They were brought together 17 years ago when she was working for Endemol (now Endemol Shine), the independent production behemoth responsible for Big Brother and Deal or No Deal. We’re both control freaks and we challenge each other to come up with the most harrowing stories Jones is unusual for a producer in that she has only ever worked with Brooker, first on Dead Set, about a zombie outbreak during the filming of Big Brother, and then on the various incarnations of Brooker’s topical Wipe satires and the Brooker-scripted Philomena Cunk comedies. “It was just an opportunity to have films that were ideas-driven.” “We’ve always tried to hide the technology so that they don’t feel too sci-fi,” says Jones.
“So whereas The Twilight Zone took on the themes of McCarthyism and psychoanalysis and the space race, we decided on one of the things that people are worried about but don’t perhaps know yet, which is our relationship with technology.” Museum from Black Mirror, Series 4Īnd so past episodes have featured unsettling extrapolations of the subtle tyranny of online approval ratings, blackmailing hackers, augmented reality video games, drones, Twitter trolls and the habit of filming everything on mobile phones. “A Twilight Zone for the contemporary age,” is how Jones puts it. Now, three seasons in, and with a fourth about to drop on Netflix, which took over the show in 2015, the true nature of Black Mirror is much clearer.