New Black Mirror Series in the Works at Netflix

After a three-year hiatus, Netflix is bringing more Black Mirror to subscribers. The dystopian drama was a huge viral hit when it first debuted in 2011, drawing comparisons to the beloved suspense series The Twilight Zone and drawing in millions of viewers. According to Variety, season six is set to have more episodes than the three-episode season five, and will add to each episode’s budget, essentially making each new episode a movie. There are no details about what stories or creatives will drive the new season.

This comes after a lot of legal and financial wrangling on the part of Netflix. Creators Charlie Booker and Annabel Jones left House of Tomorrow, a production company backed by Endemol Shine Group, in early 2020, and shortly thereafter signed an unprecedented overall deal with Netflix, bringing exclusive rights to any new project from “Broke And Bones,” the then-new production company of the Emmy-winning Black Mirror creators, to Netflix and giving the streamer the option to take over Broke and Bones at the end of the deal.

But Endemol Shine still owned the rights to Black Mirror and it took until very recently for Netflix to come to a deal with them to license the rights to make new seasons of the popular series. And, as noted above, it sounds like the plan is to make it bigger and more expensive than ever before, bringing it in line with fellow Netflix superhit Stranger Things. 

In the time since the end of the last Black Mirror series, Brooker has worked on Death to 2020, a mockumentary about the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, which he and Netflix followed up with Death to 2021 and Attack of the Hollywood Clichés!.

Netflix has been generally finding success with UK productions. In addition to Black Mirror, series like The Crown, Sex Education, Bodyguard, Sherlock, Top Boy, Penny Dreadful, Peaky Blinders (and others) have become hits for Netflix, which further explains why the streaming service is putting money into locking down some top UK content creators.

Here’s the big-picture synopsis for Black Mirror: 

The show looks inwards, at the darker aspects of humanity and society. This is done through the theme of technology, hence the second meaning. The black mirror is the screen that rules our lives. Taking contemporary phenomena (ranging from the wild popularity of talent shows on TV to the impact of social media and smartphones on our lives) as a starting point and speculate how such phenomena could/would evolve in the future. Each episode tells a different story with different protagonists and focuses on a different theme.