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.
I had an idea for one where it's just a fairly standard existence. Pretty normal person and we just see flashes of their daily lives. Slowly it becomes evident via flashbacks they and pretty much everyone else are on a medication that simply stops bad memories from forming, then we start to get glimpses of their day to day lives with the bad stuff too like militarized police dragging a co worker from their cubicle for questioning, armed gangs fighting it out in the streets (they briefly wonder where the chip in their bullet proof windscreen came from earlier) and so on.
This is a good one. Seems like a civilian counter-part to that one episode where soldiers are using augmented reality that makes the enemy look like inhuman monsters.
If the medication is not just a drug, but also some kind of modulator for the brain augmented reality chips, then one of the big twists could be a play on alienation. All of the people this protagonists thinks are their friends would actually just be virtual people designed by the medication. These virtual people would always be looking out for signs of radicalization and steering the protagonist away from it.
This medication would also constantly be isolating real people from one another by conditioning dislike and hatred in subtle ways. In the end, support networks can't form that aren't totally loyal to whoever is manufacturing the medication.