Black Mirror debuted in 2011 in the U.K. on Channel 4. The second season aired in 2013. Netflix picked up the anthology series from Charlie Brooker in 2014 and thus far, Black Mirror has had 22 episodes across five seasons and has won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie three consecutive times for the episodes San Junipero, USS Callister, and Bandersnatch. The series is modeled off the best TV anthologies of all time, such as The Twilight Zone, and storylines are set mostly in the near future using technology that isn’t available today but isn’t hard to imagine being available sometime soon.
Updated August 2022: With news about Black Mirror changing over time, we’ve updated this article about the show’s best episodes to better reflect current events and the consistency and excellence we always strive for.
Netflix aired the original two seasons of Black Mirror from the U.K. and then developed three more seasons so far. The critically acclaimed episode San Junipero was the first new episode to air on Netflix, and it’s one of the best. However, following these successes, Black Mirror went on a long hiatus. In an interview with Radio Times, series creator Charlie Brooker gave the bleak reason Black Mirrorstopped airing new episodes, saying that he feels as though the pandemic and related crisis have delivered enough real-life dystopian storylines and audiences might not want to see more of that on television. He said, “I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart. So I’m not working away on one of those. I’m sort of keen to revisit my comic skill set, so I’ve been writing scripts aimed at making myself laugh.”
However, it now looks like season six of Black Mirror is on its way after three years. While there is no release date yet, the cast of season six looks phenomenal — Zazie Beetz (Atlanta), Paapa Essiedu (Gangs of London), Josh Hartnett (Wrath of Man, The Fear Index), Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), Kate Mara(Fantastic Four, Call Jane), Danny Ramirez (Top Gun: Maverick), Auden Thornton (This Is Us), and more have al signed up. In the meantime, Black Mirror has given us some incredible episodes of television, and these are the best.
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10 White Christmas
Netflix
Season 2, Episode 4 of Black Mirror delivered the uber-creepy White Christmas featuring the new Fletch, Jon Hamm, as Matt and Rafe Spall as Joe. The men are stationed at an isolated snowy outpost. Matt tells Joe about his former job helping men lure women into bed including the time a date turned into a murder-suicide. He also tells him about the virtual assistant technology he developed.
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Joe then tells Matt about his fiancé Beth and the time they disagreed on whether she would get an abortion. She ended up blocking Joe, which means he couldn’t see her or any of her family — until she dies, at least. When people are blocked, only static appears and is heard in place of their bodies. When he finds out his daughter is actually the product of an affair Beth had, he kills her father. In the end, Joe was trying to elicit a confession from Matt, and when he does, he is zipped back to reality where he finds he’s been blocked by the entire world.
9 Shut Up and Dance
Season 3, Episode 3, Shut Up and Dance, finds a teenager (Alex Lawther, of The End of the F***ing World) and an older man (Jerome Flynn) blackmailed into undergoing a series of criminal acts. Arguably one of the most underrated episodes of the show (initially dismissed as a weak episode at the height of Black Mirror’s genius), Shut Up and Dance is a queasy and uncomfortable episode that takes the audience on a real-time ride through total tension. The twist puts everything that comes before it into question, raising difficult questions about morality and leaving the viewer in need of a very cold shower.
8 Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too
Season 5, Episode 3 of Black Mirror was the last new episode from the series so far, dropping on June 5, 2019. Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too featured Miley Cyrus as Ashley O, a pop star whose creativity is being stifled by her management team. In the episode, she is promoting her doll, Ashley Too, which is a robotic, AI clone of Ashley O’s personality. Angourie Rice (of Honor Society) and Madison Davenport play teenage sisters Rachel and Jack, whose mom recently died, and Rachel receives an Ashley Too. Ashley O’s aunt and manager poisons Ashley’s dinner, leaving her comatose, but the Ashley Too doll has a copy of the pop star’s consciousness and instructs the teenage girls to save her real-life body from her management.
7 Bandersnatch
Technically, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is both part of the fifth season and a stand-alone event. It was released on December 28, 2018, and was an interactive episode that directs viewers to make choices that lead the story. The user has 10 seconds to make a choice or a decision is made for them. There are more than one trillion possible paths the viewer can take to one of the five possible endings, though there are also variants within each ending. The story is set in July 1984 when a programmer named Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead) is adapting a “choose your own adventure” book called Bandersnatch his late mother owned into a groundbreaking video game. From there the story is adapted to the choices made by the viewer.
6 White Bear
While Black Mirror often has horrific elements, it has hardly embraced the horror genre quite as blatantly as it does with Season 2, Episode 2, White Bear. The story follows an amnesiac woman (Lenora Crichlow) who finds herself hunted by masked killers while onlookers simply film her with their phones. It’s a seemingly simple premise filmed with extreme tension, and with one of the most shocking endings of Black Mirror history, White Bear remains a truly disturbing, infinitely creepy horrorshow.
