# data[].attributes.body
Nexis UK article summarising Black Mirror and it's dystopian plot.

# data[].attributes.body
Channel 4 video clip, Charlie Brooker comments on the production and context behind the series.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Creator Charlie Brooker Explains Black Mirror

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Suspenseful, satirical series that taps into our collective unease about the modern world

# data[].attributes.headline
3) The speculative dread of Black Mirror 

# data[].attributes.subject
3) The speculative dread of Black Mirror 

# data[].attributes.body
An article explaining the programme's outlook on the consequences of technical innovation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1999, at the age of twenty-eight, Charlie Brooker, the British satirist who is now a television auteur, was at a low ebb. He'd spent most of his twenties freelancing for PC Zone, a little-read gaming magazine, where he was able to indulge his obscene and misanthropic sense of humor. Among other items, he contributed a regular comic strip about video-game culture, "Cybertwats," and a back-page column, "Sick Notes," in which he would solicit hate mail from subscribers and respond in kind. But Brooker, a gaming addict who'd left Westminster University without a degree, was feeling directionless. At parties, it was an ordeal to explain how he earned a living. "They'd look at you like you'd said, 'I do coloring in,' " he once told a reporter. " 'I've got these coloring-in books, and I color things in.' " He wanted to write for television, but was hampered by self-doubt. Marooned on his sofa "like a woozy sea lion," he spent weeks at a time scowling at the reality shows, talent competitions, and celebrity vehicles that were beginning to dominate Britain's programming. Once, after a breakup, he turned his set on its side so he could watch while lying down.

As a means of imposing order on his desultory existence, Brooker started a Web site, which he vowed to update every two weeks. Comprised of lurid listings for imaginary TV shows, TVGoHome (the name was inspired by a piece of xenophobic graffiti) gave Brooker a format in which to hone his gift for brutal extrapolation. The Web site was designed to resemble the Radio Times, the popular TV guide published until recently by the BBC. The listings took the reader to an alternate reality, in which the latent prurience and sadism of the nation's favorite shows were laid bare:

1:45 - Boom Goes Lovergirl

Hilarious hidden-camera action as insular nerds spend weeks being led up the garden path by sophisticated androids posing as attractive women, secretly wired to explode as soon as the word "love" is spoken.

3:30 - Strapped to Your Dad

Troublesome teenagers strapped arm, leg and hip to their fathers in order to feel his erection rousing against them as he is shown wild pornography over their shoulder.

12:50am - Fun Goose or War

Edge-of-the-seat gameshow in which two ageing bachelors are flown over an African warzone and commanded to draw a cartoon goose on the back of a shovel with a lump of coal. The creator of the most amusing sketch is slowly fellated by a prostitute with a mouthful of honey, while the loser parachutes into the middle of the raging battle below armed with only a dustbin lid, a clockwork pistol, and a webcam glued to his forehead.

Britain has always been fond of its cranks and cynics, and soon TVGoHome was drawing more than a hundred thousand readers a month. Seventeen years later, it is hard not to see the Web site, which Brooker retired in 2002, as the prototype for "Black Mirror," his acclaimed and eerily clairvoyant series about the unintended consequences of technological innovation. Like TVGoHome, "Black Mirror" is powered by an engine of speculative dread. As an anthology show, it is made up of stand-alone episodes, each featuring its own fictional world and cast of characters. Some episodes use existing technologies as the basis for their nightmare scenarios. What if an Anonymous-style group of hacktivists began blackmailing members of the public with unsavory snippets of their Internet browsing history? What if a popular cartoon character, controlled by an actor at the helm of a live-motion-capture system, successfully ran for Parliament on an anti-establishment platform? Others entertain unsettling day-after-tomorrow hypotheses. What if people had a microchip embedded in their necks that recorded their lives and allowed them to replay memories at will? What if there was a software program that enabled a bereaved person to communicate with a lost loved one by creating an avatar using the deceased's digital footprint?

The show, which first aired in Britain, on Channel 4, in 2011, became an international hit, with licensing rights sold in more than ninety territories. In 2014, Netflix acquired exclusive U.S. streaming rights for the first two seasons. Last year, Brooker and his longtime collaborator Annabel Jones signed a contract with Netflix to make twelve new episodes. (The deal was reportedly worth forty million dollars.) "Black Mirror" answers to a mood of global unease about the breakneck pace of technological development; Brooker's audience already knows what it is like to witness the sudden arrival of the future-or, as he put it in his weekly column for the Guardian, to recognize how "nuts-deep into the future we already are." Last month, on the day the third season was released, a cyberattack crashed several popular Web sites, including Spotify, Reddit, and Netflix.

On Twitter, Stephen King described "Black Mirror" as "terrifying, funny, intelligent. It's like The Twilight Zone, only rated R." Zadie Smith considers it one of the best things to appear on British TV in decades. "It's the ultimate commentary on shit television by virtue of being head and shoulders above everything else," she wrote in an e-mail. "It reminds me of TVGoHome in that it's formed out of a sort of exquisite rage, but it's also so terrifically and fully imagined-the speculative fiction element is sublime."

In May, I met with Brooker, who is now forty-five, on location at Harpsden Court, a rambling country house in South Oxfordshire, which "Black Mirror" had commandeered to film an episode of its third season. "I suppose that in TVGoHome there's a dry, deadpan presentation of a horrendous idea," he said. "And then they've often come true. Someone sent me a link to a new show the other day. It was something like 'Joanna Lumley Swimming with Dogs.' And they were like, 'This is straight out of TVGoHome.' "

Brooker was sitting hunched over a MacBook, his graying quiff, crafty eyes, and sullen mouth caught in the screen's pale glare. In person, he radiates a negative exuberance, though he is milder, more tentative than his work might lead you to expect. A scrum of crew members were preparing for a scene to be shot in an upstairs bedroom. The room had a maximum occupancy of fifteen, so Brooker and Jones, his fellow showrunner, were monitoring the day's progress through a live video linkup in an oak-panelled hall downstairs. "I assume the whole floor collapses if there are sixteen people," Brooker said. "But it doesn't specify their weight or size on the door, which is worrying."

