Black Mirror

There are few American shows more acclaimed and successful in the past decade than Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s peerless study of the corrupting influence of money and power, as illustrated through a Murdoch-esque media dynasty led by Brian Cox’s bull-like Logan Roy. The series was magnificent because it blended hysterical, unexpected black humor (step forward the excellent Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Wambsgans, who is hilarious virtually every moment he’s onscreen) with the serious thespian pyrotechnics of a starry cast including Cox, Kieran Culkin and the great Jeremy Strong, who, rumor has it, did not believe that he was making a comedy but a serious study of moral decay.

Charlie Brooker’s cautionary technological tales have now been running for well over a decade, and they are almost in danger of seeming old-fashioned. When Black Mirror began in 2011, Instagram was only a few months old, the iPhone was a new novelty just coming into the mainstream, and Elon Musk was best known for being CEO of Tesla. Now, virtually everything in the world has changed, and Big Tech plays roles in our lives that the ever-cynical Brooker could barely have imagined. There is, naturally, a residual irony that in order to afford the budgets – and starry casts – that the show continues to demand, it long since left its original home on Britain’s Channel 4 for the deeper-pocketed Netflix, which still funds it into its seventh series.

Burned by the backlash to Lost, Damon Lindelof went in a new direction for his following show, The Leftovers. It also had a mystery at its center: why did a rapture happen where 2 percent of the world’s population instantly vanished on a random Friday? But whereas Lost set up an expectation of answers, only to disappoint, The Leftovers made it clear that there were no answers to this mystery. Over its unfortunately abrupt three seasons, neither the viewers nor the characters would ever find out why this event happened or what it meant; why some people were taken and why others were left behind. It wasn’t a puzzle to solve but a situation to cope with and live through. It’s the greatest TV show you haven’t seen.

It was that philosopher of modern life Iggy Pop who first noticed that the screens were watching us. ‘See that cat, down on her back?’ Mr Pop reflected thoughtfully on the Stooges’ Funhouse album of 1970. ‘She got a TV Eye on me.’ These days the ‘TV Eye’ is on all of us. Black Mirror, back on Netflix for its fifth series, is what Stooges guitarist Ron Ashton would have recognized as an extended riff on the same theme. Except that while Mr Pop found the experience quite pleasant— ‘Yeah I love her so’ — it’s hard to enjoy Black Mirror. To be fair, that might not be the point of it. We aren’t here to enjoy ourselves. Iggy Pop’s signature move is to drop his pants at the end of the show.

What I watched: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch What I turned off: re-runs of Arrested Development (it’s great but my son has been making me binge watch with him and you can have too much of a good thing) What I’m going to be tuning into: Trigger Warning with Killer Mike. He’s a rapper and activist but I get the impression that politically he’s like the anti-Kanye-West.