Black Mirror Review

When Brooker gets a premise exactly right, nothing else on television is close. The Entire History of You builds an argument about memory as evidence and then follows it all the way down. White Bear is a structural trick that turns into the strongest thing the show has ever said about spectacle. San Junipero abandons the format's cruelty entirely and is better for it. The problem is that an anthology has no floor, and the later runs demonstrate this repeatedly, mistaking a technology for a thesis and then stretching a thin scenario to feature length.

Several of the streaming episodes would be twenty minute pieces if anyone were still enforcing a runtime. The craft stays high throughout, with real directors, real budgets and a house style of clean surfaces and sudden ugliness that has since been imitated everywhere. Performances are consistently strong because the format attracts actors who want one contained thing to play. Judged on every episode, the floor is real. Judged on its best, which is how an anthology earns its place, few series this century have mattered more.