"When we were rehearsing yesterday, Charlie was literally doing a head count," Jones said. Their relationship seemed to be founded on affectionate reciprocal mockery. "He was terrified the floor was going to fall through."

"I'm terrified of most things, to be fair," Brooker said.

The techno-dystopian "what if"s that Brooker poses in "Black Mirror" are far-fetched, but his meticulous attention to detail gives the show a remarkable plausibility. "I've never been interested in the school of sci-fi that's about, you know, aliens with croissant-shaped foreheads flying about through Sector Alpha-6," Brooker said. "I can't get a foothold on that." Instead, he grounds his high-concept stories in the humanly mundane. Like "The Twilight Zone," another anthology series that distilled the ambient paranoia of its age, "Black Mirror" ranges effortlessly across genres, cannibalizing everything from police procedurals and kitchen-sink dramas to eighties music videos and feminine-hygiene commercials; it is manifestly the work of someone who has clocked up many hours of screen time. But the show returns again and again to the domestic: horror, Brooker understands, begins at home.

In "The Entire History of You," the episode about the microchip, or "grain," that records people's memories, a group of well-off thirty-somethings sit around a dinner table making small talk. When one member of the party reveals that she is "going grainless," an awkward silence descends. "Is that a political thing?" another character asks. "I'm sorry, but I couldn't do it," a third says. It isn't so much the shock of the new as the shock of recognition that makes the moment so disconcerting. We have all been involved in conversations about smartphone holdouts, and anyone who has resisted joining Facebook or Twitter has felt the subtle coercion of consensus.

Each episode of "Black Mirror" establishes the background of normality against which a decisive tweak will stand out all the more starkly. In "The National Anthem," the show's début episode, set in a fictional Britain, Princess Susannah, a popular member of the Royal Family, is abducted. Her release hinges on a single demand: the Prime Minister must have unsimulated sex with a pig on live television. "The idea had been knocking around for a while," Brooker said. "Originally, it was a beloved celebrity that's blackmailed into fucking a pig on live TV. Society wouldn't quite be the same. How would you deal with censorship after that?" A few years later, he was watching the counterterrorism drama "24," one of his favorite shows, when a new possibility occurred to him. "I thought, God, you could do it like that," he said, his voice recalling the hushed awe of artistic revelation. "The way to do it would be to play it straight."

In 2010, Brooker and Jones took the premise, along with several other story lines, to Shane Allen, then the head of comedy at Channel 4, and proposed a new series. Allen had commissioned "Dead Set" (2008), Brooker's first foray into television drama, in which the inhabitants of the "Big Brother" house are the last to learn of a zombie apocalypse ravaging the outside world. (The master joke is that nobody is alive to watch.) The five-part series enjoyed critical and commercial success, but Allen was dubious about "Black Mirror," and especially about "The National Anthem."

"It's one of those things where your knee-jerk response is 'I'm not sure you can do that,' " Allen told me recently at BBC headquarters, in central London, where he is now in charge of comedy. "My boss at the time wasn't too impressed with it." The possibility of using another animal was briefly considered. "A chicken?" Allen said when I pressed him for details. "Or a horse? It was a mad conversation."

Commercial viability was another concern. British TV budgets are negligible compared with those in the U.S., and many U.K. shows rely on deficit funding from distributors, who typically sell programs to international markets in bulk. Anthology shows are costly to make and often struggle to build an audience. Nevertheless, Brooker was given a tentative go-ahead and produced the first fifteen pages of a script for "The National Anthem" in a few days. "It was crisp, it was brilliant," Allen recalled. In lesser hands, he suggested, the premise would have turned farcical; Brooker's genius was to take "a ridiculous idea and make it feel very rooted and real."

"The National Anthem" falls into the category of "Black Mirror" episodes that could conceivably occur today with the technology at our disposal: social media and the television news are all that is needed to bring about its wretched consummation. They are also the means by which Brooker persuades us to suspend our disbelief at the idea that the British government would give in to a kidnapper's demand, let alone the demand that is made of Michael Callow, the Prime Minister. Throughout the episode, the screen pulsates with news crawls and graphics, polling results, tweets. We briefly see a video of the kidnapped Princess on YouTube; it has received 19,345,973 views and, in a sardonic touch, more likes (8,471) than dislikes (8,004).

We also see Callow's wife, Jane, scrolling through her Twitter feed, her face taut with the rising pressure of tears:

WAKE UP SHEEPLE THIS IS FALSE FLAG OPERATION - GET SYMPATHY FOR PM THEN BOMB YEMEN #PMpig, #kidnap, #trottergate, #bilderberg

OINK OINK CALLOW :-D #PMpig, #kidnap

He better not think about his wife during it cos it'll put him off! #pigfuckercallow #PMpig

Like most episodes of "Black Mirror," "The National Anthem" is a forty-five-minute panic attack. But it wouldn't be as harrowing, or as poignant, if we didn't care about the effect of the unfolding crisis on the Callows' marriage.

Hearth and home are also at the center of "Playtest," the episode that was being filmed at Harpsden Court, which Brooker characterized as a "horror romp" in the vein of "Evil Dead 2." In the episode, Cooper, a young American backpacker, played by Wyatt Russell, is stranded in London, the last stop on a round-the-world trip, after his credit card is hacked. To earn money for a plane ticket back to the U.S., he responds to an online ad posted by a video-game company to test a new "interactive augmented reality system" that uses a neural implant called a "mushroom" to generate audiovisual hallucinations based on the user's deepest fears. Brooker spends the opening minutes establishing his protagonist's troubled family history. Cooper's father has recently died after a descent into Alzheimer's, and his relationship with his mother is strained. Early one morning, he gathers his bags and tiptoes down the stairs of his childhood home so as not to wake her. It is typical of Brooker's grimly ironic narrative sensibility that Cooper's escapism should bring him to a technologically enhanced haunted house, a dark parody of home.

