Choose-your-own-adventure? That’s just like, urr, Black Mirror
One of the episodes of the new Black Mirror series will include an interactive element which allows viewers to choose the storyline, it has been reported.
It is no secret that Netflix has been planning to combine traditional formatting with video games in the coming years. Children’s show Puss in Book has already features a number of choose-your-own-adventure episodes, with Charlie Brooker’s show being judged an ideal way to test how this might work for an adult audience.
An source told Bloomberg that the interactive episode will be part of the fifth series of Black Mirror when it returns to the streaming service in December. It is thought that the range of options and choices given to viewers will be more than those currently offered in Puss in Book.
The future will be brighter than ever. pic.twitter.com/slVeg3VPd7
— Black Mirror (@blackmirror) March 5, 2018
It is reported that the subscription service is hoping to begin producing at least one more live-action project soon. Two video game adaptions are being lined up as potential options.
Charlie Brooker initially created Black Mirror in 2011 for Channel 4. The right were bought by Netflix in 2015, leading to Emmy Award winning episode San Junipero. Ironically, choose-your-own-adventure TV series are the exact type of futuristic technological advances subject to foreboding parody on the show itself.
The last season of the show was released in December 2017. Filming of the upcoming series began over summer with a number of shopfronts in Croydon being kitted out with retro signage. Brooker, meanwhile, has addressed viewers longstanding questions over whether the show all occurs in the same universe during the hiatus.
He and fellow showrunner Annabel Jones told The Watch podcast: “I think we have malleable rules on that. Sometimes it’s useful… So in Black Museum, Rollo Haynes works for TCKR, which is the same company that we see in ‘San Junipero’ and he’s going into a hospital called St Juniper’s Hospital. There’s a clear sort of through-line there, that we don’t bother to explain.
“But on the other hand, we sometimes have used the logic [of another episode]. Often it is to do with the gadget. We did The ‘Entire History of You’, which is the episode where everyone can rewind memories, and they use a little thumb controller thing to access the UI in their eyes.”
