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A few weeks ago, television producer Charlie Brooker bought an electronic toothbrush – a “smart” toothbrush, to be exact. It seemed harmless enough at first, what with its promise to “elevate the brushing experience.” But as Brooker is the dystopia-minded genius behind the extra-dark sci-fi series Black Mirror, sometimes a toothbrush isn’t just a toothbrush.

“I charged it, connected it to my phone via Bluetooth, downloaded the app, and now it wants me to set up an account and tell it all sorts of things: my date of birth, how often I floss my teeth. I thought, what the hell is this?” Brooker says with a laugh. “Now Putin has probably got a database of how I’m brushing my teeth. It’s only a short step from there from him knowing how much I wipe my ass. But I kind of shrugged and thought, well, that’s the world I’m living in now.”

While Black Mirror tackles the dark side of technology, creator Charlie Brooker says he's 'pro-technology' and hopes we get better at dealing with it. (AFP/Getty Images)

It is also the world that Brooker has successfully mined for Black Mirror. Over the course of just seven episodes, the anthology TV series has tackled the dark side of technology with an equal mix of brash humour and what-the-hell-just-happened twists. Its series premiere laid Brooker’s cards bare, imagining a world where, thanks to a bizarre series of Internet-aided events, the British prime minister is forced to copulate with a pig on live television. Other episodes, meanwhile, have eerily prophesied the rise of Donald Trump (called “The Waldo Moment,” in which a racist cartoon bear gets elected to office) and the ubiquity of GoPro and self-documentation (“The Entire History of You,” where every waking moment of a person’s life is available to rewatch via their hard-wired brain).

Although the series earned a cult following in Brooker’s native Britain, where it aired on Channel 4, it wasn’t until Netflix picked up the show at the tail end of 2014 that the series got any traction in North America. And even then, fans hungry for Brooker’s acidic tales were left starving once they plowed through the paltry number of episodes available. But that all changes this weekend, when Netflix (which took over the rights from Channel 4) unveils six new episodes, each more ambitious than the last. It’s like Christmas, but for fans of horribly upsetting presents.

Black Mirror earned a cult following in Brooker’s native Britain, where it aired on Channel 4. (David Dettmann/Netflix)

Watching each new instalment – from the gaming culture takedown “Playtest” to the social-media satire “Nosedive” – it’s hard to shake the sense this new offering of Black Mirror carries a purposeful sense of optimism, or at least less unimaginable dread than previous seasons.

“In a contrary way I am getting more optimistic about the state of things, and you can see it this season – partly to ensure there’s just not one mood the whole time, and also because I am quite pro-technology, which you might not believe from the series,” says Brooker, 45. “I kind of hope we are getting better at dealing with technology as a species. At the moment, we’re retreating into echo chambers, and everyone is becoming polarized and shouting at each other. But I’m hoping that it’s a side effect, a temporary anomaly, and we’ll get used to it and work out the kinks as we go along.”

Brooker is still getting used to his role as a sort of television Nostradamus, having gotten his start on the other side of the industry as a journalist, writing a TV review column for The Guardian for 10 years. “I find myself watching things these days not so much with a critic’s eye so much as a jealous creator’s eye,” he says. “I’m slightly outraged when things are good, which they often are these days.”

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, right, chats with Annabel Jones, a producer with the TV series, during a Netflix event in July. Netflix is set to unveil six new episodes. (Eric Charbonneau/Netflix)

When the series launched in 2011, the television landscape was a markedly different environment, not yet full of streaming services and specialty channels that have ushered in the current era of “Peak TV.” Although Netflix will undoubtedly ensure Black Mirror is available to a larger audience, that audience is also overwhelmed with other options.

“It’s getting quite demented – we’re going to end up with special glasses that allow us to watch two programs at once: time-slicing,” Brooker says, possibly writing a future episode as the words spill out of his mouth. “It can be frustrating and daunting with so many shows available.”

But Brooker’s producing partner, Annabel Jones, argues that audiences have always been primed to seek out programs that would appeal directly to them – the current landscape just makes it easier to do so. “Social media helps target that marketing for the streaming platforms, so you zone in on the shows that are the most widely liked by the people you respect,” she says. “It becomes self-selective.”

The television landscape was a markedly different environment when the series launched in 2011. Streaming services present viewers with far more options. (Laurie Sparham/Netflix)

However and whenever viewers might discover Black Mirror, though, it’s unlikely they’ll encounter as big a shock as Jones and Brooker received when claims emerged last September that the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, parodied in the show’s premiere episode, engaged in an obscene act with a pig’s head while attending Oxford.

“I genuinely had no idea about that rumour when the episode was written. The character is vaguely based on Cameron, but it was more a question of ‘Can I take a Tory prime minister and make him sympathetic?’ Which for me required a massive leap of imagination,” Brooker adds. “But when the news broke, I did fear the universe was just a simulation designed to fuck with my head. Of course, had I known, I wouldn’t have bothered to write a program about it – I just would’ve blackmailed him.”