If any series has flown the sci-fi flag to new heights, it’s Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. And it’s this anthological narrative that renews the game: the intrigue that springs from the chapter’s origins, its flirtation with the most common technologies, and its constant limit with saturation. In his own way, he managed to resolve the dichotomy discovered by Pablo Capanna in his historic book The Sense of Science Fiction: Jules Verne was consulted for his opinion on the work of HG Wells, who used antigravity for space travel, while he used ballistics They say he replied: “I use science, he creates.” Halfway between what happened and what’s to come, Black Mirror manages to get to the point where, when things get dystopian enough, it’s normal to say it’s a “very Black Mirror”. Asked this question, Brooker didn’t test any theory, he practically said: “That’s good, because it’s free publicity.”

Idea hinge. Charlie Brooker was born in Reading, United Kingdom, in 1971. He started writing comics and between 1999 and 2003 he worked on the comedy page TVGoHome. Little by little he began to form a shrewd look, while cultivating a wide repertoire for work as an actor, screenwriter and presenter. In 2011 he released Black Mirror and became well known outside the UK. Originally, Black Mirror’s goal was to warn with dystopian tales about the dangers of technological addiction. The series grew from season to season in viewership and, after four years, Brooker returned with a sixth season and in Argentina, #BlackMirror was among the top ten network trends. In this return he considers change: “I want to throw out some of the basic assumptions about what the Black Mirror chapter will be like. I mean, when we started, there weren’t that many dystopian sci-fi shows. Now yes. So we broke the rule of being unpredictable in stories and there were a few that I was really interested in seeing how people reacted to,” said Brooker. “On top of that, I want viewers to be entertained as well as horrified. I never thought that I should explain what other people think about a story. And I feel that I will fail as a writer if an episode is deemed insignificant or highly didactic. This season there is no moral lesson and it is more interesting”. For Brooker, this new season should be like any other, namely, training for people to have fun after having a bad day in a world that, as sometimes in Black Mirror, seems to be getting worse.

ChatGPT. The platform’s voracity for adding content positions those who make it in spaces that were – presumably – previously assigned to actors and actresses. Hence the curiosity about how they came up with this or that script. Talkative, Brooker explains that “my writing process is a combination of slow motion, panic, and confusion. I’ve learned that you have to make a fool of yourself when you write a first draft because there’s always a voice in your head boycotting you and saying, ‘This is bullshit, give it up, let it go. And as for ideas, they’re like welcome intruders and occasionally pop up while I’m doing something else –watching TV, running, chatting with friends–; or also when I think of an idea and another, more interesting idea appears. Then, of course, you have to figure out how to make a story out of it, which is the hardest part.” In Hollywood writers’ strike, the use of regulated artificial intelligence to craft scripts was one of the demands. Brooker tested it to see how it would work with Black Mirror.” ChatGPT has no idea of ​​its own or original,” he stressed. “Use material written by others without paying royalties. I really saw the potential of the end as part of a human author’s toolkit, something of a toolkit that “autofills” narrative gaps. I asked for it. to do Black Mirror episodes and what he does is looks up episode synopsis for all the previous seasons. And if you dig deeper, you say: no groundbreaking ideas here.”

Debutant. One of the actresses who was surprised by Charlie Brooker’s call for season six was Salma Hayek, as the protagonist of a chapter. “She has to play alone, so who better than Salma herself to do it?” he recalled. “First interview via Zoom, I was really nervous because I just sent him the script with his name and with him as the protagonist… He loved it! And it started pushing us to do all of these things that I never would have had the urge to write in the first draft of the script. Well, in Joan is Horror, Salma Hayek –according to Brooker– stars in the funniest episode we’ve ever done. While we’ve had a few dark comedies in other seasons, this is the weirdest, and at the same time it’s a very Black Mirror story in the sense that it’s set in the near future, has high-tech gadgets, and is also an existential nightmare.