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Introduction: Read that Back to Yourself and Ask If You Live in a Sane Society

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Through the Black Mirror

Abstract

Has there ever a been a television show more intrinsically connected to the fears and anxieties of the decade in which it was produced than Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2011–)? Across the diverse tapestry of its episodes it has both dramatised and deconstructed the shifting cultural and technological coordinates of the era like no other programme and in years to come when people want to know what we talked about and what we were afraid of in the new millennial decades, they could do a lot worse, and not much better, than begin with Black Mirror. Indeed, an exploration and interrogation of what these anxieties might tell us are the central aims of Through the Black Mirror: Deconstructing the Side Effects of the Digital Age, which charts the first four seasons of Black Mirror from its opening episode “The National Anthem” broadcast on Channel Four on 4 December 2011 to the “interactive movie” that is Bandersnatch (2018).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These three episodes were all considered to be the top ten best of the series in an article by Gilbert Cruz (2009) in Time called “Top 10 Twilight Zone Episodes”.

  2. 2.

    “San Junipero” earned Black Mirror its first Primetime Emmy Awards in the categories of Outstanding Television Movie and Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special.

  3. 3.

    The idea of Black Mirror being prescient or able to predict the future has been applied to several episodes including “The Waldo Moment”, “Hated in The Nation” and “Nosedive” among others from both technological and cultural perspectives (see Weller, 2018).

  4. 4.

    In 2008, Jon Hamm won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in A Television Series—Drama.

  5. 5.

    The anthology series has become increasingly popular in recent years with shows such as High Maintenance (HBO, 2016–) Room 104 (HBO, 2017–), The Guest Book (TBS, 2017–) and Electric Dreams (Channel 4, 2017–) demonstrating a resurgent interest in short-form storytelling. Elsewhere, the self-contained mini-series format of American Horror Story (FX, 2011–), Fargo (FX, 2014–), True Detective (HBO, 2014–) and The Girlfriend Experience (Starz, 2016–) provides further evidence of a sophisticated and demanding audience.

  6. 6.

    In “Hated in the Nation” there are two other references to her: one in a Twitter hashtag “#deathto” and another when the police office Blue (Faye Marsay) says she worked on the “Ian Rannoch case”.

  7. 7.

    See, for example, AFellowOfLimitedJest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Southampton Solent University, Southampton, UK

    Terence McSweeney & Stuart Joy

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  1. Terence McSweeney
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Correspondence to Terence McSweeney .

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  1. Southampton Solent University, Southampton, UK

    Terence McSweeney

  2. Southampton Solent University, Southampton, UK

    Stuart Joy

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McSweeney, T., Joy, S. (2019). Introduction: Read that Back to Yourself and Ask If You Live in a Sane Society. In: McSweeney, T., Joy, S. (eds) Through the Black Mirror. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19458-1_1

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