Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror could return this year

Channel 4 head of comedy Phil Clarke tells RadioTimes.com that there could be one episode of the dystopian anthology series this year.... with three more planned for 2015.

TV rewind: Black Mirror

Sci-Fi is at its scariest though, not when it transports us to faraway lands and presents us with the frightening or grotesque, but when it presents us with the frighteningly possible and realistic. That's the world presented by Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, a series which presents a skewed version of our own reality in a set of cautionary tales that are both terrifying and frighteningly realistic.

Charlie Brooker confirms at least 2 more Black Mirrors

Charlie Brooker has promised more Black Mirror, saying that two 'helpings' of the Channel 4 drama are on the way.

Radio Times review

Though Black Mirror sometimes lacks subtlety, that's sort of the point - we live in a world of ever-widening extremes. What the show does so cleverly is to merge this present reality with a sci-fi future so convincingly realised it seems more of a prediction than a warning. This series bettered the first, though the final episode, The Waldo Moment, suffered by comparison with the earlier instalments. Be Right Back, starring Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson, was a beautiful, haunting exploration of virtual life after death, while the horror of White Bear, where punishment became entertainment, was hard to shake off.

Hints of third series of Black Mirror and 'delay'

Charlie Brooker has revealed that his cult Channel 4 drama Black Mirror will return for a third series - but has no idea when.

Charlie Brooker interview

The satirist and former Guardian columnist on a special screening of his drama Black Mirror, and why fame has made him rethink his comedy.

Charlie Brooker: there are scripts for Series 3

Charlie Brooker says he has "ideas" for another run of Black Mirror if the show is recommissioned.

Charlie Brooker has been kind to me in print, so I must be careful not to be too kind about him, lest people suspect that I am dishing out a quid pro quo. On the downside, his weekly show behind a desk (Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe, BBC Two) sometimes makes it look as though he wants to eat the desk in his anger at the world.

But his larger dramatic creations reveal a Swiftian intelligence that is quite unusual when translated into an updated, high tech, electronic (squrrk!) field. There is quite a lot of squrrk! in Black Mirror. He wants you to know that your attention is being zapped into lightning trips from one field of reality to another.

The main reality in the latest show seemed to be that a helpless young woman was on the run from dozens of zombie-type vigilantes: shades of A Clockwork Orange, Assault on Precinct 13, etc.

But (squrrk!) not so fast. Towards the end it turns out that she is really the victim of a deadly game. With her wiped brain - Brooker is fond of the idea of the human mind being annihilated by television - she is being made to experience the suffering she caused when she tortured a child. But did she? Are the organizers of the game (see, as Brooker undoubtedly has, The Game, with Michael Douglas) normal people like us, at last getting the chance to inflict a just punishment that the psycho criminal will actually feel? Or what?

Doubts remain as the soundtrack says squrrk! Brooker used to be a companion at arms for Chris Morris but it is starting to look as if he, Brooker, has a scope all his own, and more powerful for being less parodic. He doesn't just make fun of television, which even I can do. He can see the fractures in life itself, as Swift could. On top of that he has the great virtue of having seen everything and yet not being derivative. His desk-eating savagery is too heartfelt for that.

TV Review: Black Mirror

Essentially, the second series lacked the key ingredients of the first: freshness and surprise.

Strong lead performances (Hayley Atweel, Lenora Crichlow and Daniel Rigby) have made the most of the nightmartish, almost ludicrous set-ups in Charlie Brooker's latest blast of three dystopian futures. Rigby is in perhaps the best of them, as a comedian who voices a rude satirical cartoon bear that ends up standing in a by-election.