Black Mirror ‘renewed’ for seventh season at Netflix

Charlie Brooker’s popular sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror is coming back for a seventh season.

The dystopian TV show, which was first aired in 2011, returned to screens earlier this year after a four-year hiatus. Variety reports the seventh season has now been confirmed. The show will begin production later this year with Brooker returning as an executive producer, while plot details and the number of episodes are still being kept under wraps.

Black Mirror debuted its first two seasons on Channel 4 in 2011 and 2013 before it was acquired by Netflix, where it returned with its latest four seasons in 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2023.

Following the show’s move to the streaming platform, some viewers have suggested that its quality has diminished, including The Independent’s Nick Hilton, who wrote that the “quality has become more variable... like the weather”, in his three-star review of its latest, sixth season.

The most recent season consisted of five parts, featuring A-list names including Salma Hayek, Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy, Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, Oppenheimer’s Josh Hartnett and I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu.

The fifth season was comprised of only three instalments and starred Andrew Scott, Anthony Mackie, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Topher Grace and Miley Cyrus.

At first, the dystopian series, which often tackles modern conundrums surrounding data privacy, surveillance, virtual reality, deep fakes and artificial intelligence, has often been credited as speculating about the future. However, more recently, the show has reflected the darker side of modern technology developments as they happen.

The most recent season, which was released in June, opened with an episode titled “Joan Is Awful” about a streaming platform called Streamberry that was co-opting people’s lives in real-time using AI to turn their day-to-day lives into blockbuster shows for its platform.

In the episode, Joan (Annie Murphy), a manager at an amorphous tech firm, learns that her life is being turned into a TV show starring Salma Hayek as her. Streamberry is incredibly similar to Netflix, with the shows featuring the same user interface as Netflix and episodes opening with the platform’s signature “tudum” sound.

Brooker has said that the episode was written before concerns started mounting around the AI program ChatGPT, which can generate large bodies of text – specifically the worry that AI could one day outsmart humans and replace workers in their jobs.

Read all of the Black Mirror episodes ranked from best to worst, here.