Charlie Brooker’s dark anthology series prepares to embrace technology – and bridge the gap between fiction and reality – with a choose-your-own-adventure episode of Black Mirror.
A report on Bloomberg suggests that Netflix will be bringing an interactive element to the next series of Black Mirror.
The unsettling anthology series, which focuses on the – often insidious – spread of technology into our everyday lives, has flirted with in-universe social voting themes and video games before. It makes sense then that Netflix and Brooker will be allowing the viewers to influence the progression of an episode of Black Mirror during season five, which is expected to air this winter.
This isn’t Netflix’s first foray into interactive games as part of their television series. Puss in Book is an animated children’s series that allows viewers to make story decisions for the feisty feline hero. The streaming giant was also working on an interactive Minecraft series with Telltale Games before the studio’s effective closure. While Telltale did indicate they would be maintaining a skeleton staff to meet its obligations to Netflix the project’s future is still somewhat up in the air, while their adaptation of Stranger Things is thought to be cancelled.
There are of course technical and creative challenges to delivering a choose-your-own-adventure in a traditionally linear storytelling medium. If anyone can pull it off, though, it’s Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker.
The only other detail we know about season five of Black Mirror thus far is that one episode will transport us back to the 80s, based on these shopfronts spied in Croydon earlier in the year.
The Black Mirror set builders on St George’s Walk Croydon have gone completely mad now. pic.twitter.com/gbWiyPEHyh
— Tim Longhurst (@tim_longhurst) April 25, 2018
You are in Croydon in 1987. To the North, you see Woolworths. BHS is to the East. Dixons is to the South, and Blockbuster Video is to the West.
What would you like to do? >
