Political Science Commons^™

Screen Savior: How Black Mirror Reflects The Present More Than The Future, Bryant W. Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Despite the media treatment of Black Mirror as a dystopian series dealing with the (near) future, this essay explores season three of Charlie Brooker's immensely successful Channel 4-turned-Netflix series in order to show how the central themes of the series are actually more concerned with the present than they are with the future. The present that is reflected is, to put it mildly, not very pretty, but it offers the necessarily dark vision of the current conjuncture that we need if we are to fully appreciate where our present tendencies are leading us.