Black Mirror's Charlie Brooker is making a Netflix special about 2020, which is a bit much, really

By Sam Barsanti | December 1, 2020 | 2:27am

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Black Mirror's Charlie Brooker is making a Netflix special about 2020, which is a bit much, really

Charlie Brooker Photo: Tommaso Boddi

Back in May, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker offered the world a rare kindness when he declared that life in 2020 was too depressing to sustain another season of his bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak sci-fi thriller anthology series, but that doesn’t mean we’re all being spared the sting of Brooker’s particular brand of societal satire. Really, we’ve all been inside our homes for months, with one specific company’s videoconferencing tech keeping us in contact with our friends, family, and coworkers, and you think Charlie “Your Phone Is Evil!” Brooker is just going to let that slide? You think he’s not champing at the bit to write something where, like, everyone in your Zoom call is already dead, and you’re just talking to recordings to make it seem like life is normal.

We don’t know if he’s doing that, but we do know that he’s working on some kind of “mockumentary about 2020" for Netflix. That comes from Hugh Grant, who spilled the beans to Vulture, saying he plays a “repellent” historian in some kind of interesting wig. This news hasn’t been confirmed by Netflix, but Deadline does note that Brooker used to regularly do this sort of thing with his Weekly Wipe and Annual Wipe for the BBC back before Black Mirror took off (he also did a year-in-review thing back in May that seems a little premature now called Antiviral Wipe). This Netflix thing sounds more fictionalized than that, given Hugh Grant in an interesting wig, but we don’t know much about it anyway. Maybe it’ll just be him in a wig, reciting things that happened this year? Depending on when it comes out, that could be fun… or sad. Or both! That’s the Black Mirror twist.