No matter how horrible it gets, I can never take Black Mirror totally seriously. And the more horrible it is, the funnier I find it. I can't take it seriously because I came to Charlie Brooker with his comedy, and I can't help but see it as the darkest of comedy.
I'd been following Booker for years - since he was doing Nathan Barley and telling everybody to just fucking watch The Wire, long before anybody else was. His TV shows gave us the immortal Barry Shitpeas and the delightful Philomena Cunk. And he's doing some thing about technology being bad? All right then.
A lot of Black Mirror is outright and obvious comedy, but when got nasty, it's a very British kind of nasty, where it's so fucking bad it's coming out the other side as something supremely dark and funny. It's just the way I've always watched that show.
I have the same issue when people talk to me very seriously about Succession, because I love that show too, but it's just so fucking hard to take "boar on the floor" super seriously when you know it's created by one of the same guys that had Jezza eating his girlfriend's dog that he'd accidentally killed and failed to cremate.
(I maintain a firm belief that the only character who could cross over between Peep Show and Succession is obviously Super Hans.)
It's like the Alan Moore thing - American readers who first noticed him with the Nukeface Papers or the nastiness of the Killing Joke might think it's all grim and biting, but he'll always be the man behind 'Mind the Oranges, Marlon', and the creator of Ablard Snazz to me. Jog for your life, man.
I'm not pissing on anyone else who doesn't see it that way, and sometimes even the silliest of stories can have real poignancy. But I do find laughs in the darkness, when I'm coming from that direction.
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