Black Mirror Is the New Twilight Zone 

The Twilight Zone is the greatest television show ever produced, and very few series even come close to replicating it. In some ways, that only endears me to the original version even more. Every time I see an attempt to top it (The [New] Twilight Zone, The [Other New] Twilight Zone, Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories), my esteem for the original only grows. It seems to feed off its supplicants in order to sustain its fattened reign; hey, that actually sounds like a good Twilight Zone episode.

So when folks started saying that England's Black Mirror was the New New New Twilight Zone, I thought, "Yeah, right." I also saw words and phrases like "dystopian" and "the evils of technology" thrown in, two clichés that bore the shit out of me. (Man creates robot, robot kills man. Next.) However, when one of my friends said that the episodes of Black Mirror that she caught on Netflix had "haunted" her, my interest was piqued. I pictured being haunted by an iWatch or a computer chip, the two things that come to mind when the word "technology" is uttered. Not scary enough, folks. Early raves from highbrow sources like The New York Times and The New Yorker didn't help my aversion; shit, they liked The Master. Snooze.

Finally, I watched Black Mirror. And I was left gape-mouthed and, yes, haunted. The show is incredible. Each episode is a self-contained story that plays off some greater psychological byproduct of our texting, Facebooking, downloading, and ever-consuming media society. It's not about a man creating a robot and the robot going berserk and bashing him over the head with his steel arm; it's about man creating hyper-reality and living with the consequences. It's about basic human scruples being tested by the easy access to instant gratification. It's about prurience and consumerism, advertising and sensationalism. It's grand satire that makes you think. Like The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror has good stories with even better back stories.

If you haven't yet watched it, don't let the first episode throw you off, the one about the British prime minister forced to have sex with a pig on live TV — porking the pork? — to free a kidnapped woman. (Why the producers decided to lead with their weakest episode is beyond me.) Instead, skip to the first episode of Season 2, where a woman creates a replicant out of her dead boyfriend, or perhaps the greatest episode of all, "White Bear," in which a woman awakes in a Hunger Games-type world with no knowledge of how or why she got there.

Seasons 1 and 2 have been up on Netflix for a few months, but if you are keen to find more out there you have only one option, the Black Mirror "Christmas Special" that aired in the U.K. last December. It starred Jon Hamm, no less! I waited patiently for Netflix to pick it up but it still hasn't. Luckily, some enterprising chaps posted it on YouTube in March and it shall remain there until The Man notices. I suppose more technologically savvy readers know other places on the internet to find illegal streams, but once you finish tinkering with your robot you will be dead, anyway. We Luddites depend on YouTube.

Sadly, the "White Christmas" episode was a bit of a letdown. Could it be possible that the creators bowed to pressure to make a long "special" to feed hungry fans and thereby take creative dives? Hmm. The crux of the story revolves around Hamm, who gets into people's heads for a living, so to speak. I don't want to reveal spoilers. The characters find themselves in improbably strange situations, like a good George Saunders short story, but the show really seems like the writers cobbled together two show ideas and tried to squish them into one long one. In the end, I wasn't haunted one bit.

Don't get me wrong, it's still better than 90 percent of what's out there. But perhaps, like The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror will be hit-or-miss, with some instant classics and others that have the faint glow of brilliance. It may not be shot as beautifully as its counterpart, nor does it have the range and scope, but like The Twilight Zone, folks are already scrambling to copy it. To wit, an American Black Mirror is reportedly in the works. That's right — a replicant.