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.
We can project advertising into your dreams. Don't you remember your old school, brought to you by Carl's Junior? Your first love, set free by the powerful flavour of Coke?
We made a mutilated version of you (digitally) so we could better predict your behaviour so you'd buy things. You run into this version of you.
You're not good enough. Your body will have a better worker copied into it during the day. Why are you waking up every morning with bruises?
You couldn't afford rent, but could afford server time, so here you are, terminally online. As your distance from real productive forces increases and your ability to work drops, you can afford less and less server time. You fade away until you are deleted.
Then show the communist version where the same technology is used to educate everyone in the process of managing the socialized means of production and dissolve the abitrary division between physical and mental labor.
Unironically reading that first bit convinced me to get fast food for dinner lmaoooo fuck