‘Black Mirror’ Season 3 Details: Rashida Jones and Mike Schur Co-Write New Episode
For those captivated by the first seven installments of the UK anthology series “Black Mirror,” there’s an awful lot more to come. Today at Netflix’s TCA press day, executive producers Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones promised that the upcoming Season 3 — premiering October 21 — would maintain that “special ‘Black Mirror’-y unpleasantness,” but also a wider variety of tones across the six new stand-alone installments.
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In classic “Black Mirror” style, the secrets behind these episodes were kept under wraps, beyond some basic details:
- “San Junipero” features Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis in an episode directed by Owen Harris
- “Shut Up and Dance” features Jerome Flynn and Alex Lawther in an episode directed by James Watkins
- “Nosedive” features Bryce Dallas Howard, Alice Eve and James Norton in an episode directed by Joe Wright
- “Men Against Fire” stars Michael Kelly, Malachi Kirby and Madeline Brewer in an episode directed by Jakob Verbruggen
- “Hated in the Nation” features Kelly MacDonald in an episode directed by James Hawes
- “Playtest” features Wyatt Russell and Hannah John-Kamen in an episode directed by Dan Trachtenberg.
Brooker is the lead writer, but one of the six episodes, “Nosedive,” was co-written by Rashida Jones and Michael Schur, who were fans of the show (in Brooker’s words, “the feeling was mutual”).
They were hesitant to reveal details about “Nosedive,” but described the episode as “a social satire about identity in the social media age — quite a playful episode, but also quite nightmarish.” Meanwhile, “Playtest” was billed as a video game-themed episode, while “Hated in the Nation” will be more of a “police procedural.”
In general, the show’s shift from Channel 4 to Netflix has challenged them to be “ambitious in scale — bigger and crazier,” Jones said. “But we hope they still feel very human and grounded. At the heart, there’s a human dilemma we’re solving.”
“Technology is never the villain,” Brooker added. “It’s always about human failures and human messes.”
That said, the forward-looking series does find that its biggest challenge is staying ahead of reality. Asked directly if they can top a “Black Mirror” episode which ended up famously echoed by an incident involving David Cameron, “I’m not sure we can top the David Cameron incident. He did it himself,” Brooker said.
They will not be referencing Cameron in the new season, though — or pigs.
“Black Mirror” Season 3 premieres October 21 on Netflix.
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