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New details surrounding the Black Mirror expected to drop on Netflix next week have been leaked.
According to reports, the new outing – titled Bandersnatch – will be the previously reported choose-your-own adventure that will allow viewers to interactively dictate events using their remote control. It will be an original release and not part of the forthcoming season five which is expected to be released in 2019.
Reddit fans have unearthed some revelations which, if true, means fans of Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones’s anthology series have a lot to look forward to on 28 December.
The biggest tidbit of information comes from the Korean Media Rating Board , which seems to reveal the film’s director and lead star.
Look away now if you don’t want to know any possible details about Bandersnatch .
Show all 10 Best TV of 2018 10) Save Me Lennie James's missing-child thriller Save Me looked as though it might be a paint-by-numbers affair. Instead it was a gripping start to Sky Atlantic's impressive run, with James taking the lead as Nelly, the womanising bum who gains a new lease of investigative energy when his estranged daughter Jody vanishes. A smart script kept us guessing right up to an ending that denied us the closure we had expected. A second series has been commissioned.
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Best TV of 2018 9) Cunk on Britain How much you enjoyed Philomena Cunk's history of Britain depended on how funny you find Diane Morgan's resting confused face. I find it hilarious. Her interviewees are kind of in on the joke but clearly briefed to take it as seriously as possible. They’ll be mid-flow and she will cock her head and drain all the interest from her face. “What's the most political thing that's ever happened?” she asked Robert Peston, who did his best to answer with a straight face. Co-producer Charlie Brooker's fingerprints are everywhere in the way Morgan's vain, poorly informed, easily distracted Cunk operates within a ruthlessly satirical production, which sends up the tropes and cliches of every dodgy documentary and history programme. She might not be the comic creation we need, but she is the one we deserve right now.
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Best TV of 2018 8) Sally4Ever You either love Julia Davis or think her sick filth ought to be banned. Sally4Ever proved yet again that there is nobody working today – or at least nobody with the same platform – with a blacker sense of humour. Sally (Catherine Shepherd) was already surrounded by monsters: her loser of a boyfriend (Alex MacQueen) and tricky colleagues played by Julian Barratt and Felicity Montagu. Then Emma (Davis herself) arrived, a tornado of sex and bad intentions. Beneath the shagging, drugs, excrement, manipulation and malice were pockets of tenderness, but you had to look pretty hard to see them. Luckily there were also gales of laughter. N.b. If you have yet to see it, please do not watch it with your parents or children on Boxing Day and then write in to complain.
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Best TV of 2018 7) The Little Drummer Girl This was a spiritual successor rather than a sequel to The Night Manager. It was still a Le Carré adaptation on the BBC sprinkled with famous faces, but the differences were as pronounced as the similarities. Park Chan-Wook, the Korean auteur, directed with a high sense of style. Florence Pugh was dazzling as the ingenue actress Charlie, recruited for a dangerous mission across Europe, ably supported by Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon as her spook handlers. Some viewers switched off after the first episodes, which took time to set the scene. They missed out on a vivid, beautifully told thriller.
BBC
Best TV of 2018 6) A Very English Scandal Hugh Grant… can act? That was the first surprise in this smooth, stylish BBC retelling of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. He burst convincingly out of the charming fop mould he has slept in so comfortably for thirty years. What have we been missing all this time? The other shock was remembering how recent it all was. The government is still up to a lot of nonsense, but the days of this kind of cover-up, for these reasons, is surely over. Or is it?
BBC
Best TV of 2018 5) Patrick Melrose Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels have the kind of precisely drawn interiority that makes any kind of adaptation seem doomed to fail. Instead, the Sky Atlantic series brought them convincingly to life. It is not a happy tale. In flashback we saw Patrick's childhood in the shadow of his monstrous father David (Hugo Weaving), and the decades of self-loathing and substance abuse that followed. At the centre of all this was Benedict Cumberbatch, as good as he's ever been. His Patrick could be brilliant, witty, cruel and pitiful, sometimes in the same smack-addled sentence. Weaving, Jennifer Jason Leigh as David's wife Eleanor and Pip Torrens as his ghastly friend Nicholas Pratt all put in memorable performances, too.