5 15 Million Merits
Season 1, Episode 2 of Black Mirror proved why it’s some of the best British television of the 2010s, delivering 15 Million Merits to audiences who were not quite sure exactly what Black Mirror was yet. The episode was co-written by Charlie Brooker and his wife Konnie Huq and was inspired by her idea that tech-obsessed Brooker would be happy in a room covered by screens and the deluge of talent shows on television leading winners to fame.
15 Million Merits is set in a dystopian society where most people have to ride exercise bikes to earn merits that people can then use to pay for things they need. The only way off the bicycle is to win the talent show called Hot Shot. The episode revolves around Bing (the great Daniel Kaluuya pre-Get Out fame) and Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay). Bing convinces Abi to go on a talent show and spends almost his entire life savings of 15 million merits to purchase an entry for her. Abi doesn’t win and ends up on a porn site, which enrages Bing. He ends up seeing ads for the porn site that features Abi. Ben ends up going on Hot Shot and delivering an angry rant against the system they live in. He is offered his own television show and becomes an even bigger part of the system he ranted against.
4 USS Callister
Season 4, Episode 1 of Black Mirror gave us the truly creepy and wonderful episode USS Callister. The episode revolves around Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), a programmer and co-founder of a popular multiplayer online game. He’s frustrated by a lack of recognition and respect from his co-workers (and women) and takes out his angst in a Star Trek-like space adventure in which he uses the DNA of his co-workers to create digital clones of them.
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As the captain of the USS Callister, Daly can order his co-workers around, make them do whatever he wants, and punish them at will. When a new hire named Nanette (the always wonderful Cristin Milioti, from Made For Love) is brought into the game, she convinces the other clones to revolt against Daly. The episode is both a loving tribute to ’60s sci-fi but also a clever deconstruction of sexist tropes and the current ‘incels’ of toxic fanship.
3 The Entire History of You
Season 1, Episode 3 of Black Mirror delivered The Entire History of You, a truly creepy look at what can happen to a person’s mental health when they can go back and review every single second of their lives. It was the first episode not written by creator Charlie Brooker. It is set in 2050, a time when “grain” technology records people’s lives, so they can re-watch their memories (as if every second was part of Facebook’s wall or memories posts).
An attorney named Liam (Toby Kebbell) drives himself crazy after attending a dinner party with his wife Ffion (the phenomenal Jodie Whittaker, before her time in Doctor Who) where she is engaged in an enthusiastic conversation with her friend Jonas (Tom Cullen). Liam goes back and reviews every interaction in his memories of his wife and Jonas. He confronts his wife about Jonas who says she only dated him for a month. Liam then pulls up footage from the past when she told him they only dated for a week. The situation devolves from there and, after more obsessive and bad behavior from Liam, he ends up alone in the dark replaying memories of his now former wife and child.
2 Nosedive
Season 3, Episode 1 of Black Mirror cast Bryce Dallas Howard in Nosedive, which is chilling because the situation that plays out is so close to current reality. In the world of Nosedive, people can rate each other from one to five stars for every single interaction they have in life, the way we do with businesses. A person’s rating has a direct effect on their status in society.
Howard plays Lacie, who is obsessed with her ratings and thrilled her popular childhood friend Naomi asked her to be the maid of honor in her wedding, which boosts Lacie’s social rating considerably. Lacie needs to get her rating up from a 4.2 to a 4.5 to secure a luxury apartment, and the emotionally claustrophobic episode finds her attempting to navigate the hyper-superficial, toxically positive society without offending or upsetting anyone. Nosedive is one of the most brightly directed episodes of the show, yet with some of the saddest and loneliest ideas.
1 San Junipero
For Season 3, Episode 4 of Black Mirror, San Junipero is set in a beach town of the same name. Set in 1987, a young woman named Yorkie (an amazing Mackenzie Davis) meets outgoing party girl Kelly (a charming Gugu Mbatha-Raw), at a nightclub called Tucker’s. The two women dance, but Yorkie becomes uncomfortable and leaves. The following week she goes to Tucker’s again, where she and Kelly end up making out in the bar of the club and then having sex at Kelly’s house on the beach. Yorkie reveals that it was her first time having sex. The following week, Yorkie can’t find Kelly, and is told to “try a different time.”
It’d be a shame to spoil every facet of this tender, unique episode, but suffice it to say that this is one of the least disturbing, most emotionally beautiful episodes of Black Mirror, and a brilliant and unique respite from its usual horrors. Even if someone isn’t a fan of the typical Black Mirror formula, it’s likely that anyone will fall in love with the wonderfully scripted, perfectly executed San Junipero.