At Harpsden Court, someone called out, "Quiet, please! The time is nigh!" Brooker and Jones put on their headphones and huddled around the video monitors, which stood in front of an open fireplace. In the scene, Russell is slouched against a four-poster bed, pleading with two members of the video-game company to turn off the augmented-reality system. Earlier, Brooker had suggested that Russell play the scene with even greater abandon than he had in previous takes; he wanted to insure that his frenzy was commensurate with the ghastly situation in which he found himself. As Russell took another stab at it-"Stop!" he howled repeatedly, his voice at full stretch, while two impassive musclemen lugged him away-Brooker flexed his eyebrows and winced. This seemed to signal approval.

Brooker grew up a Quaker in the small Oxfordshire village of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, a short drive from Harpsden Court. His father was a social worker. His mother worked at a gift shop; her parents were actively involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Brooker speaks of certain shows from his childhood as though he were yet to recover from them. A 1982 episode of "Q.E.D.," the BBC's popular science program, explored what would happen if a one-megaton nuclear bomb exploded over St. Paul's Cathedral, in central London. In the episode, the viewer sees a map of the city, a large portion of it shaded red, while a matter-of-fact narrator tells us, "Everywhere inside this seven-mile radius-for example, at the shops in Holland Park Avenue-the effect on directly exposed flesh is the same: it behaves like the meat in the butcher's window." The film cuts to time-lapse footage of fat oozing off a strung-up pig carcass.

"I still sort of expect to die in a nuclear holocaust," Brooker told me over lunch, which we ate on the ground floor of a double-decker dining trailer for the cast and crew a few fields over from Harpsden Court. "I think that's where the pessimism comes from," he continued. "I remember a history teacher who taught us a whole lesson and then at the end said, 'It doesn't matter anyway, 'cause we'll all blow ourselves up.' I was like, 'Oh right, thanks. Does that mean I don't have to do the exam?' "

Brooker's video-game habit was inaugurated one afternoon in the late seventies during a trip to the local swimming pool, where he encountered his first arcade machine. "The notion that you could control what was on the screen was just magical," he told me. Even when he didn't have enough money, he would move the joystick as he watched a game's demo and persuade himself that he was playing. "I don't think that feeling ever really went away," he said. "I have to buy every new games console that comes out."

In 1999, Brooker was introduced to one of his heroes, Chris Morris, the creator of the spoof current-affairs programs "The Day Today" and "Brass Eye," which many consider a high-water mark of British television comedy. Morris, an admirer of TVGoHome, was especially taken with the recurring character Nathan Barley, "an upper-middle-class London media prickhole" whose day-to-day activities-networking, d.j.ing at pubs, getting overpriced haircuts-form the basis of a fly-on-the-wall documentary series. Morris proposed to Brooker that they turn Barley and the vacuous new-media scene he exemplified into a sitcom.

"Nathan Barley," which Brooker described as feeling "a bit like sci-fi at the time," now appears to have been the R. & D. department for "Black Mirror." Gadgets abound; Barley's cell phone, the Wasp T-12, which can also function as a camera, a projector, and a set of "MP3 decks," predates the first iPhone by a couple of years. "It's got apps, only they're physical," Brooker said. "We hadn't thought these things were going to be on the screen." Working on the series, he recalled, he and Morris would have "conversations that lasted for ages about the typeface on a poster in the background."

As showrunner on "Black Mirror," Brooker is similarly scrupulous. The believability of each episode depends on maintaining the complex internal logic of its dystopic world, so he watches for the kinds of inconsistencies that can be unwittingly introduced during filming and editing. In "Playtest," an employee of the video-game company assures Cooper that the spectres he sees during the trial are merely holograms and can't harm him, a claim that comes to seem increasingly suspect. During a fight scene between him and a woman who may or may not be a hallucination, a bottle of wine is knocked to the floor. Brooker, Jones, and Dan Trachtenberg, the episode's director, pondering the levels of reality to which different props and characters belonged, discussed at length whether the bottle would shatter. (They eventually ruled that it would.) In "San Junipero," another new episode that involves simulated reality, two characters are caught in a downpour. As filming got under way, Brooker began to doubt whether it would rain at all in this particular world. He spent a week and a half debating the point with the director before conceding that he was "just being a prick about it."

Brooker was determined to make the devices and screens and interfaces used in "Black Mirror" seem authentic. "In Hollywood, if the hero receives an e-mail there'll be a giant animation of a fucking envelope spinning around," he said. "We try to avoid those kinds of histrionic computers." In "Be Right Back," the episode about the software for the bereaved, the female protagonist, whose husband has recently died in a car accident, receives an e-mail from an online bookseller with the subject line "Martha, people in your position bought the following." When she opens it, the message shows an array of grief-counselling books, each accompanied by customer reviews. We glimpse the screen, and Martha's irritated response to it, for only a second. (In the future world of the episode, deleting an e-mail simply requires making a fist in the air and opening your hand again, as though crumpling up a piece of paper and tossing it away.) But the vignette stands for an accumulation of such intrusive moments-the death of solitude by a thousand digital cuts.

At the root of the show's creepy prescience lies Brooker's entrepreneurial grasp of what people desire, or might be made to desire. He frequently receives tweets and e-mails about real-world developments that echo details from the show. Samsung recently patented a "smart" contact lens that projects images directly into the user's eye; the characters in "The Entire History of You" use a similar item, a kind of phenomenological DVR, to record and replay their lives in real time.

"The National Anthem" first aired in late 2011. Last year, an unauthorized biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron quoted an anonymous member of Parliament who claimed to have witnessed Cameron during his student days at Oxford placing "a private part of his anatomy" inside the mouth of a dead pig during a hazing ritual for an exclusive social club. Twitter did what Twitter does with such material, but the BBC and other traditional news organizations initially resisted covering the story. The situation plays out in an almost identical manner in "The National Anthem." Even the Twitter hashtags that appear in the episode-"#PMpig," "#trottergate"-showed up on the actual Web.

"Who'd have thought the pig-fucking episode would be the most accurate one?" Brooker said. "I didn't know anything about that, by the way. I'd never heard the rumor. So when that story broke I was quite weirded out and genuinely worried for a short period that maybe reality is a simulation designed to confuse." He exhaled. "I hope it doesn't happen again."

