The five best Luddite episodes of Black Mirror

Black Mirror is probably the biggest luddite TV show. Here’s a guide to its most critical episodes.

I’m old enough to remember when Black Mirror first dropped, and the anthology sci-fi show was widely received as transgressive, even shocking. Here was a smart, often legitimately unsettling suite of dark modern Twilight Zone fables, all built around the ways new technologies might be used (typically by faceless corporations just off screen) to corrode our humanity. It was, in other words, a luddite show, at a time when “luddite” was still very much a pejorative. And it was willing to probe just how oppressive a world domineered by devices and digital culture might turn out to be, at a time when the pervading consensus was one of tech-friendly optimism.

I will always be happy to see a new Black Mirror season, haters be damned, no matter how skewed the ratio of masterpieces to misfires becomes. So I got a little a shot of serotonin when Netflix announced it was dropping the latest season, which it proceeded to do on April 10th last week.

Honestly, it’s pretty wild that Black Mirror has stuck around this long—14 years now; long enough to endure multiple eras. After that initial phase where it was cool and subversive, it hit its inevitable backlash era, in which it was called out for being too one-note, best summed up by the infamous Daniel Mallory Ortberg burn that Black Mirror is just “what if phones but too much.” I always found that criticism itself to ring hollow—there was always a lot more to the best episodes than complaining about screens. But also, in a moment when social and economic mores were being totally transformed by phones and the companies that put stuff on those phones, that’s a pretty reasonable foundation on which to build a show! You could argue that we should have spent even more time asking what if phones but too much, given where we’ve wound up.

Anyway, after its ‘what’s even going on with Black Mirror?’ era, in which its biggest crime was not showing up, and not having much to say when it did, the show seems now to have settled into something of an elder statesman phase. When season 6 appeared after years of silence in the wake of the brief season 5—arguably the series’ nadir—I was pleasantly surprised with its range and ambition, even if it had its share of clunkers.

The leadoff Joan Is Awful was unhinged and weird again, and, like such Black Mirror episodes tend to do, it also helped process a socio-technological threat as we were living through it in real-time. When the Writers Guild of America were on strike in 2023, protesting the Hollywood studios’ ambition to use AI to produce scripts, screenwriters I spoke with on the picket lines often referenced the episode. They saw it as a too-plausible worst-case scenario of what entertainment would look like if studio execs used AI to cut humans out of the picture and put TV on autopilot.

The rest of the season was a mixed bag—I thought Loch Henry was a slick and mostly successful interrogation of true crime streaming schlock, Beyond the Sea was definitely overlong but compelling; tonally interesting with a hell of an ending. And Mazey Day earned a slot among the very worst of the series (this is a solid snapshot of how every Black Mirror season works btw). But Black Mirror was back.

And now it’s back again. I haven’t watched yet, but to mark the occasion, I thought I’d round up the 5 best luddite episodes—the ones that register the most potent criticisms of tech and who it serves. This is not, I should note, a rundown of the best episodes, period, though I should do that someday because every ranking I have read is wrong, sorry, and they all seem to overrate what is to me the most gratingly terrible episode of the series and underrate some of the most incisive ones. I digress again.

So yes, you may notice certain beloved episodes aren’t included here. That’s because, for my purposes today, I’m interested in Black Mirror’s sharpest assaults on the tech industry; its critiques of executive power and tech culture. (Not, say, questions of digital mortality.) Without further ado, here they are:

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