Though the anthology television series Black Mirror has an ambitious vision – it is a dramatic satire which explores the unanticipated consequences of new technologies – there is little doubt that the tone was well and truly set by the first episode, back in 2011.
In it, a fictional British princess played by Lydia Wilson and the ransom for her return was that the fictional British prime minister Michael Callow (Rory Kinnear) should have sexual intercourse with a pig on national television. It seemed somehow to simultaneously offend, appal and illuminate. A tough combination by any measure.
Just three episodes were produced in that first series for Channel 4, three more episodes two years later and then a one-off special in 2014. The streaming platform Netflix has now commissioned 12 episodes of the series, to be released in two blocks of six in 2016 and 2017.
"There's probably a wider variety of tone across these six episodes than there has been previously," creator/producer Charlie Brooker explains.
"Each episode is a complete standalone story with entirely different cast, different characters, different world, often different realities," he says. "It's a pure anthology show, kind of in the vein of shows like The Twilight Zone or Tales of the Unexpected."
Brooker's co-producer Annabel Jones says the new episodes are "more ambitious, ambitious in scale, ambitious in terms of the talent we are working with, ambitious in some of the worlds that we have created," as those which came before.
"They are crazier and bigger but I hope that they still feel very grounded and at the heart there's a human story and a human dilemma that we're exploring," she says. "So we try to sort of create entertaining but thought-provoking dramas but that also have a human element, a real human story."
And no pigs. "No pigs," says Brooker.
Past episodes have been set in an alternative realities in which people are chipped to retail complete memories, can access the internet via an inbuilt device called a Z-eye, or can communicate with the dead using a social media platform that bridges the real world and the afterlife.
Brooker says almost all of the series' ideas have bubbled up in conversation. Brooker writes most of the episodes, though he collaborated with Kanak Huq on one script in the first series. New episodes have been co-written with Michael Schur, Rashida Jones and William Bridges.
News events sometimes inspire him, Brooker says, "if, like, I don't know, Samsung invents a new phone that can beam flavours onto your tongue from five miles away or something, people will tweet me and say, oh, this is a bit Black Mirror."
But he says it is the human narrative and not the technological development which is the starting point. "When we've tried to sit there and think of stories based around some kind of technologic development, it doesn't quite gel," he says.
"Similarly, if we're sitting there thinking, well, we've gotta do a story about the political scene at the moment, it doesn't feel like that's the best starting point," he adds. "It's usually a 'what if' idea that just occurs and often is something usually something that makes me laugh initially that we then play straight."
Though some of the stories have touched on transgression and payback, the idea that a line is crossed and that someone has to pay for it, Jones does not believe the series is, broadly, about retribution.
"I think we're trying to dramatise very contemporary concerns," she says. "With the technological advancement in the last few decades I think we're in a place that feels very new and alien and I think we're evolving as a species, and we don't quite know how or what the ramifications are yet."
The heart of the stories is, she adds, "a sort general unease we haven't yet explored or come to terms with."
The two new blocks of episodes will stream on Netflix; the platform has also acquired the rights to the earlier episodes. Though that environment lends itself to "binge" watching the series, Brooker and Jones don't believe it's a requirement, particularly given the series' anthological nature.
"We have a wide variety of stories," Brooker says. "We've got a police procedural story, for instance, this time around. We've got a romance, a thriller, a horror romp episode, a military story. And running times are quite different. One of them is feature length, so you wouldn't necessarily want to binge-watch that and another one."
Brooker likens it to a small film festival. "That's how we approached it," he says, "Because you can watch them in any order as well. So we sort of imagined in our pretentious wanky way that we were curating a film festival. You can choose which one you want to go into first. If you want to watch six films in a go, go ahead."
WHAT Black Mirror
WHEN Netflix, from October 21
