The first few seasons sorta did this in some capacity. I remember the intensely British early episodes mostly all included a social critique of some kind. A lot of the times that critique was sorta liberal in nature, but at least it was present. Early Black Mirror was almost like a Twilight Zone for gen z and millennials.
But wow did it have a sharp decline, especially after Netflix got it. Season five and Bandersnatch were especially terrible. I'm not even sure if the show has been renewed. If it ends up getting cancelled, I would hazard a guess that maybe it wasn't covid but those last two releases that did it in.
Imagine if Black Mirror retained the quality of episodes like Fifteen Million Merits all the way through its run. In this thread let's come up with actually good Black Mirror episode concepts. I always get a kick out of people doing the whole "wot if ur mum ran on batteries" bit.
Eh, I don't mind sci-fi being just sci-fi. Like, I'm already a leftist, there are only so many hamfisted class metaphors I care to sit through.
That's true, hamfisted metaphors can be very annoying when you already agree with the argument that is being presented. Though I don't think anti-capitalist media necessarily needs to be either ham-fisted or preachy.
The problem in the case of certain late season Black Mirror episodes is that it is trying to depict a sci-fi dystopia while only delivering on the sci-fi. There's technology and things suck. Without any form of social critique, you are then lead to believe that the reason this fictional world is a dystopia is solely because of the technology. Often this comes off similarly to a boomer complaining about kids using smart phones too much, which honestly, is probably worse than a hard reliance on over stretched class metaphors.