For all its imaginative range, Brooker's work regularly returns to a particular character type: the wayward, disaffected young man who has more rage than he knows what to do with. Nathan Barley spends much of his time trying to win the approval of a jaundiced hack named Dan Ashcroft, who has won minor celebrity for his articles deriding "the idiots" who make up his milieu, those "self-regarding consumer slaves" who "babble into handheld twit machines." One TVGoHome listing describes an episode of a documentary series called "Britain's Angriest Failures," devoted to a man who "explains how everything on television is produced by a cabal of guffawing nepotists hell-bent on filling the schedules with simple-minded rubbish, while lying in front of his television smoking cannabis on a grimy towelling robe."

In 2000, Brooker began working on the satirical news program "The 11 O'Clock Show" and writing his TV column for the Guardian. A few years later, the column grew into a weekly review program, "Screenwipe," in which Brooker, ensconced in the living room of his South London flat, wryly taxonomized TV conventions ("TV presenters are basically imaginary friends, and they come in four main types ") and delivered baroquely vituperative monologues straight into the camera.

It is not always easy to distinguish between the crotchety couch pundit and Brooker himself. Shane Allen, a producer on "The 11 O'Clock Show," told me about a New Year's Eve party in the early aughts at which Brooker, having spent most of the night sitting quietly by himself, rose from his chair, put on the song "I Hate People," by the hardcore punk group the Anti-Nowhere League (chorus: "I hate people / I hate the human race / I hate people / I hate your ugly face"), proceeded to "wave his arse at everybody in the room, singing the song word for word, and then just sat down as though nothing had happened."

In 2008, Brooker received a spoof news article from one of his admirers about Kerry Katona, a member of the British pop group Atomic Kitten. Katona, who had a history of drug addiction, had recently appeared on the daytime talk show "This Morning" to promote a new reality series. She was clearly intoxicated, and her speech veered in and out of intelligibility. The article described Katona as a "mentally hilarious ex-girl band jizz puppet" and a "pram-faced shit-muncher." Brooker was mortified. "I couldn't work out which was worse," he wrote in the Guardian. "The fact that they'd written this in the first place or the assumption that I, specifically, would find it funny."

In 2010, Brooker retired the column and married Konnie Huq, a former host of the classic BBC children's variety program "Blue Peter." They now have two young children. "It's like getting new software installed in your head," Brooker said of being a father, though he rejected the idea that it had mellowed him. "If anything, I've got to get crosser. There are people who are going to be around after I'm dead who I give a shit about."

"Black Mirror" is as scabrous as anything Brooker has done, but it is also clearly the work of a person who has thought through the risks and limitations of default-mode misanthropy. In "The Waldo Moment," the episode about a blue cartoon bear who successfully stands for Parliament, the disaffected public can't get enough of Waldo's ribald anti-politics. Critics were unconvinced when it aired in 2013, and Brooker told me he agreed that the ending, which skips forward to a Waldo-dominated global police state, is too abrupt. Now it seems prophetic. On the night of November 8th, as a Trump Presidency began to look increasingly likely, the show's Twitter account posted: "This isn't an episode. This isn't marketing. This is reality."

"Black Mirror" is full of the cynical types that populate Brooker's earlier work, but they are presented with a new subtlety and skepticism. In the climactic scene of "The Waldo Moment," Jamie Salter, the depressive comedian who voices Waldo, tries to make amends with his young Labour opponent, whose career he has wrecked during the campaign. She is unreceptive. "I was at least attempting to represent-well, I don't know, not just bollocks to everything," she says. "If you were preaching revolution, well, that would be something. But you're not, because that would require courage. And a mind-set. And what have you got? Who are you? What are you for?" Salter, unable to meet her gaze, has no answer.

I asked Brooker the same thing-what he felt he was "for"-when we met at the Gore Hotel, an upscale establishment on a street of pollarded trees in Kensington, just around the corner from the Royal Albert Hall. He paused over his meal. "Now, there's a profoundly disturbing question," he said.

Brooker first achieved recognition by, as he put it, "standing outside the tent pissing in." But he is no revolutionary; his world view is essentially cautious, humanistic. "I think most people are inherently good," he said. "When they throw themselves behind some ugly cause, it's usually out of fear or because they're not availed of all the facts. The show generally reflects that. It's usually just people with a weakness who end up fucking up. We don't have many mustache-twirling villains. But I am a worrier and I do think things are going to go horribly wrong by accident."

Saul Bellow once described human beings as "the not-yet-stabilized animal." The majority of people, he wrote, "will never attain equilibrium and . . . are by nature captious, fretful, irritable, uncomfortable, looking for relief from their travail and angry that it does not come." Brooker possesses the same intuitive understanding of humans as works in progress. Bellow's characters look for relief in ideology or religion; Brooker's, afflicted by grief, boredom, loneliness, and desire, are drawn to the promise of stability held out by technological optimization. Like all such promises, this one proves to be illusory, and their wishfulness comes at a cost.

The bill arrived, and Brooker insisted on paying. The PIN pad blipped obediently as he entered his number, then let out a low, querulous screech.

"Oh, it's not that, is it," he said. "Hold on."

He tried a different combination, with the same result.

"I could've sworn that's what it was."

Our waitress smiled politely.

"Shall I try this one more time?" he asked. "Or does that then lock me out of my card?"

Brooker paid in cash. It wasn't the first time this had happened, he said, as we got up to leave. It seemed an answer to my question. Brooker is for a world in which, no matter how advanced our technology becomes, generous allowances continue to be made for human error. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1999, at the age of twenty-eight, Charlie Brooker, the British satirist who is now a television auteur, was at a low ebb. He'd spent most of his twenties freelancing for PC Zone, a little-read gaming magazine, where he was able to indulge his obscene and misanthropic sense of humor.

# data[].attributes.body
A blog showing graphical Twitter data as to which episode received the most views.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Black Mirror season three has hit Netflix with six traumatizing episodes that'll make you want to go and hide in the woods.

