a fantasy novel written by a deranged author into a video game. As reality fractures, the viewer guides him through choices that determine how—and if—he survives the psychological spiral. After the release, Netflix was all-in on the format. Todd Yellin, then Netflix's VP of product, said the company planned to 'double down' on interactive content. But that push quietly faded away. Yellin left in 2022, and now the final remnants of that experiment are getting scrubbed. A Netflix spokesperson explained that the technology used in Bandersnatch 'served its purpose, but is now limiting as we focus on technological efforts in other areas.' And where exactly is Netflix pointing its tech efforts now? Games. The streamer has gone all-in on building a game portfolio. Its recently revamped TV interface now features playable games on smart TVs, including Too Hot to Handle 3 and Oxenfree —an 'interactive story' you control with your phone. So, interactivity isn't completely dead, but the choose-your-own-movie format as we knew it is getting retired. As for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. The Reverend , that one dropped in 2020 as a farewell to the sitcom's four-season run. The description read: 'Kimmy's getting married, but first she has to foil the Reverend's evil plot. It's your move: What should she do next?' In the original announcement, co-creator Tina Fey said the interactive finale 'will be a great way to officially complete the series.' Now, ironically, both projects that were once billed as 'the future of television' are being quietly deleted. Source: Variety
