Black Mirror Creator Responds to Criticism That Netflix Ruined Series

When a beloved TV show jumps networks or platforms, the quality can sometimes be impacted in ways both good and bad, but for some longtime Black Mirror fans, the anthology series’ pivot from Britain’s Channel 4 to Netflix has seen it lose its edge. Series creator Charlie Brooker recently addressed those concerns, noting that he’s never seen any directives from the streamer to make the program more palatable, though did note that there has been a concerted effort to make the stories appeal more to international audiences as opposed to specifically UK viewers. Season 6 of Black Mirror premiered earlier this year on Netflix.

“One of the criticisms we sometimes get is, ‘I prefer the show when it was British and everyone in it was miserable and everything smelled a little bit of sh-t and all the stories were horrible,’” Brooker recently shared at an event in Sydney, Australia, per The Guardian. “‘And then it’s gone to Netflix and suddenly everything’s sunny and happy and everyone has wonderful teeth, and it’s full of Hollywood stars and it’s lost that edge.’”

Brooker accepted those criticisms, joking that his work created an intimidating persona for himself and how “everyone expected me to be like the Unabomber” when he came to the U.S. He added, “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.”

He also pointed towards the Season 6 episode “Loch Henry” as being “f-cking nasty — nasty as anything we’ve ever done.”

While some audiences might appreciate the bleakness of the series, Season 3’s “San Junipero” is one of the most beloved episodes of the whole series, which featured some more optimistic themes.

“Arguably the happiest [episode] I’ve ever written was ‘San Junipero’ and I just did that off my own back,” Brooker detailed. “It’s probably one of the most meaningful ones we’ve done … It was the first positive one that I’d done because, up until that point, every Black Mirror was about someone’s in a trap and they don’t get out of it. And in [‘San Junipero’] it was two people are in a trap and that’s fine. It seemed that that resonated with a lot of people.”

Black Mirror Season 7 has yet to be announced.

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