Murky reflections: why sci-fi needs to stop imitating Black Mirror
It’s a tale as old as time: two young people hit it off. They’re living in a vaguely future-ish, vaguely retro world, with the technology to read potential couples for compatibility within the accuracy of a percentage point. A match, and you’re golden; a declaration of romantic doom, and why waste time? These two young people have results they believe, but don’t necessarily trust. What do you do when science doesn’t align with the heart?
Related: Fingernails review – Jessie Buckley’s intelligent acting keeps sci-fi love story afloat
If this sounds to you like the premise of a Black Mirror episode, you would be correct. That’s loosely the synopsis of Hang the DJ, the fourth installment of the British futurist anthology series’ fourth season, released on Netflix in late 2017. It’s also the basic summary of Fingernails, a new Apple TV+ film released this month and the latest in a string of underbaked yet overdone emulations of the show which presaged the future with varying levels of clarity.
The two productions have their differences – in the episode, Black Mirror’s Amy (Georgina Campbell) and Frank (Joe Cole) choose to be together despite a negative test result, only to discover that they’re in a simulation of outcomes for a real couple with a 99% chance of compatibility. In the movie, no computer glitch can save Anna (Jessie Buckley) from a stagnant relationship with her test-confirmed boyfriend Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) or her test-confounding attraction to her co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed). Fingernails, written and directed by the Greek film-maker Christos Nikou, is starrier, more expensive, more clearly aiming for prestige sci-fi.
But no amount of fine acting (particularly from the ever-solid Buckley) or serious-looking film-making – lingering shots, tableaus of confused yearning, consistent aesthetic – can keep the film from trailing listlessly in the show’s wake. It has the now classic hallmarks of a Black Mirror imitator: an aspect of modern life distended into a new, unsettling normal; questions of humanity broadly posed and hammily answered; the heady premise of techno-futurist sci-fi far outpacing the development of characters or the specifics of story.
At this point, Black Mirror knock-offs are a scourge of the streaming era, which unfortunately incentivizes dressed-up spins on previous successes over truly cerebral or ambitious imaginations of the future. In light of Netflix’s success, other streamers developed good-on-paper, well-endowed yet ultimately throwaway anthology series. There was AMC/Amazon’s Soulmates, developed by the Black Mirror writer Will Bridges, which extrapolated a sci-fi preoccupation with the concept of soulmates into a diagnostic test and profitable company, and replicated the original series’ most consistent flaws – overstatement, underdevelopment, unwieldy ideas, an over-emphasis on dark potential. Solos was supposed to be a tentpole dystopian series for Amazon, with such marquee names as Anne Hathaway, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and Constance Wu, but sagged under stodgy monologues. FX’s The Premise, developed by The Office’s BJ Novak, turned the Black Mirror formula on to hot-button issues and social media fixations in grating fashion, too enthralled with its own, yes, premise to say anything interesting.
All three premiered between 2020 and 2021, and all fizzled on impact. Same for Swan Song, a 2021 Apple TV+ film starring Mahershala Ali as a man who, faced with a terminal illness, pays to have his memories copied into a doppelganger for his wife. A relatively similar mandate – romance with a clone, melancholy vibes, A-list actors – guided Foe, another big-screen sci-fi disappointment this fall. Directed by Garth Davis and starring Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan as lovers in the desolate 2065 American midwest, Foe never shook the feeling of being a moony, undercooked imitator of Black Mirror’s fascination with avatars. Like Fingernails, Foe also echoed a Black Mirror episode – Mescal’s Junior requires a body double in his absence (he’s going to a space colony) – and also oddly envisioned the future with a sterile retro aesthetic, to unintentionally comic results and a collective shrug.
Arguably no studio has bet on sci-fi more than Apple, which has a stable of futurist shows and films on its roster, from Silo to Foundation to the cult hit For All Mankind. (Tech money has to be good for something.) Still, Black Mirror casts a long shadow. Extrapolations, a starry and expensive anthology series which focuses its futurist imaginings on the climate crisis, is a useful example of how television can use arguably the most pressing issue of our time as more than just a flashy premise. (Whether people want to watch is a different story.) Invasion, which just wrapped its second season, spreads its alien invasion story across disparate ordinary characters. The most successful show, both critically and in the Black Mirror “one tech anomaly changes everything” vein, is Severance, whose first season was an unnerving breath of fresh air in a TV season awash with remakes, reboots and based-on-a-true-story adaptations.
Related: Foe review – Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan can’t lift dull Black Mirror knock-off
Black Mirror was always hit and miss, more so as it went on (I don’t count Bandersnatch, Netflix’s disappointing experiment with interactive entertainment). The show seems itself to have run out of ideas in its latest season. With the exception of Joan Is Awful, an AI-centric episode which eerily envisioned fears undergirding the actors’ strike, the latest outing has drawn a middling reaction; even Black Mirror is just another Black Mirror echo. But at its best, it channeled brainy, potentially strained thought exercises into economical characters, textured emotion, firm grips for big ideas. It was not just the wonkiness or threat of nascent technology, but how it could reshape our instincts, prefigure our emotions. How love, longing and memory could be manipulated for profit or product.
Sci-fi is, admittedly, a tricky genre to nail, particularly for a mass audience without the patience for a dense explanation of rules or meticulous world-building. It makes sense that Black Mirror, a show which could occasionally sear the brain with a believable enough scenario – the grief staunched by AI in Be Right Back, the personal rating system in Nosedive – carries on as a perennial template, easy to invoke and hard to emulate. Streaming-era sci-fi would do better to look beyond it.