Sky
Best TV of 2018 4) Dynasties At an age where most of us are long past doing anything, David Attenborough is still changing our expectations of what a nature documentary can do. Like The Rolling Stones, he has been on his farewell tour since about 1970, but unlike Jagger & Co, the returns are not diminishing. Is he fuelled by anger at the world's response to climate change? Or simply driven by some massive internal dynamo, a soul-quest to improve our ability to relate to penguins? Whatever the motivation, Dynasties was wonderful, telling complex stories of the animal kingdom with beautiful photography.
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Best TV of 2018 3) Killing Eve It's unusual for a TV writer to attract more attention than the stars or director. Perhaps the world is changing. Or perhaps it's simply that the writer of Killing Eve was Phoebe Waller-Bridge, star of Fleabag, Star Wars and one of the country's outstanding new talents. Here she turned her hand to a spy thriller, an adaptation of Luke Jennings' novels about a beautiful assassin, Villanelle (Jodie Comer), and the MI6 agent given the task of hunting her down, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh). Both leads demanded attention: Comer the magnetic murderer, Oh the harassed but brilliant spy. The script swerved between comedy, action and drama often enough to keep everyone guessing.
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Best TV of 2018 2) England vs Colombia Yes, the national team have played on television in a World Cup before, but I'm including this because the outcome, an England penalty shoot-out victory, was so unusual as to count as a whole new format. At a time when we all watch things at different times, here was something unmistakably live. We watched Gareth Southgate's men knowing that the rest of the country was, too, poised in living rooms and pub gardens, ready to bury their heads in a sofa or throw their pints in the air. No other TV programme sold as many waistcoats.
Rex Features
Best TV of 2018 1) Succession The ageing patriarch and his scheming children. Not an original concept. Trust, the drama about the last days of Getty family, proved that it was possible for a series built on this premise to have actors, scenery, direction, script, etc etc, and still somehow fall short. Succession, by comparison, felt alive. If US production values and ambition gave it its scale, its heart was dark and British. We can thank Jesse Armstrong, co-creator of Peep Show, and his all-star line-up of British writers, including the Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche and Georgia Pritchett. They made the Roy family expats themselves, and you could hear the old aristocratic froideur in every withering put-down. But we cared for them, too. One of the many TV professionals I consulted for this list thought Succession was so much better than everything else this year that the top 10 should just have it listed in bold and then nine blank spaces. I wouldn't go that far but it's certainly at the top.
Alamy Stock Photo
These reports have Dunkirk lead Fionn Whitehead named as lead actor, with David Slade down to direct.
Slade, whose credits include episodes of Breaking Bad and Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman novel American Gods , was invited to put his imprint on one of the show’s dystopian parables last year. The result was the Maxine Peake-starring black-and-white horror outing, “Metalhead”.
According to the same report, the synopsis is translated as: “A young programmer makes a fantasy novel into a game. Soon, reality and virtual world are mixed and start to create confusion”.
This seems to refute the theory that Bandersnatch would have anything to do with series two episode, “Be Right Back,” which starred Hayley Atwell and Domhnall
Gleeson.
One Twitter user shed some light on the film’s title, stating that Bandersnatch was a video game, developed in 1984, that never saw the light of day.
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Try for free This year coincides with photos taken earlier this year of the show’s production in Croydon. Keen-eyed individuals sussed out that, going by the props being used in a retrofitted WHSmith, the episode would be set in 1984.
Whatever happens, Black Mirror fans clearly have less than a week until something drops. Whether it’ll be Bandersnatch or something else entirely remains to be seen.
The show’s fourth series dropped in December 2017 and featured episodes including “USS Callister”, “Hang the DJ” and “Black Museum”.
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