Black Mirror season 5 won’t include interactive episodes
During a new interview with the New York Times, showrunner Charlie Brooker confirmed that the fifth season will not feature any more of these interactive episodes — we don’t want to call any episode of this particular show “traditional,” but it does feel as though they are going to have a little bit more in common with your typical Black Mirror installment that what we saw in Bandersnatch. In hilarious fashion, he did also hand some advice over to anyone out there who thinks that they want to take on this choose-your-own-adventure brand of storytelling for TV in the future: “Run away. It’s harder than you think.”
Do we understand where he is coming from here? Absolutely, given that there’s a big difference between writing different outcomes for a book and then actually doing it for TV. It takes so long to film various endings that for Bandersnatch, they basically had to film more than five hours of footage for a movie that, when watched in a somewhat-linear pattern, is not anywhere close to that long. This may have been a worthy experiment, but it was an exhausting one and something that may not be replicated by this show in the future. (Make no mistake that we think, 100%, that someone else is going to try to jump on this format for at least something. It’s the sort of format that is so weird and wacky and experimental that we have a hard time imagining that people are going to steer clear of it entirely.)
The hard part of Black Mirror is going to be waiting for whatever comes next. While the general consensus at the moment is that we are going to have a chance to see a season 5 at some point in 2019, there is no specific period of time as to when it’s going to be coming about. We’re not sure that Netflix will really choose to spend a lengthy amount of time building that up, either — they may opt to give you the news a short period of time before it launches, though we hardly imagine that it’s going to be as quick of a turnaround as what we saw with Bandersnatch, which wasn’t really promoted at all until around 24 hours before it came out.
What do you want to see when it comes to Black Mirror season 5, and are you going to be happy to dive into a show where the series more or less makes the decisions for you? Share right now in the comments!
(Photo: Netflix.)