Inside Black Mirror

by Charlie Brooker, Annabel Jones, Jason Arnopp

Overview

The first official companion to the Emmy-winning Netflix cult-hit sci-fi television series that's fascinated millions of fans worldwide, with stunning visuals and never before seen behind-the-scenes content

What becomes of humanity when it's fed into the jaws of a hungry new digital machine? Discover the world of Black Mirror in this immersive, illustrated, oral history.

This first official book logs the entire Black Mirror journey, from its origins in creator Charlie Brooker's mind to its current status as one of the biggest cult TV shows to emerge from the UK. Alongside a collection of astonishing behind-the-scenes imagery and ephemera, Brooker and producer Annabel Jones will detail the creative genesis, inspiration, and thought process behind each film for the first time, while key actors, directors and other creative talents relive their own involvement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984823489
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/20/2018
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 9.80(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Charlie Brooker (Author)
Charlie Brooker is an award-winning writer, producer and broadcaster whose career has spanned television, radio, print, and online media.

Brooker is the creator and writer of Black Mirror, whose fourth season launched on Netflix at the end of 2017 and won a BAFTA Craft Award and has recently picked up three BAFTA TV Awards nominations. The critically acclaimed, mind-bending anthology series originally launched on Channel 4 in 2011 and over its four seasons has collected awards including Primetime Emmys® for Outstanding TV Movie and Outstanding Writing for a TV Movie, Producers Guild of America, Rose D'or, BAFTA, International Emmy® and Peabody.


Annabel Jones (Author)
Annabel Jones is a long-term collaborator of Charlie Brooker’s. She serves as co-show runner and executive producer on Black Mirror. Previously Jones executive produced a number of shows presented by Charlie Brooker including three series of the BAFTA-nominated BBC Two satirical review Weekly Wipe; all seven editions of the annual shindig Charlie Brooker’s End of Year Wipe, which won a BAFTA for its 2016 edition; How Video Games Changed the World; Newswipe, which won the 2009 Royal Television Society Award for Best Entertainment Programme; Gameswipe; and the How TV Ruined Your Life series for BBC Two.


Jason Arnopp (Co-author)
Jason Arnopp is a novelist and scriptwriter, with a background in journalism for such titles as Heat, Q, Kerrang!, SFX and Doctor Who Magazine. He wrote the terrifying 2016 Orbit Books novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, acclaimed by the likes of Ron Howard, Sarah Lotz and Alan Moore. Arnopp’s previous works include official Doctor Who and Friday The 13th tie-in fiction, Beast in the Basement: A Sincere Warning About the Entity in Your Home and the non-fiction title How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne and Everyone Else. He lives in Brighton, UK, and can be found on Twitter as @jasonarnopp.

Read an Excerpt

Charlie Brooker: So, how did Annabel and I meet? This is like the scene in When Harry Met Sally, when they interview those couples.   

Annabel Jones: Yes. Old people who wish they’d never met.   

Charlie Brooker: My first memory of Annabel is her mocking me. I was in the [TV production Company] Endemol building on Bedford Square in London, playing the video game Counter-Strike with three other comedy writers, when Annabel came up and took the piss out of us all, for being grown men pretending to be counter-terrorists.   

Annabel Jones: At Endemol, my job was to look after its smaller companies, including the comedy label Zeppotron. Sharing a love for counter-terrorism, we all got on and I became managing director. We were making it all up as we went along of course, and then Charlie and I started working together on the Wipe shows that he presented for the BBC.   

Charlie Brooker: While working on Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show, I met Shane Allen, who would eventually commission Black Mirror.

Shane Allen (then Channel 4 Head of Comedy): Charlie was one of The 11 O’Clock Show‘s topical writers and I was a producer on the topical footage team, so we’d cross paths. He was chosen for his work on the website TV Go Home which enjoyed an early following. I got to know Annabel around this time as part of the same social group. Charlie and I worked together on Chris Morris’s 2001 Brass Eye special again after that and kept crossing paths. I got the job as Channel 4’s comedy commissioner in 2004.   

