Charlie Brooker wants Black Mirror to be one of TV’s longest-running shows

Exclusive: Brooker doesn’t want his Netflix anthology show to end anytime soon

It’s been 14 years since Black Mirror‘s humble beginnings on Channel 4 – and if creator Charlie Brooker has his way, it’ll become one of TV’s longest-running shows.

Brooker’s dystopian anthology show, which returns this week on Netflix, ran for three series on terrestrial TV between 2011 and 2014. The streaming service gave it a new lease of life when it looked like new episodes would not be commissioned.

That was in 2017 and, ever since, the show has increasingly attracted star names, ranging from Miley Cyrus to Josh Hartnett.

The new series’s A-list cast includes Paul Giamatti, Rashida Jones, Issa Rae and Emma Corrin, who stars in a feature-length episode titled “Hotel Reverie”.

New episodes, as ever, explore the worrying effects of technology on the world – and if there were any doubts over whether the show could continue (considering the real world has, thanks to AI, worryingly caught up with the science fiction since it first aired), Brooker is batting them away.

Black Mirror’s debut episode “Hated in the Nation” made headlines after showing Rory Kinnear’s prime minister getting intimate with a pig on national TV to save an abducted member of the royal family. When The Independent highlighted that this was 14 years ago, Brooker replied: “Don’t say that. I feel so old.”

Aske if the show could continue for another 14 years, he said: “I hope so,” revealing that was his plan.

He corroborated this to the BBC, stating: “Hopefully [it will run and run]. Selfishly, it’s a fun job.”

Charlie Brooker has grand plans for ‘Black Mirror’ (The Independent)

One of season seven’s stars who was overjoyed to win a role is Lewis Gribben, the Somewhere Boy breakout who appears in an episode titled “Plaything”.

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“It’s trippy,” he said. “You watch it and you’re like, ‘It would be cool to be a part of that,’ so being in it is like, ‘Woah!’”.

Gribben said that Black Mirror “represents where we’re going wrong in humanity” and “how we're getting further and further apart from people” – and pointed to the recent Studio Ghibli AI scandal as evidence.

Last month, fans of famed Japanese animation studio behind Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle were left furious when a new version of ChatGPT let them transform popular internet memes or personal photos into the distinct style of Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki.

“Bad parts of technology are becoming more acceptable, like recently that whole AI Studio Ghibli rip-off art,” Gribben said.

“I love Ghibli movies and they’re all hand drawn and then animated – it takes years to get it that way. Then people are like, ‘Oh, I can make Ghibli art from a photo in two hours.’

“That people find that’s OK when there are real artists who paint and draw, and you’ve just replicated it on a phone and are trying to sell it, is crazy to me. It’s bad and soulless.”

Lewis Gribben in season seven ‘Black Mirror’ episode ‘Plaything’ (Netflix)

Black Mirror season seven is released on Netflix on 10 April.