Charlie Brooker won't appear in his Death to 2020 mockumentary, which will send up Netflix's "beautiful" documentaries

Radio Times

The Black Mirror creator used to star in December Wipe specials roasting the previous year for the BBC, the last of which he aired in 2016. But his star-studded Death to 2020 mockumentary premiering Saturday won't be like his Wipe specials. “Every year (on the Wipe specials) I seemed to be saying ‘this is the worst year ever’ and then along comes 2020 and puts all of that into sharp relief! So it’s been an interesting year to approach – and the approach of this particular special is very different from the kind of stuff I’ve done in the past," says Brooker. “For one thing I’m not in it, which is a relief to everyone – and it’s more sort of character-based.” Brooker, who began working on Death to 2020 over the summer, says it "is not just a sort of cathartic, gruelling watch – there’s a lot of stupid jokes in there as well!...Netflix has had great success with doing a lot of documentaries – often about appalling things happening, with beautiful cinematography. So (the format) seemed like a good opportunity to do something that was talking about the year and was also gently tweaking the nose of a format that you would see on Netflix.” Brooker also reiterated that this year has not been “like an episode of Black Mirror," adding: “If I’d been writing the Black Mirror version of a pandemic unfolding across the planet, it would’ve been incredibly violent and society would’ve collapsed into dust."