Watercooler Shows, the trending series that everyone talks about the next day at the office, around the water cooler. Watercooler Wednesdays seeks to be a (critical) guide through the VoD maze: from masterpiece series to guilty pleasures, and from blockbusters that keep you on the edge of your couch to hidden gems; if it leads to binging, then it’s exactly what we’re looking for.

Black Mirror (Charlie Brooker, 2023)

It took me a while to find the latest Black Mirror on the Netflix Home page – less than 10 days after its release, season 6 was not (yet/anymore) on any of the lists that the platform pushes on you (Popular on Netflix, Trending Now, Top 10 in [your country] Today, etc). If there’s one thing we’ve learned from previous seasons, it’s not to trust technology (companies), but this time the famous Netflix algorithm matched my viewing experience. Sure, some of the new episodes would have deserved a bit more appreciation from the platform’s subscribers – to the extent that we take these rankings as a transparent expression of popular taste and not just a marketing tool (and of course, with the understanding that recommendations hardly reflect a standard of technical implementation, let alone value hierarchy or innovation).

I wouldn’t have started with this little detour through Netflix’s in-house policy if Black Mirror itself had not called for further reflection on the matter in its very first episode, Joan is Awful. Joan, a tech CEO, has her life turned upside down when a streaming platform turns her daily life into a TV series. Sure, it’s flattering to be played by none other than Salma Hayek, but it sucks to be fired, dumped by your boyfriend, and so on, for a few otherwise not even that serious, or even fictitious, indiscretions. Joan is not awful, but her boring and mundane life needs to undergo a process of dramatization. “Creating characters and dialogue for dramatic purposes,” her lawyer quotes from the Terms & Conditions she accepted when she subscribed to Streamberry and basically consented to the app’s usage of her personal data. Joan finds an ally in Salma Hayek, who is also unhappy with the platform’s use of her image.

In a move that aims to be cool and meta but rather comes off as cringe, Streamberry is very much like Netflix, if not identical, when it comes to its features. It’s not like Netflix is anywhere close to a breakthrough like a quantum computer that instantly generates CGI series using deepfake to cast A-listers in any role. But they sure would like to. Charlie Brooker, the creator of the show, confessed in an interview that he tried to write an episode using ChatGPT: “At first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is shit (…) all it’s done is look up all the synopses of Black Mirror episodes, and sort of mush them together. (…) there’s not actually any real original thought here.”

Technology may not be at that level yet, but here, too, the Netflix recipe – visual, auditory (the emphasis on the soundtrack), and emotional (the obsession with nostalgia, as 3 out of 5 episodes are set in the past) – is followed religiously. Depending on the script and acting – less predictable – what comes out of the Netflix film factory usually falls somewhere between content and cinema, and season 6 of Black Mirror is no exception.

Lack of originality can always be argued as an homage. We have: a horror with werewolves and paparazzi set in Hollywood during Bush Jr’s first term; a ’70s slasher mixed with demonic possession against the backdrop of racial tensions in London on the brink of the Thatcher era; a minimalistic retro Sci-Fi set in an alternate 1969, where two astronauts are sent into space for years but can transfer their consciousness to a mechanical avatar left at home with their family. Alternate histories, supernatural elements, and a notable bent towards genre film, which is exactly what Black Mirror has never been. It may not have been original, but that amalgamated episode generated by ChatGPT probably had more of the Black Mirror aesthetic and concept than this latest season.

Black Mirror has always been the ubiquitous mirror of the modern world – the gadget, the screen, the smartphone – and it always revolved around imagining science fiction scenarios (social dystopias or psychological issues) based on already-known technologies. The most visible sin of the new season is ultimately false advertising. Joan is Awful, the only episode that kept some of the series’ trademark approach, is a lazy attempt without vision, the fake bill placed on top of a stack of newspapers. Made from the beginning to look like a Netflix comedy, Joan is Awful is not so much the worst episode of the season as it is the most unbearable. Salma Hayek screaming in exasperation “Kill the quam-puta!” with a strong Mexican accent is enough to make you skip the entire season (the pun is repeated about 3 or 4 times, in case you didn’t get it the first time that it refers to the quantum computer generating TV shows).

So we have a Black Mirror season but without the mirror – it reflects very little of our technological contemporaneity, and when it does, it fails big time. On the other hand, it heavily explores the black, sometimes extremely predictable, other times unpredictable, but in a completely gratuitous and demonstrative way. Of all the 5 episodes – essentially medium-length films whose only connection is the fact that they are written by Charlie Brooker – I found Demon 79 to be the most compelling: a shoe saleswoman with violent fantasies is asked by a demon with a sense of humor to kill three people to prevent the threat of a nuclear apocalypse. Beyond the Black Mirror label, each episode rises and then falls apart at the hand of its own script – Demon 79 is the only one where the story flows smoothly and doesn’t seem algorithmically directed from plot point to plot point, making it probably one of the best Netflix productions lately.

Season 6 of Black Mirror is available on Netflix.

Andrei Sendrea

Film critic and journalist, UNATC graduate. Andrei Sendrea wrote for LiterNet, Gândul, FILM and Film Menu, and worked as an editor on the "Ca-n Filme" TV Show. In his free time, he works on his collection of movie stills, which he organizes into idiosyncratic categories. At Films in Frame, he writes the Watercooler Wednesdays column - the monthly top of TV shows/series.