The series, which originally came out in the UK, was snapped up by Netflix who announced the new series in January 2016. The new show follows the same format of stand-alone episodes that act as eerie depictions of what technology is capable of in the not so far away future.

Twitter is no longer available to users below a 5 star rating. We apologize for the inconvenience.

- Black Mirror (@blackmirror) October 21, 2016

The Brandwatch React team decided to take a look at the data surrounding the show, examining 67k tweets from 42k unique authors between 20th and 23rd October to determine which episodes stood out the most for online commenters and which were most distressing.
If you wish to avoid spoilers do not read the final section of this article (entitled "#DeathTo ___").
Let the binge begin

Like with any Netflix series, some fans just can't get through them fast enough. We found over 2k mentions of "binge" or "binging" or "binged" in our dataset, and watched as the later episodes gained popularity over the weekend.

Since the season has only been available for a few days it's understandable that the later episodes (five and six) got less mentions than episodes one to four. However, six overtook five and four overtook three so mentions volumes don't necessarily correlate with episode order.

Perhaps it's fitting that Nosedive would cause a big stir on social media. It tells the story of a young woman attempting to improve her life in a world where social reactions are rated out of five, with the influential "high fours" living the high life and reputations prone to "nosediving" fast. It was certainly resonant with social media users and reminded us a lot of a certain app.

#BlackMirror's "Nosedive" episode is just a step away from reality. And that's scary.

- Gabby S. (@velouriadreams) October 24, 2016

It's also come in conjunction with some scary looking revelations about how China plans to rate people.

Reputelligent Tip: votes from upscale people will help your own rating. Expand your sphere of influence now. https://t.co/bc2E12x2dd

- Black Mirror (@blackmirror) October 22, 2016

"Spine-chilling"

Once we found out which episodes caused the biggest stir we were interested to find out which were the most disturbing.

We searched for terms like "troubling", "terrifying", "eerie", "unnerving", "creeped out" etc. within episode mentions and found out which had the highest percentage of key terms that related to the distress of the viewer.

There was a clear winner and it came in the form of episode two (Playtest), in which a man who's strapped for cash agrees to test out an immersive new game created by a controversial developer (only to find it's not much fun).

New @blackmirror out on Netflix . DO NOT watch the episode called 'Playtest' before bed. Freaked out... #BlackMirror

- Mo Bashagha (@mobashagha) October 24, 2016

Interestingly, episode four (San Junipero) is one of the top mentioned episodes, but it also contains the lowest portion of distressed keywords. After an incredibly dark episode three (Shut up and Dance) it looks like the Black Mirror producers spared a thought for traumatized viewers by giving them a slightly less soul-crushing experience.

#DeathTo ___
Spoiler alert
Part of the final episode involves the hashtag #DeathTo, in which tweeters are invited to tweet the name and photo of someone they hate and with enough mentions they'll be subjected to a horrible mechanical bee related death.

It seemed like a kind of dark use case for a social media monitoring tool but we couldn't resist taking a look at who might be generating a lot of #DeathTo tweets...

#deathto Donald Trump. Just testing. #BlackMirror

- Rainbow Tractors (@RainbowTractors) October 23, 2016

Are you a journalist looking to cover our data? We have plenty more. Email us react@brandwatch.com for more information

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black Mirror Season Three: The Social Data Review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Black Mirror season three has hit Netflix with six traumatizing episodes that'll make you want to go and hide in the woods. The series, which originally came out in the UK, was snapped up by Netflix who announced the new series in January 2016.

# data[].attributes.headline
5) Black Mirror ranked 6th best show of 2016

# data[].attributes.subject
5) Black Mirror ranked 6th best show of 2016

# data[].attributes.body
The Guardian discusses the programme's representativeness through innovation and relation to British society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In one especially upsetting episode of the third series of Black Mirror, Kenny downloads a malware program called Shrive to repair the laptop his sister screwed up by watching movies illegally. But instead of cleaning up his computer, Shrive ruins Kenny's life. It activates the webcam which films Kenny when, as happens with adolescent boys, he masturbates over online porn.

And then an anonymous email pops up bearing the caps-lock hallmark of the online loon: "WE SAW WHAT YOU DID." The "we" has a video of him masturbating. Then another: "REPLY WITH YOUR PHONE NUMBER OR WE POST THE VIDEO TO EVERYONE IN YOUR CONTACTS."

The rest of the episode, called Shut Up and Dance, consists of Kenny fulfilling a series of texted demands - deliver a cake, rob a bank, fight a stranger - so the video doesn't go public.

It's hardly irrelevant that shrive is a Middle English word meaning to prescribe penance. It survives today in the name Shrove Tuesday (once we did penance for our sins; now we make pancakes). Part of what Charlie Brooker offers in Black Mirror is shriving for a social media age, chastening us by showing us the abyss into which we, in 2016, are amorally plummeting.

We should repent for our grubby private online pleasures, our worthless Twitterstorms, our Katie Hopkins-like trollumnists, our technology-facilitated murder of human empathy. But you know what? We probably won't. We're like the narrator of the late Leonard Cohen's song The Future: "When they said Repent! Repent! / I wonder what they meant." And in this series of Black Mirror, Brooker's like Cohen too: he has seen the future and, brother, it is murder.

When Black Mirror, which from 2011 to 2014 unflatteringly reflected the Facebook generation on Channel 4, was bought up by Netflix, some worried: could it continue savaging our giddily onanistic online age when sucked up by a big-budget global conglomerate? Could Brooker deliver over six episodes a series as creatively potent as he had for C4 in three?

By means of this genre-hopping series Brooker has overcome those worries. He offered us a chillingly effective police procedural with robo-bees hovering over Britain, mirroring the toxic swarm of online trolls (Hated in the Nation), a haunted house horror tweaked into cutting-edge relevance by dallying with game-playing virtual reality (Playtest) and a war movie in which soldiers in the near future have chips installed in their heads to makes their victims seem less than human (Men Against Fire).

But, as often in Brooker's world, there are nihilistic twists, wrong-footing those hoping he's supplying straightforward cautionary tales. What, for instance, Kenny doesn't realise as he scampers from task to degrading task is that he has no leverage: his shaming video will still get posted. To, among others, his mum.

