Black Mirror

At first, I had a feeling that I just needed to tune in to the specific corrosive mood, later I believed that the best episodes were yet to come, but even after five seasons, my disappointment had not improved. The title explicitly suggests that it will address issues of contemporary society, but I cannot shake the impression that despite the diversity of themes, the individual plots are almost always about the same thing in the end. In more than half of the stories, the latest technological innovations appear and are eventually misused by people to disadvantage, humiliate, or even kill either someone close to them, a stranger, or themselves. And however technically well made the series is as a whole, that depressing routine always kicks in almost immediately. (16.03.2017)

The best idea of the first two seasons is complemented by a depressing atmosphere and at least one very unpleasant twist. And yet it's not enough. When it comes to the point of why we saw everything we saw, the overwhelming avalanche of ideas does not hold together at all. And that is a pretty serious problem for catharsis in a seventy-minute episode. (14.03.2017)

On paper, everything looked like a turning point in my perception of the entire series. An appealing and perhaps the most topical subject matter, starring my beloved Bryce Dallas Howard, the appealing James Norton as her brother, the reliable Joe Wright behind the camera – and yet I remain disappointed. I don't like stories where the main character is punished for mistakes they didn't make and as a result, is dragged into an increasingly repugnant quagmire. Instead of being an unforgettable spectacle, Nosedive leaves only a feeling of permanent frustration. (15.03.2017)

Detective stories rarely come my way, but when a good one appears, I usually don't pass on it. In his most ambitious work to date, Charlie Brooker pays homage to the Nordic phenomena of the last decade and, despite a pleasantly disturbing atmosphere, bites off more than he can chew. Ninety minutes in this case is truly an unmanageable dose, confirming that the main creator of the series is, willingly or unwillingly, a megalomaniac who almost always overdoes everything in the end. This time, he also tries to drive me crazy by using one of the characters as a narrator during the investigation, who four times astonishedly stares at the monitor with some breakthrough information for that moment, loudly announcing to everyone around that the case is finally solved. Black Mirror has something to it, but it has definitively become somewhat distasteful to me with this tired homage to every other crime story. (15.03.2017)