Great news for fans of existential dread and tech-based hyper anxiety: Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s groundbreaking dystopian drama series, will beam season 6 into our eyeballs later this year.
A first-look trailer for the new season dropped in April, alongside the announcement that it'll hit Netflix this coming June. That's right — there's just a few months to wait, at the time of writing, for the first bit of Black Mirror since 2019. (Until then you'll have to make do with the frightening absurdities of the real world.)
In May, an exclusive preview from Entertainment Weekly outlined the episode titles and descriptions for the upcoming season, giving us our first proper idea of the stories we'll encounter. Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett in an alternate 1969, faced with an unspeakable tragedy in space? Zazie Beetz hunted down by the paps? The life of an average woman, portrayed by Annie Murphy, adapted for a big-budget prestige TV series — in which she's played by none other than Salma Hayek? Yep, it's as weird as ever.
Here's everything we know about the upcoming series.
The episode titles and descriptions for Black Mirror season 6 are here
Not too long to wait for your dose of Brooker-flavoured dystopia, folks. In the meantime, Entertainment Weekly has just dropped a major scoop on season six of Black Mirror, revealing all five episode titles and descriptions, giving us our first proper idea of the nightmarish stories we'll be subjected at Brooker's unsettling hand. It's as eclectic an anthological slate as ever, with story locales ranging from space in the ‘60s (an alternate ’60s, that is) to a sleepy Scottish town and England in the late '70s.
In “Joan is Awful”, Annie Murphy's average woman will discover that a TV network is adapting her everyday life into a prestige series — herself portrayed in the show by Salma Hayek. It sounds a little bit like The Truman Show, only in this instance Murphy will presumably be audience to the mimicry of her doppelgänger, arguably more terrifying than being trapped inside a live-streamed fishbowl.
Sam Miller's “Lock Henry” will feature Samuel Blenkin and Myha'la Herrold as a young American documentarian couple who travel to a, quote, “sleepy Scottish town,” to shoot a new nature film, only to discover a much more nefarious story extending back to the shadowy local past. Whether or not Herrold will wear fierce suits and bang lines a la her central turn in Industry is yet to be seen.
The starriest and most tantalising episode, comes by way of the Aaron Paul-starring “Beyond the Sea”, which takes place an alternate 1969. In what seems a savvy blend of 2001: A Space Odyssey flavoured cabin fever and the ever-creeping future tech anxieties fuelling our present day nightmares, Paul and Josh Hartnett will be on a high-tech spaceship — check out that artificial gravity — in the aftermath of an “unspeakable tragedy.” Note that ‘69 was the year the United States landed a man on the moon, so hopefully in this timeline Neil Armstrong doesn't end up smeared on the lunar surface.
The most succinct description provided by EW is for the episode “Mazey Day”, which stars Joker's Zazie Beets as a troubled starlet hounded by the paps a la Marilyn Monroe, simultaneously dealing with the aftermath of a hit-and-run. From that sliver of synopsis alone, one should think it has all the makings of a frenetic thriller a la Uncut Gems. Danny Ramirez, the hot internet fav seen in the background of some shots in Top Gun: Maverick, also stars.
Last but not least, an episode returning to the home territory where a wee Black Mirror sucked its first teat. “Demon 79” takes place in northern England in ‘79, and centres on a meek sales assistant forced to commit terrible acts to prevent disaster. With its titular suggestion of hellish horror iconography and its latter-century setting, one can’t help but imagine this will be Black Mirror Peter Strickland-style (think: In Fabric, which about a dozen people saw but was very, very good). Anjana Vasan stars alongside Paapa Essiedu, and is the only episode on the roster not solely written by Charlie Brooker, as former Ms. Marvel head writer Bisha K. Ali also rolled her sleeves up for it.
The first trailer for Black Mirror season 6 sees Aaron Paul lost in space, seemingly
The new trailer for Black Mirror season six isn't giving much away, but we do know that Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul will be seen in a space station, seemingly adrift, going by his panicked expression. (Or is he? You never know with Black Mirror, do you.) Otherwise, we get glimpses at some of the other feature-length episodes included in this season's anthology — not least Paapa Essiedu looking fierce in an angelic silver jacket.
Speaking to Netflix blog Tudum alongside the trailer launch, Brooker opened up on his approach to the new season. "I've always felt that Black Mirror should feature stories that are entirely distinct from one another, and keep surprising people — and myself — or else what’s the point? It should be a series that can’t be easily defined, and can keep reinventing itself,” he said.
