Television series

Black Mirror

Name: Black Mirror
Genre: Drama, Science Fiction, Thriller
Released: 2011

An anthology of near-future nightmares, each episode a stand-alone thought experiment about what our devices are doing to us. Tone swings wildly by writer and year — cynical satire one week, genuinely heartbreaking the next. It's best watched two or three at a time, not binged; the dread accumulates faster than you'd expect.

TVMaze rating

8.4

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The Twilight Zone1959

Jordan Peele's reboot is the closest thing to Black Mirror's own ancestor: same one-off morality-tale structure, same appetite for social dread, occasionally landing a properly great hour.

But Inconsistent; some episodes feel like pale imitations rather than a genuine update of the format.

Inside No. 92014

Twist-obsessed British anthology from the League of Gentlemen pair — every episode reinvents its genre and structure, often within the same 25 minutes, with a nastiness Black Mirror rarely matches.

But Broader comic energy and more theatrical trickery than Black Mirror's cool tech dread; less about the future, more about cruelty.

Love, Death & Robots2019

Animated anthology that swings from grim philosophy to outright pulp, often in the same episode — a good palate cleanser if you want the ideas without the slow dread.

But Wildly uneven episode-to-episode; several installments are just violent spectacle with nothing underneath.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Social Dilemma2020

Black Mirror fictionalizes what this documentary says outright: the people who built the machine confirming, in their own words, that the manipulation is real, current, and not speculative at all.

The nonfiction version of every Black Mirror tech-dread episode — the actual engineers who built the algorithms explain, on camera, how deliberately addictive and manipulative they made it.

But No fiction, no plot, no relief — just talking heads and dramatized reenactments that can feel a little heavy-handed.

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams2017

Philip K. Dick anthology adapting his short stories — the direct literary ancestor of Black Mirror's paranoia about reality, identity, and control.

But Slower and more melancholic; less interested in shock twists than in existential unease.

Devs2020

Alex Garland's tech miniseries traps a grieving coder inside a quantum computing cult — gorgeous, glacial, and genuinely frightening about determinism and Silicon Valley hubris.

But One long story rather than anthology bites; deliberately paced, more art film than thriller.

Mr. Robot2015

A hacker drama that shares Black Mirror's suspicion of screens and corporations, wrapped in unreliable narration and formal tricks that mess with the frame itself.

But Four full seasons of serialized plot — a much bigger commitment than a stand-alone hour.

Years and Years2019no page yet

A British family drama that fast-forwards through the near future one crisis at a time — Black Mirror's anxieties given a soap-opera household to actually live in.

But Melodramatic and occasionally on-the-nose; political points land with a sledgehammer, not a scalpel.

Maniac2018

Emma Stone and Jonah Hill trip through a pharmaceutical trial's shared hallucinations — surreal, sad, funny, and deeply weird about what technology promises to fix in us.

But More absurdist comedy-drama than thriller; the sci-fi is a framing device, not the point.

Person of Interest2011

A network procedural that quietly turned into one of the smartest shows about AI surveillance ever made, asking what a machine that predicts crime owes the people it watches.

But Starts as a conventional case-of-the-week show; the good stuff is a long build across seasons.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents1955

Same machine as Black Mirror — a self-contained story building to one cruel or ironic reversal — running decades before anyone worried about smartphones, proving the dread was never really about the gadgets.

The great-grandparent of the format: half-hour morality tales with a sting in the tail, hosted by Hitchcock himself, proving the anthology-with-a-twist engine is older than any anxiety about technology.

But Black and white, studio-bound, and paced for 1955 patience — no CGI, no visual shock, just craft.

Kwaidan1965

Swap silicon for the supernatural and it's the same trick Black Mirror plays: ordinary people undone by a rule they didn't take seriously enough, told as a string of contained, unsettling parables.

A gorgeously stylized Japanese horror anthology of folk ghost stories, each one a moral trap closing on someone who broke a promise or told a lie.

But Slow, theatrical, and rooted in folklore rather than technology; two and a half hours of deliberate, painterly dread.