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    New Season of ‘Black Mirror’ on Netflix Satirizes Streaming Services

    The new season, premiering Thursday on Netflix, includes the show’s most blatant satire of streaming services yet.The deal is too good to be true: The setup is free, the monthly fee low. Streaming is unlimited with further benefits still to come. But hidden costs emerge. Intrusive ads pop up. The app’s time in sleep mode becomes longer and longer. Those perks? You’ll have to pay more for them — much, much more.This story arc should be familiar to anyone who has ever downloaded a free app or subscribed to a streaming service, which at this point is pretty much all of us. And it is at the very dark heart of “Common People,” the first episode of Season 7 of “Black Mirror,” the anthology sci-fi series that helped to give Netflix, which has distributed it since its 2011 debut, artistic cred. All of this season’s six episodes arrive on Thursday.Is mocking streaming services biting the hand that keeps renewing you? Charlie Brooker, the creator of “Black Mirror,” was more equivocal. “To be honest, I’m probably more nibbling the hand that feeds us,” he said on a recent video call.In its past seasons, “Black Mirror” has promoted a skeptical view, perhaps an utterly nihilistic one, regarding the ways in which entertainment is created and enjoyed. In the near future, we are all amusing ourselves to death, or worse. But with the exception of last season’s episode “Joan Is Awful,” written by Brooker and directed by Ally Pankiw, in which a Netflix stand-in creates humiliating shows adapted from its subscribers’ lives, Brooker has never come for streamers so baldly.Brooker first conceived of “Common People” while listening to true-crime podcasts. He was struck by the disjunction of hearing a host describe a mutilated corpse in one moment and advertise a meal prep service the next. What, he wondered, would make a human integrate sponsorship into their ordinary speech?At that point, he thought that the show would be, like “Joan Is Awful,” a dark comedy, a funny story. “He kind of tricked me,” Pankiw, who also directed “Common People,” said of Brooker’s pitch. “I was like, OK great. Then I read the script and I was like, Oh, it’s actually incredibly devastating.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Cunk on Earth,’ a New Mockumentary on Netflix, Is Not Afraid to Get Silly

    The new Netflix show “Cunk on Earth” looks like an ambitious BBC documentary. Until its fictional host, created by Charlie Brooker, starts to ask some deeply silly questions.On her BBC show investigating the history of humanity, Philomena Cunk interviews Martin Kemp, a professor at the University of Oxford, about the Renaissance period.“Which was more culturally significant, the Renaissance or ‘Single Ladies’ by Beyoncé?” she asks the academic with all seriousness.Kemp pauses before patiently answering. The Renaissance was trying to reform culture as a whole, he says, and “whatever Beyoncé does, I don’t think she’s quite got that ambition.”Cunk responds with bewilderment: “So what, the work of a few straight white men just blows Beyoncé out of the water?”The fictional Cunk, played by the actress Diane Morgan, is confident, impertinent and almost always wrong. At once too normal and too weird to be presenting real documentaries, Cunk has fronted satirical BBC programs and segments about topics as lofty as Britain, time and Shakespeare over the past decade.“I quite like the idea of her not being from any time or place,” Morgan said in a recent video interview. Charlie Brooker, who created the character, described Cunk as “otherworldly,” adding, “It’s like she’s off our plane by like 25 degrees or something.”In “Cunk on Earth,” a five-part mockumentary now streaming on Netflix, Cunk grapples with the herculean task of exploring the entirety of human civilization. (In Britain, the series aired on the BBC last year.)The show has all the hallmarks of a highbrow BBC documentary, with sweeping drone shots of the presenter standing amid vast landscapes and dramatic re-enactments. Morgan, 47, plays Cunk completely straight, never cracking a smile.“Cunk on Earth” is shot like a highbrow BBC documentary, including sweeping shots of Morgan standing amid vast landscapes.BBC“We don’t tend to do too many things that tell you it’s a comedy,” said Brooker, who executive produced the show. “If you were watching this with the sound off you’d be like, ‘That looks like a real show.’”But Cunk’s observations range from the absurd (“Was the invention of writing a significant development or more of a flash in the pan like rap metal?”) to the surprisingly insightful (is Jesus “the first celebrity victim of cancel culture?”). Her recollection of facts is also questionable — she refers to Christopher Columbus as Christopher Columbo, an “Italian sailor and detective.” In interviews, her questions often leave the real-life academics bewildered or reeling.Morgan is “not afraid to leave an extremely awkward pause in, or could say incredibly ridiculous things with a completely straight face,” Brooker said. “I would find that more terrifying than doing a bungee jump.”“Cunk on Earth” fits perfectly into Brooker’s satirical oeuvre, which is partly defined by commitment to a bit: The first episode of “Black Mirror,” the anthology show he produces and writes, is a thriller that opens with a British prime minister being blackmailed into having sex with a pig. Elsewhere, he masterminded “A Touch of Cloth,” a series that has dramatic actors parodying British police procedurals.Cunk began life on “Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe,” a BBC satirical news show which premiered in Britain in 2013. She was originally conceived as upper-class and clueless, but the character’s trajectory changed after Morgan suggested in her audition that she should speak in her own northern British accent. Initially a bit part as a talking head, the character soon had longer segments on the show, which led to spinoffs and even a book, “Cunk on Everything,” released in 2019.For Morgan, while the character’s appeal has a lot to do with the writing and her own dry performance, Cunk also offers the audience some catharsis. “A lot of people fantasize about being able to say whatever they want and not care,” the actress said. “She just genuinely does not give a toss, and that’s almost like a superpower.”At a time when the mockumentary form is often imbued with resonance around real-life issues — in films like 2020’s “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” or shows like “Abbott Elementary” — “Cunk on Earth” feels somewhat different. For its creators, the show isn’t necessarily trying to make a specific point about politics, academia or even the documentary form. Its first priority is silliness.“It’s funny to take something which should be awe inspiring and serious and grandiose, and doodling bums in the corner of it,” Brooker said. “It’s a childish urge.”Still, the script contains moments of biting commentary. In her appraisal of human history, Cunk makes comments about religious hypocrisy, genocide and whitewashing. Brooker and the writers have also made the Cunk of this most recent series more “post-truth” than in previous iterations of the character, he said.During a segment on math, Cunk tells an academic that she saw a video on YouTube saying numbers only go up to 700, after which they are just given different names so people think they’re still going up. “That’s something that frightens me in the real world,” Brooker said. “The confidence with which people will start asserting things that they’ve read.”Still, the show is a comedy vehicle first and foremost. “I just want to make something really funny,” Morgan said.“It doesn’t have to have any big meaning for me,” she added. “I’m not trying to change the world, I just want people to enjoy it.” More