Basically, in typical Black Mirror fashion, expect the unexpected. Or don't. Or do. Or…
“Partly as a challenge, and partly to keep things fresh for both me and the viewer, I began this season by deliberately upending some of my own core assumptions about what to expect,” Brooker says. “Consequently, this time, alongside some of the more familiar Black Mirror tropes we’ve also got a few new elements, including some I’ve previously sworn blind the show would never do, to stretch the parameters of what ‘a Black Mirror episode’ even is. The stories are all still tonally Black Mirror through-and-through — but with some crazy swings and more variety than ever before.”
Watch the trailer below.
Salma Hayek and Annie Murphy are reportedly in talks to join the Black Mirror season 6 cast
Injecting a little more Hollywood verve into Black Mirror season six's raft of tomorrow's stars, Variety reports that multi-award nominee Salma Hayek (best known for Frida and From Dusk till Dawn, plus recent parts in House of Gucci and Eternals) has been added to the series casting list. Nowt is known about her prospective part at current.
Coming off a similarly hot streak on the small screen, Schitt's Creek and Russian Doll star Annie Murphy is also reportedly in talks to join the Black Mirror season six cast. The 35-year-old won an Emmy and a SAG award for her performance as Alexis in Creek, plus a slew of nominations from the other major TV awards bodies.
Deadline has further reported that Rory Culkin, member of the long-standing acting dynasty and recent star of Under the Banner of Heaven, has too struck a deal to appear in an episode of Charlie Brooker's anthology series. Maybe it's time for a little brotherly Succession crossover?
Who else has been cast in Black Mirror season 6?
After its fifth season boasted a stacked lineup with the likes of Andrew Scott, Anthony Mackie, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Topher Grace and even Miley Cyrus, the sixth instalment looks to bring in a similarly starry cast with a tilt toward TV actorly prestige, per a report from Variety.
Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul is arguably the most tantalising prospect, especially as he's kind of appeared in the series already. Paul was a voice cameo in season four's iconic USS Callister, playing a disgruntled multiplayer gamer in Jesse Plemon's Star Trek virtual fanfic. Black Mirror's never been one to recur any of its characters, so who knows whether Paul's involvement is a look at Gamer691 or a new story entirely. Early reports from filming have seen him donning old-timey clothes in East Sussex, so bets are on a fresh twisted tale.
Other cast members announced for the series include Top Gun: Maverick's Danny Ramirez, Joker's Zazie Beetz, I May Destroy You's Paapa Essiedu, 90s teen heartthrob Josh Hartnett and House of Cards' Kate Mara.
The cast includes a number of other exciting names, many of them recent prestige TV staples. There's Himesh Patel, of post-apocalyptic series Station Eleven; Myha'a Herrold joins from Industry; Barbie's Michael Cera will also star in one of the season's feature-length episodes.
There'll be more episodes in Black Mirror season 6, with each to be like ‘an individual film’
Variety broke the news of Black Mirror's return back in May, confirming that we can expect a larger number of episodes than we got three years ago from season 5 (a paltry three, albeit they were mega) and the usual stuff about the new episodes being “even more cinematic in scope, with each instalment being treated as an individual film.”
Is this strictly good news? Diehards of the show will contest that, after the big money move to America streaming for its third run in 2016, something of Black Mirror's uniquely British sense of humour got lost.
For our money, every season of Black Mirror has been a gloriously mixed bag, with some episodes hitting dizzy heights of concept and execution and others being out-and-out duds. Debating which is which, while admiring the chances the show takes, is all part of what makes it so good.
Anyway — for a while there it looked unlikely the show would be revived after Brooker and his creative partner Annabel Jones parted with their production company at Endemol and set off on their own under the banner of Broke and Bones back in 2020.
But Netflix, despite its recent travails, know to back a winner when they see one and soon pumped funding into the company in a deal thought to be worth around $100 million. That’s quite a lot of CGI to fit around your nihilistic plotlines and dick jokes.
Brooker himself has been rather lowkey in recent years (haven't we all), telling Radio Times in 2020 that he wasn’t sure “what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart”. Perhaps now the pandemic has passed and we only have impending global climate catastrophe to worry about, he feels the time is right to step back into the fray.
There was actually one small clue in that interview as to what we might expect from new Black Mirror: "I’m sort of keen to revisit my comic skill set, so I’ve been writing scripts aimed at making myself laugh,” he said. So more satire like ‘The National Anthem’ and less of the out-and-out bleakness of ‘Metalhead’, perhaps? Either way, we’ll be tuning in...
What's the release date of Black Mirror season 6?
The new series is coming in June 2023.