Then comes another twist. What's that sound? Sirens. The cops are coming to arrest Kenny for looking at pornographic images of children. Maybe Kenny deserves all that's coming his way. Maybe everybody in 2016, thanks to how technology helps us realise our most shameless desires, gets corrupted. Even you.

Strikingly, we never find out who - or what - is behind Shrive. Possibly it was concocted by wrathful forces beyond human powers - a self-generating algorithm, or a vengeful Old Testament-style God.

Either way, Brooker revels in playing with the idea that us degraded humans in 2016 deserved the punishments he metes out - murders, public shamings, fried brains, unacceptable social media profiles.

If there was a topical moral one might take from Black Mirror, it was perhaps this: put your phones and laptops in buckets of water and go off-grid for your own good. Certainly that was what the first episode in the series, Nosedive, made me want to do. It dramatised a none-too-implausible future in which every human encounter is ranked by participants out of five on their phone, and where your own personal ranking determines such things as which cars or apartments you can rent.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Put your phones and laptops in buckets of water and go off-grid for your own good ... Nosedive. Photograph: David Dettmann/Netflix

Like Dave Eggers' novel The Circle, Nosedive was pitch-perfect satire of the Sisyphean labour of social media in which our heroine, Lacie ( Bryce Dallas Howard, channelling a candy-coloured Stepford wife and superbly nauseating omni-niceness), desperately wants to improve her ranking above 4.5 to join the elite.

In Eggers' novel, the slogan of the eponymous Google-Amazon-Facebook mashup for which the heroine works is an update of Proudhon's "property is theft", namely "privacy is theft". Lacie similarly mines herself and others for anything that can help her ratings. Every encounter - the barista's "Have a nice day!", the nodding acquaintance in the lift - becomes reconfigured with game theoretical sophistication to boost Lacie's ranking. Privacy makes no sense when you can - reader, you must! - commodify everything about yourself to improve your ratings.

Black Mirror thus asked questions that possess us 2016. Are we nice enough? Are we interesting enough? Why don't trolls like me? How can we blind ourselves to others' suffering? And if we aren't nice or interesting, can we use technology to make ourselves seem that way to improve our social capital? What made Black Mirror such compelling viewing this year was that its answers were unremittingly, almost unbearably, dark.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 50 best TV shows of 2016: No 6 Black Mirror

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In one especially upsetting episode of the third series of Black Mirror, Kenny downloads a malware program called Shrive to repair the laptop his sister screwed up by watching movies illegally. But instead of cleaning up his computer, Shrive ruins Kenny's life.

# data[].attributes.body
Includes access to images, videos, polls, articles, forums and quizzes for enthusiasts of Black Mirror.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black Mirror Fan Club | Fansite with photos, videos, and more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fanpop community fan club for Black Mirror fans to share, discover content and connect with other fans of Black Mirror. Find Black Mirror videos, photos, wallpapers, forums, polls, news and more.

# data[].attributes.headline
6) Backlash against writer inspired episode

# data[].attributes.subject
6) Backlash against writer inspired episode

# data[].attributes.body
An interview with Charlie Brooker with regards to series 3 and social media.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker says his own experience of a public backlash influenced one of the latest episodes of the acclaimed series which deals with hatred on social media.

Brooker, a creator and main writer of the anthology series that explores anxiety and human relationships around technology, apologised in 2004 after writing a satirical article for The Guardian on George W Bush in which he wrote: "Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?". The line caused a public outcry.

"That experience definitely fed into that episode, which we call Hated in the Nation, as it deals with people getting trolled on Twitter," says Brooker.

"My own incident pre-dated Twitter, and my vilification was done by good old-fashioned email, but some of the characters in Hated in the Nation say things that I was experiencing at the time, and I also read a book for research that deals with people caught up in Twitter storms. The author hangs out with them and sees how devastated they are, often by the sheer volume of comments they receive. The whole thing is terrifying."

Compared to a modern Twilight Zone or Tales of the Unexpected, Black Mirror - using technology instead of the supernatural to unnerve - first aired on Channel 4 in 2011.

Brooker had previously worked on satirical comedy programmes, including Brass Eye and the 11 O' Clock Show.

Because Black Mirror usually deals with a futuristic scenario, Brooker and his producer Annabel Jones have been accused of uncannily predicting the future - notably in 2013's The Waldo Moment, which documents a fake politician's unexpected rise to power.

"It certainly wasn't based on him, but now a lot of people have come up to me and said, 'that episode predicted Donald Trump,'" Brooker explains.

"The idea actually pre-dates 2011 when I was working on satirical comedy shows. I wanted to do an MP based on a Gorillaz character, and we thought, 'What if you had an ironic MP who ran for office in London's Shoreditch?'.

"It was inspired by figures like Boris Johnson and Ali G, and it was exploring the 'what if' scenario with a figurehead who was artificial, so that was a plus for many of the electorate, but he was also crude and unpleasant. However, we thought the episode would fall down as we said 'no one would ever vote for anything so witless and crude'. It wasn't a good comic character, deliberately so.

"I think the thing about the appeal of politicians like Boris and Trump is that they are entertainers, and they upend normality. Also, I think we are in a time when someone can be a legend at breakfast, detested by lunchtime and then loved again by dinner - society is that fickle and fast-moving."

Each episode of Black Mirror runs for up to 90 minutes as a self-contained film. The current series, which will appear on the streaming site Netflix, features actors Bryce Dallas-Howard, Alice Eve, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Kelly MacDonald, as well as an episode directed by Atonement's Joe Wright.

"Bryce in particular is playing a character that really has totally lost it," says Brooker.

"The episode, Nosedive, is about how people can rate each other instantly using their phones, and she has lost all sense of self in her bid to gain likes. We're not so far away from it, are we? We rate our cab drivers, our hotels and our food - and I believe another app tried to rate encounters with people until there was a complete outcry.

"I don't read the news though and then think 'what's the angle?', I start with a 'what if' idea, and if it relates to something in the real world, so much the better.

