New Black Mirror movies could be the perfect approach for a stale series

polygon.com:

Everything’s been quiet for Charlie Brooker’s landmark tech-horror series Black Mirrorsince its truncated, three-episode fifth season hit Netflix in 2019. The series’ interactive movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch briefly caused a sensation in 2018, but it’s been a long time since the show has had the impact or cachet it had back in the glory days of its beloved 2016 episodes “San Junipero” and “Nosedive,” much less the shock value it had when the series first premiered with the searing political satire “The National Anthem” in 2011.

Variety now reports that a sixth season of the show is underway at Netflix, which has been Black Mirror’s home since 2016. It also offers some insight on why season 6 was delayed — Brooker and creative partner Annabel Jones left their old production company, and it took some time for them to regain the rights that would let them pursue Black Mirror. The trade publication didn’t cite specific sources, but says a season 6 is currently in casting, that it will have more episodes than season 5, and that they’ll be longer, with each installment “treated as an individual film.”

That wording leaves plenty of room for hedging. Black Mirror episodes have always been “treated like” individual movies, with each one setting up a different world. Usually, episodes take place in a future featuring some new technology that’s an iteration on familiar tech from our time, like “Nosedive”’s society-wide ratings systems, or “Metalhead”’s killer hunter-robot, based on Boston Dynamic’s dog-bots. But if that quote represents a more literal approach, with longer episodes, it might be exactly what Black Mirror needs to stay relevant.

When the series first launched in 2011, it was considered wildly ambitious, given