During a recent panel appearance at the SXSW Sydney film festival, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker challenged critics who state he is watering down the show’s themes to appeal to a more commercial audience. “I was aware we’re going on a global platform now, so we’ve got to make these stories a bit more international. And I wanted to mix it up a bit, as in not just keep doing bleak-a-thons.”
Look, I can understand not wanting nor being able to produce constant “bleak-a-thons,” and as much as I personally like how dark and bleak the original seasons were, it’s not the despair alone that was enticing, it was the fact that the stories were all tragedies in the most classical sense of the word. The characters almost always ended up in a place worse than where they started through no fault of their own. If their status was elevated, it was always presented with the caveat, “At what cost?.”
The criticism was never that it got sunny and happy…it’s that the show started pulling punches and lowered the stakes. Characters who made mistakes stopped facing the negative consequences of their actions. Characters started getting their cake and being able to eat it too, and that’s just not satisfying in a show that’s always been about the consequences of living in a tech based world.
Take “the happiest episode” that Brooker has ever written, San Junipero. It was fantastic because the stakes were high. Once the true nature of the characters’ reality was revealed, we learned that the characters were fighting to live blissfully in love, but it would be at the expense of robbing their families of a little extra time. For one of the character’s it means living forever with the memories of tragedy despite being in love. Even though it was a happy ending, it was still bittersweet and the gravity and consequences of their situation were felt through and through.
Just because San Junipero wasn’t bleak and had a happy ending, that doesn’t mean that’s what made it successful. It was successful because it fully explored the significance of the characters’ decisions and the impact on themselves and those around them. By contrast, you have Nosedive where a person is pushed to her brink, destroys her life, and winds up in jail, but not only has the character made peace with her reality she ends up finding love in her jail cell. No consequences for her actions, in fact she got a reward. Then there’s Striking Vipers where two men roleplay as women and start hooking up in VR at the detriment of their real world relationships. Everyone fights and argues, but it ends with what appears to be an amicable compromise between all parties. The men can hook up in VR once a year if his wife can go out and hook up with a stranger. Again, we don’t see any real world consequences from this episode, and everyone seems satisfied with this agreement.
Brooker says he brightened up the show to appeal to a wider audience. IMO, making the content brighter and/or more palatable misses the real point on why people say the new episodes aren’t like the original seasons. The majority of the new episodes don’t give characters the same amount of agency they had in the first two seasons, nor do they face the same level of consequences. This has nothing to do with light/dark or positive/negative. It has everything to do with heightened stakes and giving the characters the agency to help or destroy themselves. We like watching people fight for things, and if they don’t have agency over their destiny, then it’s not a fight, we’re just watching someone get dragged.
It’s hard to tell a compelling story with a morally ambiguous conflict that concludes with a happy/positive ending because that’s endorsing a side where philosophically there isn’t a right or wrong one. If the conflict is morally ambiguous and the plot has a positive ending, then either the outcome didn’t really matter, or the conflict wasn’t actually that ambiguous if one outcome is viewed more favorably. Without seeing the characters have to live with the negative consequences of their actions, Black Mirror loses its intellectual edge. By neatly tying up endings and giving them positive outcomes, the writers take away the moral ambiguity of the characters’ choices, which robs viewers of a dialogue, making the show nothing more than a melodrama.
Black Mirror Season 7 has yet to be announced.