"A couple of times we've got accidentally lucky. We did one episode on a woman who brings her dead boyfriend back as an Artificial Intelligence, and that's a service that now exists - apparently someone watched the show, and then went and created the technology. One of our new episodes features drone bees, and that is being worked on too because of fear of real bee colony collapse."

"But I hope I'm not a prophet," he adds. "Because Black Mirror is really based upon my incessant worrying about everything. The thing that really keeps me awake at night, and has done since I was a child, is the thought of nuclear war. I really don't want to create an episode on that."

Brooker believes that technology is now moving so fast "that Black Mirror will struggle to keep up with it".

"The challenge is to keep one step ahead of the real world. So we won't do any shows about Brexit or the migrant crisis, but we are aware of all these things in the ether, and then the reality it creates will be part of new episodes."

While the writer says he mourns what he describes as "the debris of 2016, the year you couldn't even be a clown any more without it being creepy," he adds that he is "incredibly optimistic about technology".

"You wouldn't know if from the show, but I am. I think, by and large, the internet is a force for good. There may be a lot of toxicity online, but I think eventually humans will work out a code of conduct without the need for legislation.

"And I do believe that tech will solve more problems than it causes - a cure for cancer, in the future, for example. And I definitely haven't started worrying in the night about robots taking over. Yet."
All six episodes of Black Mirror's third season are on Netflix from 21 October. Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram, or if you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black Mirror: Backlash against writer inspired episode - BBC News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker says his own experience of a public backlash influenced one of the latest episodes of the acclaimed series which deals with hatred on social media.

# data[].attributes.body
Regulation complaint towards the episode 'The National Anthem' (pp. 120). First broadcast on Channel 4, 4th December 2011.

# data[].attributes.headline
9) Black Mirror relocates from Channel 4 to Netflix

# data[].attributes.subject
9) Black Mirror relocates from Channel 4 to Netflix

# data[].attributes.body
Netflix pays a reported $40 million for worldwide broadcasting rights.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For the first time, Netflix outbid a network on a show it originally commissioned and wanted to keep on air.

Online streaming companies have resuscitated series that were on the verge of being dropped, as Amazon did with Ripper Street. And they've resurrected much loved shows that had laid dormant for some time, as Netflix did with Arrested Development, Fuller House and the upcoming revival of Gilmore Girls.

But up until just a few weeks ago, no online streaming company, no matter how powerful, had dared to snatch a show away from a commissioning broadcaster that was looking to retain it for another season.

Enter Black Mirror, the darkly satirical British anthology series created by Charlie Brooker, and that big Netflix deal.

Brooker had developed Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-style show in which each episode offers a different dystopian vision of a future Britain, for U.K. public service network Channel 4, which aired the first two three-part seasons in 2011 and 2013. Both received critical and ratings acclaim, with 1.9 million watching the premiere episode of season one. A 90-minute stand-alone Christmas special, which Channel 4 commissioned from Brooker, starred Mad Men's Jon Hamm and drew 2 million viewers when it aired on Dec.16, 2014.

But Netflix had already trained its sights on Black Mirror. The SVOD giant had picked up the series for its U.S. service and began streaming it in late 2014. It was an instant hit, garnering an American fan base, including genre master Stephen King, who on Twitter called the show "terrifying, funny, intelligent. It's like The Twilight Zone, only rated R."

Black Mirror was already a global success story, having sold to more than 90 territories, and a third season seemed a given. But instead of Channel 4, it was Netflix that swooped in, commissioning a 12-part season three in September 2015 for a reported $40 million in exchange for worldwide rights. Even then, however, it was assumed that Channel 4 would still air the show in the U.K. But last month, Endemol Shine, which owns Brooker's House of Tomorrow production banner, confirmed that Netflix outbid the network in its own backyard.

According to sources, Channel 4 had a first-look option for the series with Endemol. For its part, Endemol Shine said in a statement on March 29 that the British network "had the opportunity to recommission [ Black Mirror] since 2013 and passed on this and subsequent co-production offers put to them. Only following this and the first series' exceptional performance when aired on Netflix did Netflix offer a longer order of 12 with an increased budget that allowed producers House of Tomorrow to realize their ambitions for the series. Further efforts were made to try to reach a settlement regarding a U.K. window for Channel 4, but these were also sadly to no avail."

However, Channel 4 immediately responded, saying it wasn't true their network had passed on the show and had "offered to recommission Black Mirror."

Whatever the true sequence of events, the deal has sent a chill across the European TV industry, worried that deep-pocketed online companies could poach their hit shows.

"It's terrifying," said one veteran producer, who has sold international rights for European series to Netflix in the past and spoke on condition of anonymity. "It undermines the foundation of the free-TV networks."

Netflix has been pumping cash into its European operations, commissioning original shows in the U.K. (royalist period piece The Crown), France (political thriller Marseille) and Italy (Mafia drama Suburra) as well as new series in Germany and Spain.

But taking a risk on original productions is one thing. Snatching away a show with an established fan base from the network that helped make it a hit is something else entirely.

" Black Mirror couldn't be a more Channel 4 show," said the network's controller, Jay Hunt, in a tersely worded statement following the announcement of the Netflix deal. "We took it from a dangerous idea to a brand that resonated globally."

Hunt added that it was "disappointing" that the first broadcast window in the U.K. had been sold off to the "highest bidder, ignoring the risk a publicly owned channel like 4 took backing it."

Hunt's second point is particularly relevant in Europe, where public networks fund a huge volume of TV series and many take risks on cutting edge or alternative content considered too edgy for commercial networks.

But does Channel 4 have any right to feel aggrieved? Sources claim that the network wasn't given an opportunity to match Netflix's offer, but even if it had been, it's unlikely the network could have put a similar amount of cash on the table. Channel 4 certainly wouldn't have been able to front a full 12 episodes of the series, a huge order for a British series, which traditionally have three-to-six episode runs.

"They're just trying to bring to attention that they picked a winner," claims Claire Enders, CEO of Enders Analysis, who says that Netflix's investment in British talent can only be good for the creative industries of the U.K., which, she says, will become the company's hub for global content. "They tend to pick winners and develop new types of talent, as indeed was the case with Black Mirror. Charlie Brooker went from a Guardian columnist to a TV guy. I'm sure they knew the game was up a long time ago."

