"Does Black Mirror Still Matter In 2023?" Season 6 Criticism & Story Changes Explained (2024)

Warning! SPOILERS for Black Mirror season 6!As Black Mirror season 6 receives criticism for its thematic changes and novelty compared to prior installments, the relevance of the adaptable show in 2023 has come into question. Black Mirror has been creating mind-bending episodes since 2011, producing stories that are shocking, disturbing, funny, or, on occasion, disappointing for over a decade. But a show that functions as a critique of current events or reflects society at large can be tenuous, as their stories must remain relevant to the times or else risk becoming a parody of itself. How Netflix's anthology series handles this makes examining the show’s impact all the more fascinating, especially in the context of recent technological developments.

Black Mirror's season 6 cast inhabits an anthology series that debuted in 2011, reacting to fears of technological advancements by pushing present-day concepts to their most-extreme results, with settings in futuristic dystopias driving home the series’ grim point. While still produced in an episodic anthology format 12 years later, Black Mirror season 6's five installments focused less on technological advancements and futuristic settings, primarily taking place in past or contemporary timelines. This was especially clear since Black Mirror's Netflix self-parody, Streamberry, was a through-line in these episodes. After prior reservations about the series potentially overstaying its welcome, Black Mirror season 6 premiered to mixed responses and notable backlash.

Black Mirror Season 6's Criticisms & Backlash Explained

Since Black Mirror season 6’s release, many of the new episodes have been poorly received. These criticisms boiled down to two core reasons: The twists and premises did not feel like they fit the show’s genre, and the insights yielded were not overly surprising or pertinent. For the first complaint, many found that the twist in Black Mirror's season 6 episode “Mazey Day,” where the big reveal is that the actress is a werewolf, edged into fantasy horror instead of warning of a future dystopia. Meanwhile, Black Mirror season 6, episode 2, “Loch Henry,” reads more like a drama without many futuristic elements. Both episodes were a departure from the sci-fi dystopias expected from Black Mirror.

Related: Loch Henry's Criticism Totally Misses The Black Mirror Episode's Point

The second complaint questions Black Mirror’s relevance, given how several of the episodes did not extrapolate on a potential, horrifying future, but instead looked back at the past or present. Black Mirror season 6’s episodes tended not to focus on a particular piece of futuristic technology and how it impacted society, but rather on actual services or issues already familiar to audiences. Such conflicts include those regarding personal privacy and corporations and the relationship between media productions and the public. Unfortunately, this approach makes each episode's thesis less disarming and feel more redundant, because they’re not exploring new concepts or social anxieties.

Black Mirror Isn't The TV Show It Was In Season 1

The struggles of Black Mirror season 6 reflect how the show itself has changed since it first began airing over a decade ago. One such shift is how the series moved to Netflix, away from British network Channel 4, in 2016. This adjustment in platforms helped inform the show’s evolution as it experienced different processes to critique and explore. Black Mirror was forced to pivot in response, with such differences being especially clear when comparing season 6 to season 1, where the latter includes episodes that aim at cable game shows set in the future while the latter examines streaming shows set in the past and present.

Black Mirror season 6 takes this tonal shift even further by stripping away much of the sci-fi and dystopian, futuristic elements found in the series' debut installments. Instead, season 6 takes place almost entirely in present-adjacent and past time periods. Black Mirror's season 6 episodes "Joan Is Awful" and "Loch Henry" occur in the present and critique streaming services and true-crime series, "Beyond the Sea" is set in an alternate 1969, "Mazey Day" takes place in the mid-2000s, and "Demon 79" takes its characters back to 1979. This broadening of the series' horizons further shows how Black Mirror is not the same series it was, though this element isn’t necessarily negative.

Black Mirror Has Changed Because The World Changed

Beyond Black Mirror changing as a result of its transitions and growth between studios and production processes, the world itself has changed wildly since Black Mirror first aired in 2011. Whereas part of the show’s allure during its initial release was its ability to create dark, predictive futures based loosely on current events, this tactic is proving to no longer work for modern audiences. After all, the global landscape in the present is already as grim as some of Black Mirror’s earliest episodes, meaning that there’s little point to the series continuing to try to outdo reality.

This global shift is especially apparent given Black Mirror’s early reliance on technological dystopias. In a world where social media impacts elections, cultural violence, and dictatorships; companies sell personal data to the highest bidder; people enter para-social relationships with chatbots, and AI writes gibberish and steals artists' work to Frankenstein into new creations, there’s little technological abuse that Black Mirror can conjure that doesn’t feel plausible today. As a result, if Black Mirror continued to make episodes about futuristic tech replacing or hurting humanity, it would be thought of as tired or commonplace.

Black Mirror Is Still Relevant - But For Totally Different Reasons

However, just because Black Mirror is trying to pivot its storytelling premises does not mean that it’s no longer relevant or worth watching in 2023. It just means that the show’s messages have shifted, and if they do so well, it can still yield strong, compelling TV. Black Mirror just can’t be as much of a cautionary tale now, with “Joan Is Awful” perhaps being the exception. Instead, Black Mirror can provide a broader look at humanity's dark side, a universe with no shortage of material to examine given how public daily life is nowadays.

While this thematic shift may still not sit well with all Black Mirror audiences, it is an entirely valid direction for the series to take, and one that makes the most sense given how quickly the real world is catching up to the series' prior technological horror stories. If done well, Black Mirror season 7 will be just as unsettling and relevant as previous installments have been, and it may even hit closer to home than ever as it begins to touch on not just the corruption wrought by technology, but by humanity itself. This will better reflect the current time and cynicism of the age, as opposed to the technological optimism of 2011 that has since been tempered.