In a 2013 interview with Games Radar discussing the second season of “Black Mirror,” creator Charlie Brooker revealed how his show had nearly borrowed the framing device from the hit 1960s anthology show “The Twilight Zone.” Just as showrunner Rod Serling would talk directly to the camera at the start and finish of every episode, Brooker nearly did the same for every episode of “Black Mirror” season 1.
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The main argument for this was that it would’ve helped ease a lot of the network’s concerns. Brooker explained that studios are often reluctant to do anthology shows in part because there are no recurring characters for audiences to latch onto, like there would be for any other type of TV series. The closest thing “Black Mirror” could do — at least until it started playing around with sequels in season 7 — was to throw in a recurring narrator-type character.
“Rod Serling was the unifying character, in a way,” Brooker said about “The Twilight Zone.” He brought up how Alfred Hitchcock and Roald Dahl had done the same trick with their anthology series, with similar fun results. Ultimately, however, Brooker didn’t feel like it’d be a good fit. “If I was doing it, it would just be downright odd!” he argued. “And then if we invented a character, why are they there?” Brooker obviously has a great respect for “The Twilight Zone,” but this was one element he simply wasn’t interested in putting his own spin on.
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Brooker explained why the Rod Serling approach wouldn’t work for him
A big reason Brooker abandoned the idea is that he’d found another method to keep the network at ease: he’d cut the episode count. “Initially we thought we were going to do eight episodes per season,” he explained. “Then it became apparent that it was easier to do three — we didn’t have the budget and time to do eight, basically. And once it came down to three episodes it felt less necessary to have that.” The show would eventually expand to six-episode seasons, but that was only after it had been bought by Netflix and given a massive boost in budget. Brooker explained further:
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“What I felt quite strongly was that really, when you think of ‘The Twilight Zone’ you don’t actually think of Rod Serling … With ‘Tales Of The Unexpected’ you might think of Roald Dahl, but that’s not the quality you remember about it. You say things, ‘Go a bit “Twilight Zone”‘ because the show itself became the character you tuned in for each week. Even if you didn’t know what you were going to get, you knew it would have a certain tone … the intention was that hopefully it’d become a thing where when people would see some eerie technology story they’d go, ‘Ooh, that’s a bit “Black Mirror!‘”
Sure enough, that’s exactly what Charlie Brooker achieved throughout the first few seasons of the series. By the time its Channel 4 run wrapped up, with its 2014 Christmas special “White Christmas,” viewers had been trained to brace themselves before starting a new episode. They knew they could expect a cool speculative premise, a dark twist, and a thought-provoking ending. Those were the show’s true calling cards; when it comes to making a strong, lasting impression on pop culture, “Black Mirror” didn’t need a narrator to pull it off.
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