Now in its seventh season, Charlie Brooker’s “Black Mirror” returns to Netflix with six new standalone episodes, each offering a distinct take on technology, memory, and human behavior. The anthology series has always challenged expectations, and this season deepens that approach with stories that feel more personal and ambitious in scope. There’s the long-awaited sequel “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” a surreal noir in “Hotel Reverie,” the memory-warping drama of “Eulogy,” and the industry-skewering nightmare of “Common People.” The season also includes “Playtest,” a semi-autobiographical exploration of 1990s video game journalism, and “Bête Noire,” which leans into psychological horror.
For Brooker, the challenge of writing dystopian fiction has shifted in surprising ways. When “Black Mirror” first aired, many of its speculative premises like AI companions, social credit scores and immersive simulations felt like distant hypotheticals. Today, much of it reads as eerily prescient. And yet, as Brooker explains, the show’s core has remained steady: not anti-technology, but deeply skeptical of how humans interact with it. “The tech is usually neutral,” he says, “but it’s powerful and seductive. And it’s really down to how we use it.”
That sentiment is especially poignant in “Eulogy,” co-written with playwright Ella Road, where Paul Giamatti plays a man confronting the literal and emotional gaps in his memory. What begins as a simple quest to recover a lost image becomes both a technological puzzle and an emotional reckoning. In “Playtest,” Brooker mines his own past as a journalist in the 1990s to add layers of specificity to a story about artificial life and regret. Even in his most fantastical episodes, personal history and emotional truth remain guiding forces.
Season 7 also marks the rare return of a “Black Mirror” universe, with “USS Callister: Into Infinity” reuniting the original cast for a visually expansive space saga. Directed by Toby Haynes, the sequel had been in development for years but was repeatedly delayed by the pandemic, industry strikes, and scheduling conflicts. For Brooker, the chance to revisit these characters and write for them again was an unexpected joy. “Most of my characters end up not existing,” he jokes, “so this was a weird luxury.”
Brooker’s most distilled commentary may come in “Common People,” a near-future story about Amanda, played by Rashida Jones, a woman kept alive by subscription-based technology. Co-developed with Bisha K. Ali and directed by Ally Pankiw, the episode begins as an offbeat comedy but spirals into something much darker, with Chris O’Dowd portraying her increasingly desperate husband, Mike. It’s a sharply unnerving portrait of a world where even staying alive feels transactional.
Charlie Brooker spoke to Awards Focus about the making of Season 7, his reflections on AI and misinformation, the emotional roots of “Eulogy,” the challenge of surprising longtime fans, and the rare pleasure of returning to one of the show’s most iconic stories.
Awards Focus: Congratulations on the new season—it’s been a thrill to watch, and the fan response has been incredibly strong. Given how visually and tonally distinct each episode is, was there one that surprised you most once post-production was complete?
Charlie Brooker: That is difficult. I guess it would be a toss-up between “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” because when you’re shooting it, you don’t have the scale of the giant space battle going on. There’s quite a lot of VFX that aren’t there in the early edits. There’s a climactic sequence at the end where it just cuts to black cards with descriptions of what will be happening. So by the time you get to the final version, with all the VFX and audio polished up, you’re like, wow—we’ve really made a movie here.
And then “Eulogy,” the episode with Paul Giamatti. Central to that story is that he can’t remember his ex-girlfriend’s face—he’s vandalized these old photographs. Of course, in the early edits, you can still see her face. We had to do a makeshift version of the VFX during the edit, and by the time you get to the final scene where he locks eyes with her, there’s so much power in that moment.
But really, kind of all of them. One of my favorite bits is the final stretch when you’re in the edit, polishing things, and then you get to sit back and watch the whole thing on a big screen with the full sound mix. That’s the most thrilling bit.
AF: You’ve been creating “Black Mirror” for more than a decade, and in that time, technology has evolved rapidly. Many ideas that once felt speculative now feel eerily familiar. Has your approach to writing dystopia changed?
Brooker: Oddly, I don’t think that much has changed. If you look back at our second season, we had the episode “Be Right Back,” which is kind of about AI chatbots—Hayley Atwell plays a character whose husband dies and he’s resurrected as an AI chatbot. That feels like a story you’d come up with now.
I think I spend less time explaining concepts in the script because the viewer is more familiar with things. And because we’re interacting with more systems and gadgets all the time, it throws up new story ideas. I don’t tend to read the tech news pages—I look more at how people are interacting with things.
You do have to move a bit quicker now. Some stories are so timely. Last season, when we did “Joan Is Awful,” I remember thinking, we need to do this pretty quickly. There’s even a story idea I’ve had that seems to have come half true already, and I’m not sure I can still do it—it might look like a retrospective documentary at this point. But overall, the audience is definitely more tech-aware and tech-savvy than when we started.
AF: It’s easy to categorize “Black Mirror” as sci-fi or dystopia, but the show is also deeply emotional. How much do you draw from personal experience when writing these episodes?
Brooker: I think you always do, even if it’s not conscious. With “Eulogy,” Ella and I had long chats about memory, photography, music, relationships—all that. You end up talking about heartbreak, about reassessing past relationships and thinking, maybe I was wrong about that person. What regrets do you have?
You’re drawing on personal experience, but not always directly. That story is also about looking at old photographs—pre-smartphone days, when photos were fewer and imperfect. You could lose them. You had 24 shots on a roll, and some were blurry. That imperfection made them more evocative.
There’s another episode, “Playtest,” about a video game journalist in the 1990s. He writes for a real magazine that I also wrote for in the same year. So in that case, I was pulling very specific details from my life. In other episodes, you’re just imagining yourself into someone else’s skin—but I think your core experience always comes through.
