Melissa and I recently got way into Love, Death, and Robots, which is at turns terrifying, heartening, enlightening, and blood-pounding. Every new episode is a collection of roulette rounds. Will this be a funny episode starring the three robots? Stylized CGI about sirens? A neo-noir Strange Story from an Artist’s Studio? Who knows?
That’s half the fun.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen Black Mirror. At least some of it. They all get a bit repetitive after awhile. They’re always trying to be as slick as Mad Men, as deep as Breaking Bad, and always gunning for that highest of awards in science fiction – fans who use words like “prescient” and “spookily accurate” in describing the show, as if they were John Brunner back from the dead.
In my business, you need to be at least familiar with Black Mirror and its most famous episodes (like “San Junipero” and “White Christmas”). Much like Rick and Morty, they’re sometimes-interesting takes on very familiar themes (Philip K. Dick moves, robots/AI making humanity obsolete, social currency). They’re even, I’m told, Great Television.
Great Black Mirror may be, but I don’t think it’s that good. Not as good as Love, Death, and Robots anyway.
But let’s talk about their shared grandfather: Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.
The Twilight Zone, for those who grew up after Syfy stopped doing the New Year’s Day marathons, is an incredibly influential science fiction anthology show. Hosted by its executive producer, Rod Serling, with his patented deadpan delivery and nice dark suits, The Twilight Zone featured “One Weird Idea” style science fictions, character studies, fantasy stories, and adaptations of Golden Age sci-fi literature.
It’s one of those shows that, even if you’ve never seen it, you’ve seen it. The Simpsons regularly drew from The Twilight Zone, especially in its heyday, teaching a new generation “to serve Man,” that “there was time now!,” reminding us that the monsters are due on Maple Street, and teaching us to fear small children with psychic powers in ways Stephen King could never manage. Almost everyone knows the twists at the end of each of those episodes, and the associated iconic images: that opening, Anthony Fremont using his power, the breaking of a man’s glasses in the apocalypse, a horrible creature on the wing of a plane and an anxious man inside watching him.
This is what Black Mirror wants to be, and why it fails.
Because The Twilight Zone, like Love, Death, and Robots, has room to breathe. The Twilight Zone’s five seasons are studded with exactly the kind of chilling, prescient, haunting tales that Black Mirror aspires to, but there are also episodes about masks that make you ugly underneath, magical mirrors, and at least three about returning to childhood. There are retellings of the phantom hitchhiker, the man who visits a grave and dies, Sunset Boulevard, and “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge.” I lost track of how many deals with the devil there are (one of which inspired The Good Place). There’s one episode that’s a hilarious over-the-top anti-gambling PSA, for God’s sake!
All this stuff is beneath Black Mirror’s dignity – some of those plots they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Part of that is British brevity – with only three hour-to-90 minute episodes per season, and maybe a special here and there, they can’t afford to waste an entire episode on a conceit like “a man sees his confident, debonair self in a hotel room mirror.” And most of the joke episodes wouldn’t stand the strain – some episodes struggled to keep the momentum going for thirty minutes, and the hour-long format of Season 4 all but destroyed The Twilight Zone for good.
But some of it is the approach. By aiming exclusively for The Twilight Zone’s top tier of memorable episodes, Black Mirror misses what made Twilight Zone great. Not every episode can be “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” and they shouldn’t be. I can’t imagine Black Mirror doing “Nightmare of 30,000 Feet,” “The Howling Man,” or even “Time Enough at Last.” They’d consider it “not serious enough.”
You know who I can imagine doing it?
Love, Death, and Robots.
The first three episodes, in this order, are: a gritty rape-and-revenge with Pacific Rim creatures, three robot tourists exploring the high school after humanity, and a mind-trip time-loop of two people constantly killing each other in the Kowloon Walled City. Some of our favorites include “When the Yogurt Took Over” (apparently Maurice LaMarche can do an Orson Welles impression? Who knew?), “Zima Blue” (the aforementioned meditation on the color blue), and “Ice Age” (neatly refuting the Twilight Zone episode it was clearly based on). Those are all in the first season – three radically different themes, animation styles, tones, and approaches. But they all feel like they’re part of Love, Death, and Robots, just like how “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” “Nick of Time,” and “A Nice Place to Visit” all feel like the Twilight Zone…as opposed to other shows from that era, like Lost in Space, Tales of Tomorrow, or The Outer Limits (which came closest but, like Black Mirror, suffers from its own demand for ironic cruelty…or just cruelty.).
Is the next episode gonna be three robots just kind of tooling around in post-human Earth? A hilarious and moving milSF pastiche? Mechs vs monsters with rednecks? Who knows? We’ll find out!
Because anthology shows need that kind of room to breathe. They need the freedom to do shitty episodes – even mediocre ones – and ones that are just straight-up strange (is there a point to “Nick of Time”? No, not really. Fun, though!). The point of an anthology, or an anthology show, is to try things out – and if you can’t sometimes fail, you’re not really trying new things, are you?
Which is why I think in ten years’ time, we’ll look back on Black Mirror as a beautiful and slightly sterile product of its time, like Lost or The Good Wife…
…and the next Black Mirror will be trying to compress all the best episodes of Love, Death, and Robots into a three hour season.
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