When one considers the way technology is taking over our lives, it’s sort of hard not to have “Black Mirror” flash through your mind.
The show seems to get under one’s skin, for it feels like the wild tales told in it are just a step or two ahead of what really transpires nowadays, thanks to Charlie Brooker himself, the brains behind the series.
He’s often viewed as some kind of modern-day prophet, but he says he’s just exaggerating what’s already happening around us.
Even creator Brooker himself can’t help but chuckle at the sheer frequency of news stories passed along to him that could have been ripped straight from his scripts.
“It’s like I’ve got a sixth sense for this stuff,” he explained to Deadline. “People keep saying, ‘Hey, this is so Black Mirror!’ And all I can think is, ‘Yep, just a bit of creative overdrive on my part.’
The latest season of “Black Mirror” is an epitome, with its episode “Joan is Awful.” Just imagine that your life has been turned into a series without any consent, and it’s every awkward, embarrassing moment aired out for the world to see. It does sound like hell. That is exactly what happens to Joan, played by Annie Murphy from “Schitt’s Creek”. With the help of AI.
And the timing? Or depending upon how you look at it, it could not have been better; it could not have been worse.
Because the episode dropped in the middle of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, with AI right at the heart of the debate, no less. Talk about art imitating life!
Even Charlie Brooker himself was slightly taken aback by how things lined up. “It was just crazy timing,” he said. “We were well into post-production when the strikes happened, and suddenly, our episode was more relevant than ever. I couldn’t have planned it if I tried, but it felt good to be part of the conversation.”
Even Salma Hayek – who guest stars in the episode, playing herself – got unnerved by the whole thing.
She said that there were moments there in the script that made her think twice. “Sitting there in a bra sometimes I’d actually think, ‘Is this gonna get me into trouble?'” she confessed to The Radio Times.
You don’t get to do many days in your career where you play a deranged, exaggerated version of yourself on screen, but that’s basically the whole point of “Black Mirror”— to scramble your line of comfort and make you squirm just a little bit.
But here’s the thing: Brooker isn’t out to bash technology. He’s not saying we should all toss our smartphones into the sea and go live in the woods. Far from it.
“I’m actually impressed by what we’ve created,” he explained.
“It’s not that the tech is bad—it’s all about how we choose to use it.” Take AI, for example.
“Sure, it would be dazzling and capable of some fantastically cool things, but it would also be a chaotic force if it ever got into the wrong hands,” he added.
“One could use AI to disseminate crazy misinformation and scare everyone or one could merely use it to assist in touch-up work on a photograph or in generating a list of baby names from the 1930s. It’s all about the choices we make.”