AF: What are your personal views on AI, and how have they evolved over time?
Brooker: I can see its value as an analytical tool. But obviously, as a creative person, your first reaction is to feel threatened. The first thing I did when I saw ChatGPT was ask it to come up with a “Black Mirror” episode idea. It gave me something that looked plausible—at first—and then I realized, hang on, this is really derivative. Of course it is. It’s sifting through and regurgitating existing “Black Mirror”-type content.
So no, I don’t think it will replace human creativity. All art—if we want to use that word—is really one human trying to communicate something to another human. And once you cut the human out of one end of that pipeline, you’ve got something slightly different.
That said, I can see its value as a tool, like the tools in Photoshop. The challenge is how we balance that while keeping people employed. The invention of the printing press made monks who handwrote the Bible obsolete, but this feels different.
People will always want human-generated art. And I do think AI can be hugely beneficial—especially in medicine or other forms of analysis. But the danger is misinformation and disinformation, especially when it appears very plausible. In “Black Mirror,” I’m not anti-tech. The tech is usually neutral—it’s powerful and seductive, but it depends how we use it. That’s the real challenge.
AF: You mentioned “Eulogy,” which I found especially powerful. It’s hard to picture anyone but Paul Giamatti in that role. Was he always your first choice, or did other casting ideas come up early on?
Brooker: At one point, when we were first discussing the story—it was myself and the writer Ella Road—we knew there would be a transatlantic element. Originally, we were thinking it would be the other way around. I’m older than Ella, so I remember the 1980s and 1990s and was suggesting maybe the story should be set in Manchester, England. It was going to be a guy in his fifties reminiscing about the early ’90s.
Then as we were developing the script—it was written fairly late—we started discussing casting, which also helps you write. I think I or someone else mentioned Paul, who’s always been one of my favorite actors. And it just clicked. So we flipped it—he’s American, and his long-lost love has died in England. Once we had him in mind, it all clicked into place.
And once you’ve got someone of his caliber, I really can’t imagine it being anyone else. He and Patsy worked beautifully together. And there are quite a few scenes he has to carry alone—he’s just phenomenal.
AF: You also mentioned “USS Callister.” Was there something about that story that made you want to revisit it, or was it more about giving fans what they wanted?
Brooker: Oh no, we talked about it from the beginning. Toby Haynes, who directed both the original and the sequel—and also “Bête Noire” this season—was the one who first said, we could do a follow-up. And he had a point. Most “Black Mirror” episodes end with the characters dead or destroyed, but the first “Callister” ends with them in a whole new universe. It’s literally a new chapter.
We wondered: can we even do a sequel within “Black Mirror”? Each episode had been standalone. At one point, we considered doing it as a mini-series. But the more we thought about it, the more it made sense to bring it back this way.
It was in process for a long time. Then the pandemic happened, and the actors’ and writers’ strikes delayed things further. Getting everyone’s schedules aligned took time. But I loved those characters. The cast is so good. Writing for a recurring character in “Black Mirror” is a weird luxury.
Outside of “Black Mirror,” the character I’ve written for most is Philomena Cunk—from “Cunk on Earth,” “Cunk on Britain,” and so on. Most of my characters don’t survive! So yes, we knew “Callister” was a well-loved episode, and of course there’s an element of giving fans what they want—but only if we could expand meaningfully on what we did the first time. I think we did.
AF: One fun question to close on. In “Hotel Reverie,” the characters live inside a romanticized version of the past. If you could live in a different era—or inside a movie—what would you choose?
Brooker: Different era? That would be “San Junipero,” wouldn’t it? That’s a virtual 1980s. “Hotel Reverie” is a romanticized version of 1949—a British movie set in Cairo.
But if I had to pick a movie? It would be fun to go into a Tex Avery cartoon from the late ’40s. Like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Maybe I’d live outside Toontown in that vintage Los Angeles where humans and toons live side by side. It felt like the best of both worlds—although, it’s a pretty brutal place from what I remember. Christopher Lloyd was dipping toons in acid! But that’s the first thing that popped into my head.
AF: Last one—if you had to choose one episode from this season to put in a time capsule representing 2025, which would it be?
Brooker: I guess it would be “Common People.” Like “Joan Is Awful” last season, it was the last episode we wrote. Same director—Ally Pankiw. It started with the hook: a woman has a traumatic medical event, and tech keeps her alive via subscription. She starts spouting ads at inappropriate times.
At first, I thought it was going to be a comedy sketch—but it wasn’t a full story. Then I spoke with Bisha K. Ali, who I often collaborate with—she also worked on “Callister”—and the story evolved. I was thinking a lot about this term writer Cory Doctorow coined to describe how digital platforms degrade over time as they chase growth. Users get squeezed.
That sense of pressure—everyone feeling like they’re being squeezed—really stuck. So the episode starts out like an indie comedy, then grows darker and darker until the darkness envelops everything. It feels claustrophobic and timely.
This season, I wanted to go back to basics—OG “Black Mirror.” “Common People” felt like a distilled statement of intent. When I turned in the script, our producer Richard Webb said it was the most “Black Mirror” thing he’d read in a while. So I’d put that in the time capsule. It’s a bit of a body blow, though.
That said, I don’t know if I’d say there’s one episode that defines “Black Mirror” above all others. The whole point is that they’re all distinct. It’s an odd show to make, and I love them all in different ways.
AF: It’s been great talking to you—congratulations on a wonderful season, and best of luck.
Brooker: Thank you so much.