Black Mirror's Charlie Brooker: Actually, viewers might have an appetite for dystopian storytelling amid the coronavirus pandemic

The New York Times

Brooker made headlines earlier this month when he said he wasn't sure viewers could "stomach" another season of Black Mirror when the real world is so bleak. When The New York Times asked if he's working on Season 6, Brooker said: "I’m not allowed to say. I have been keeping busy. I’ve been writing." But he did admit that it's possible for dystopian storytelling to work during a pandemic. "If you look at the film Dr. Strangelove, which was made in 1964, a period of time where nuclear extinction looked like a real possibility, that’s the darkest of satire, depicting an unfolding dystopia that people were in," he says. "So I don’t know that there isn’t an appetite for that sort of thing. In a way, lots of comedy shows are dystopian because it’s a humor in which the worst thing is constantly happening, even on the small scale, even if it’s like, 'Oh no, I hope my housemates don’t walk in and catch me doing this embarrassing thing.' Sure enough, they will. It must be a way of your brain expressing itself in some way and obviously in the midst of all this, there are a lot of worried brains around."