It’s almost been three years since season five of Black Mirror premiered on Netflix, although it feels like we’ve been living in one of the show’s speculative dystopias ever since. Now, it seems the lengthy hiatus has finally come to an end, with news that creator Charlie Brooker is working on a sixth season.
According to sources close to the production (as reported by Variety), the sixth season of Black Mirror is set to be “even more cinematic in scope” than previous instalments in the series, with each episode being treated as an individual film. It’s also likely to have more episodes than the Miley Cyrus-starring season five, which included just three instalments.
Other than that, details about the show itself are looking pretty scarce. We do have more information on the reason for the delay between seasons, however. In January 2020, Brooker and his creative partner Annabel Jones split from their production company, House of Tomorrow, and set up the new production house Broke and Bones, which soon signed a massive deal with Netflix. Unfortunately, the rights to Black Mirror stayed with House of Tomorrow’s parent company, and regaining them took some time – hence the delay.
Even without rights issues, Brooker suggested that he needed a break from the dystopian world of the show in May 2020. “At the moment, I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart, so I’m not working away on one of those,” he told the Radio Times. “I’m sort of keen to revisit my comic skill set, so I’ve been writing scripts aimed at making myself laugh.”
In the break between seasons of Black Mirror, Brooker worked on Death to 2020 and Death to 2021 for Netflix, revisiting the year-in-review format of his infamous BBC show, Screenwipe. The new Black Mirror is also set to appear on the streaming service, with the release date yet to be confirmed.
For now, we’re left wondering how the new season of Black Mirror can hope to top the events of the last few years, from the emergence of a global pandemic, to the social experiments of rogue billionaires, to the very real rise of Metalhead-style robot dogs, AI boyfriends, and “deeply concerning” robot artists. The horror writes itself tbh.