As The Toast's Mallory Ortberg put it on Twitter, 'What if phones but too much?'
At its worst, though, it can read like any other science fiction story processing our anxieties about the future: the hand-wringing fear of everything we take for granted can seem overblown and paranoid. At its best, it's insightful, satirical, and bleak enough to shock even viewers jaded by the endless, pummeling violence of shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. It's still serving up cautionary tales about how people interact with media, the culture, communications, and technology, and how our obsessions and behaviors today might logically extend into horrors in the future. If Black Mirror could be summed up in one sentence, it'd probably be 'Technology is exciting, but people are awful, and they keep finding the worst ways to apply it.' The anthology series had a seven-episode run on Britain's Channel 4 from 2011 to 2014, and Netflix is now producing new episodes, but the show hasn't changed much.