Charlie Brooker: I wrote a 2005 Channel 4 sitcom called Nathan Barley with Chris Morris, which had a really long gestation period. It would also inspire a Black Mirror episode, but we’ll cover that later…   

Charlie and Annabel’s transition from comedy to drama began with 2008’s Dead Set, which saw a fictional Big Brother house invaded by zombies.   

Charlie Brooker: Conceptually, Dead Set sounded like a comedy, with its preposterous conceit. But despite that, we were keen to impress on people that we were going to play it straight.   

Annabel Jones: We wanted it to be an uncompromising and credible TV horror show. Big Brother was Endemol’s biggest show and, being part of Endemol, we hoped we could make Dead Set in an authentic way, with access to the presenter Davina McCall, the Big Brother house, the branding…   

Shane Allen: In about 2006, Charlie and Annabel had pitched Dead Set to Channel 4 drama, who ultimately passed. So Charlie and Annabel brought it to my attention with a first episode script and series treatment. It was instantly gripping: the core concept was brilliantly irreverent in taking this huge Channel 4 pop culture brand and rooting a genre thriller at the heart of it. Beyond that, the writing was pin-sharp in how it set up the world, nailed the characters and rattled through a page-turning narrative.   

I connected with it immediately and was beguiled with the notion of it as a smart contemporary satire on reality TV, as well as a zombie thriller in its own right. Charlie and Annabel had such a clear vision and went to great pains to explain that it wasn’t a comedy and it wouldn’t be funny. It had to work as a piece of credible and rooted real-life drama and they set me homework to get a sense of tone. I had to watch the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, read Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and see [photographer] Gregory Crewdson’s profound stills. To this day The Road remains the most affecting and haunting book I’ve read–thanks for f***ing up my world view so fundamentally. 

Dead Set became a piece of event television, stripped across a week on Channel 4’s younger-skewing offshoot E4.   

Annabel Jones: Shane said, “Okay, what next?” because it had gone down really well and was BAFTA-nominated. It was a real surprise hit for Channel 4.   

Charlie Brooker: I’d been writing TV criticism for quite a while, and was still doing it then. So I’d see lots of shows that maybe otherwise I wouldn’t have watched, such as the Battlestar Galactica reboot. But that show was actually really good and I wondered why we weren’t doing things like that here in Britain. I miss all those silly US shows like Manimal, Automan and Knight Rider. At the time, everything on British TV was a detective drama or a costume drama, and it felt like there wasn’t much in between. But Doctor Who was huge, having come back and been an enormous hit, so you knew there was an appetite for something else.   

Annabel Jones: Charlie wanted to do an anthology show. He was familiar with The Twilight Zone and I was familiar with Tales of the Unexpected, and that all felt something that was really missing in the TV landscape at the time. There were no ideas-driven single dramas.

Charlie Brooker: I didn’t like the idea of doing something where it’s the same thing all the time, partly because I find it hard to work out how that would stay interesting over weeks and weeks and weeks. I also don’t tend to have ideas that last beyond an hour.   

Shane Allen: Enter Charlie and Annabel’s Black Mirror pitch, about doing modern parable stories around the theme of social media, technology and AI advances. By this point I’d been made head of comedy, so was drunk on ego and power.   

Annabel Jones: We pitched Black Mirror as the fears of the day. Things that hadn’t been dramatised. Things that people didn’t quite realise were unsettling them.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Inside Black Mirror

"Highly recommended...A great read for fans of the show." —Den of Geek

"As making-of books go, a flawless exemplar." —SFX

"A gorgeous book." —Bustle

Praise for Black Mirror

"Terrifying, funny, intelligent. It's like the 'Twilight Zone,' only rated R." —Stephen King

"Black Mirror is hands down the most relevant program of our time, if for no other reason than how often it can make you wonder if we're all living in an episode of it." —The New York Times

"Brooker continues to solidify himself as one of the most creative writers in the medium. Even when the unfair creep of expectations rears up, Black Mirror and Brooker deliver." —The Hollywood Reporter

From the Publisher