Netflix increasingly sees itself as a global channel. Company CEO Reed Hastings has made it clear he wants the company's shows to play everywhere and exclusively on Netflix worldwide.

"We're going to see this [ Black Mirror-t ype deal] replicated over and over again," remarks Enders. "This is the beginning of a wave of further rights acquisitions by Netflix, which are global models."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
MIPTV: Why the 'Black Mirror' Deal Marks a Turning Point for Netflix

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Online streaming companies have resuscitated series that were on the verge of being dropped, as Amazon did with Ripper Street. And they've resurrected much loved shows that had laid dormant for some time, as Netflix did with Arrested Development, Fuller House and the upcoming revival of Gilmore Girls.

# data[].attributes.body
An article connoting Black Mirror, with reference to the film industry too.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The show quickly went from crossover hit to something America seems keen to co-opt. Robert Downey Jr. purchased the rights to the episode described above, in which people use implants to tape their memories, called "The Entire History of You." Jon Hamm sought out the show's creators for a meeting and eventually guest-starred on a special holiday episode called "White Christmas." It's hard to say exactly how many people have watched the show, because Netflix declined to share that data, but Charlie Brooker, one of the creators, said the uptick was noticeable, even from London. "It had made some kind of impact," he said in a recent phone interview. It was as if "suddenly, America got it."

In a sense, "Black Mirror" is just the latest in a long line of British exports, right alongside One Direction and Benedict Cumberbatch, that captivate the American public by scratching an itch we didn't know we had. The show's appeal is, on the surface, completely obvious, but it is so obvious that you have to wonder why we didn't come up with the premise ourselves.

When it comes to weaving technology into its story lines, Hollywood tends to take an unimaginative path of least resistance. Some films imagine a world so fallen and far gone, as a result of technological excess, that it is rendered unrecognizable, as in "Elysium," "Gattaca," "The Final Cut" or even "Wall-E." Others rely on technology only as a backdrop or as a means of dazzling audiences with new gadgetry: Think "Interstellar" (space travel), "Looper" (time travel) and "Lucy" (telekinesis and teleportation). Hollywood offers little between the horror of dystopia and the wonder of a trip to Q's laboratory.

It is impossible to watch the show and not idly fantasize about having access to some of the services and systems they use, even as you see them used in horrifying ways.

This problem persists in movies that are set on a more human scale and that actually imagine the near future of consumer technologies. "Her," for example, the sweet romantic comedy about a lonely man falling in love with his operating system, focuses more on the male protagonist's inability to connect with other humans than the implications of unleashing such powerful programs on the world. Similarly, "Silicon Valley," Mike Judge's comedy series on HBO, prefers to make caricatures out of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists but not their creation, which is comically arcane: a video-compression algorithm.

Occasionally, of course, Hollywood does dig deeper. "Blade Runner," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "The Matrix" and "Battlestar Galactica" all stand out as excellent cautionary tales about the way humans can lose control over their inventions. But each is at least a decade old. It's as if film producers caught a prophetic glimpse of the rise of Facebook and Snapchat and iDevices and realized that lecturing audiences about the perils of wasting time online wouldn't be huge box-office draws. (They were probably right.)

"Black Mirror" falls somewhere in between its predecessors, equal parts horror and wonder, somewhere in the uncanny valley between our world and one dominated by Skynet. It looks like a future we might actually inhabit, making the show a lot more effective as a critique of the tech industry's trajectory - one that might make you think twice about which devices you buy and which services you use.

In this way, it makes sense that "Black Mirror" came from outside our borders. Europe and Britain have a richer tradition of lashing back at emerging technologies, especially those they (rightly) view as American technocultural imperialism. Germany, for example, has long warred with Google, Amazon and Uber over business practices, data-collection habits and freewheeling growth tactics that often circumvent regulation and longstanding rules. Technology is one of America's most important exports, and, as the Snowden disclosures revealed, the widespread adoption of Silicon Valley products allowed our government to surveil the world's communications. In the aftermath of the exposure of the National Security Agency's extensive spying network, lawmakers in Brazil, Japan, India and Russia pushed for new laws and cyber infrastructure intended to thwart American snooping.

In America, we treat the release of each new Apple product with the reverence usually reserved for pop icons. The sly ingenuity of "Black Mirror" is that it nails down our love for the same devices we blame for our psychological torment. Brooker understands that even as we swear off tweeting and promise to stop Googling our exes, our phones are still the last things we see before falling asleep and the first things we reach for when we awaken.

To that end, the gadgets in "Black Mirror," including the creepy memory-recording devices, look sleek enough to want, which is perhaps the show's cleverest trick. It is impossible to watch the show and not idly fantasize about having access to some of the services and systems they use, even as you see them used in horrifying ways. (You might not feel this way about, say, "The Terminator.") Most television shows and movies can't even correctly portray the standard interfaces that we use to browse the Web, send a text message or make a voice call, let alone design them in a desirable way.

"Black Mirror" resonates because the show manages to exhibit caution about the role of technology without diminishing its importance and novelty, functioning as a twisted View-Master of many different future universes where things have strayed horribly off-course. (This is an advantage it has over the movies: a blockbuster must settle on one convincing outcome and stick with it.)

But those futures, or ones like it, loom on our own horizon. Real-world events like the Snowden leaks and even the Sony email hacks may give us the chills, but they weren't enough to persuade us to change our behavior or demand more from the companies we rely on to send risqué photos and store our personal communications. And perhaps that's the true appeal of the series: It does more than blame technology for our woes. It deals with the reality that, no matter what gadgetry we may possess, our problems remain human. It reminds us that technology probably won't enslave us, but it definitely will change us.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Black Mirror' and the Horrors and Delights of Technology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The show quickly went from crossover hit to something America seems keen to co-opt. Robert Downey Jr. purchased the rights to the episode described above, in which people use implants to tape their memories, called "The Entire History of You."