Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an experiment on us – Netflix explain

why interactive episode is the grimmest yet © The New York Times

The viewer decides what happens next in the newest episode of Charlie's Brooker's dystopian series. But
their reaction may help shape the future of interactive TV, finds David Streitfeld
 Friday 28 December 2018 11:56

Black Mirror, the speculative fiction series that encouraged people to be wary of new technology, is now
hoping they will embrace it. The Netflix show is releasing just one episode for its fifth season, a narrative
titled “Bandersnatch” during which the viewer decides what will happen next.
It begins like this: Should teenage video game whiz Stefan have Sugar Puffs or Frosties for breakfast?
Soon the choices become more consequential. Will Stefan work at a game company, tell his therapist
about his mother, take his meds? As so often on Black Mirror, reality is up for grabs.
Viewers are voting on more than who lives and dies on one program. If the response to “Bandersnatch” is
enthusiastic, Netflix will take it as a strong signal that the public is ready for interactive movies and
television shows, and a new age of storytelling will commence.

The idea behind the interactive push is simple: Viewers will care more if they are complicit.

“If bad things happen, you’ll feel even more crestfallen, because you were responsible,” said Todd Yellin,
Netflix’s vice president for product. “If the character is victorious, you’ll feel even more uplifted because
you made that choice.”

At a media event late last month at Netflix’s headquarters in Los Gatos, California, the Black Mirror artistic
team and Netflix executives previewed and discussed “Bandersnatch”. The mood was somewhat
tentative. The track record of choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, from the Dragon’s Lair video
arcade game in 1983 to The Onyx Project, a 2006 suspense story on DVD, to Steven
Soderbergh’s Mosaic, a recent HBO mini-series that was also a phone app, falls short of overwhelming.

One problem is that audiences are not clamouring for interactivity. A long time ago, drama was a live,
communal experience. Now it comes over all sorts of devices, but almost always is a one-way street.
Netflix has an immense hurdle to overcome.

“We’ve learned to press ‘play,’ drop the remote and just lean on back and let the TV wash over us,”
acknowledged Carla Engelbrecht, Netflix’s director of product innovation. “I’ve seen two-year-olds do
this.”
Netflix’s first interactive experiment was in 2017 with a cartoon called Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic
Tale. It did well enough with kids to push the studio to go ahead with an adult show. Black Mirror, which
takes a “what if?” attitude to technology loosely inspired by The Twilight Zone, was an obvious choice,
but Charlie Brooker, the creator, and Annabel Jones, his fellow executive producer, were initially dubious.

Giving lots of options to the viewer while keeping the main character consistent “was a huge nut to crack,”
Brooker said. It was a five-week shoot for about two-and a-half hours of script, a much longer time than a
typical episode requires.

Even now, he is uncertain about what he has made.

“I think some people will judge it just on a narrative basis, some people will judge it as a game,” he said.
“It’s not up to us. It’s down to them.”

Jones disagreed. “It wasn’t really designed as a game. It was designed as a cinematic experience.”

“With game-y elements,” Brooker persisted. “You are making decisions. You are actively guiding it.”

The original conceit of “Bandersnatch” was that it would be an interactive show about an interactive
game. That’s the central hook that made Brooker laugh, which is his litmus test for Black Mirror. Then he
asks himself, “How can I make this not funny?” and a new episode is conceived.

“Bandersnatch” is named after the elusive beast in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, another
tale of multiple universes, but is more directly a tribute to Philip K Dick (1928-1982), who wrote about
shifting realities and believed in them, too. Colin (Will Poulter), Stefan’s mentor at the gaming company,
has a poster on his wall of Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik, where the dead talk to the living, some of whom may
be dead themselves.

Watching the episode, it is easy to see how interactivity could be the next step forward in entertainment. It
is less easy to see how this could ever be art. It’s hard to lose yourself in a story if you’re constantly being
pulled out of it. “Bandersnatch” is not linear, which made it feel unresolved even when I was offered the
chance after about 70 minutes to go to the credits. I took instead the option to plunge back to the story
and tried to make different choices.

“I don’t know how many endings there are,” Brooker said. “We don’t know what we’ve created here.”
 Jones, who plays the stern adult to Brooker’s madcap boy genius, shot back: “Yes, we do!”

Brooker: “Sorry. We do.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

(A Netflix spokeswoman later clarified that “there are five main endings with multiple variants of each.”)


When making the show, the creative team had endless conversations about good endings versus bad
endings or premium endings or five-star endings. Said Brooker: “There’s a Groundhog Day aspect where
it keeps cycling around, deliberately so.” It’s an artist’s dream: a story the audience can never escape.
Interactive filmmaking is simple to mock. Are we now going to have Mary Poppins where the nanny
dismembers the children with a hacksaw? Few artists are in favour of letting their fans make the
decisions. But the technology is perpetually enticing.

In 1993, a 20-minute short called “I’m Your Man” seemed to offer real possibilities. Viewers in a handful of
specially equipped theatres used a pistol grip attached to each seat to collectively vote on dozens of
scene variations.

Bob Bejan, the scriptwriter, director and producer, said this was only the beginning. “In another year,
you’ll see the pistol grip plus a seat with gyroscope motion control,” he told The New York Times. “Two
years after that, it will be virtual reality, with the goggles and gloves.”

It was a prediction grounded in reality. Moviegoing was in decline, so multiplex owners were open to new
approaches. A generation had grown up with a joystick in its hand and wanted to take control of its
entertainment.

But the whole effort fizzled. “It was classic ahead-of-its-time technology,” said Bejan, who now runs
experiential marketing at Microsoft.

Netflix is not making any predictions. Quite the contrary.

“In five years, 10 years, we’ll either say, ‘Wow, Black Mirror was a real turning point for interactive
content,’ or we’ll be going, ‘That was another false start,'” said Yellin, the Netflix executive.

Still, he has great hopes. “We have our eyes and ears wide open to the creative community — writers,
producers, directors — for more ideas that would leverage this art form,” he said. “What are the new
storytelling conventions that can be invented? We’re meeting with people now.”
“You think you’re choosing your ending, but are you?” said Russell McLean, a “Bandersnatch” producer.
“Black Mirror is choosing your ending.”

Bejan, the interactive pioneer, had no knowledge of the existence of “Bandersnatch” when he was
interviewed. But he said interactive filmmaking was less about the audience’s choices than it seemed.

“There’s a finite amount of media the filmmaker creates, which he slices and dices to give the illusion of
control while at the same time guiding the viewer through the underlying blueprint,” he said. “It’s even
more megalomaniacal than linear filmmaking.”

Black Mirror anticipated this sort of possibility in its very first episode. In 2011, “The National Anthem”
posed the question, What if a British politician were forced to follow the whims of the public in real time?
He would end up having sex with a pig on live television, of course.
“Bandersnatch” as a show is entertaining, but as a glimpse of the near future of technology it is horrifying.
It is the grimmest Black Mirror yet, which is saying something for a series that, for its “Metalhead”
episode, took the Boston Dynamics robot dogs and put them in a scenario where they hunt and kill
people.

“Whatever path you take, there’s darkness ahead,” observed David Slade, who directed both “Metalhead”
and “Bandersnatch.”

That is pretty much Brooker’s life philosophy. He began as a game reviewer, then became a TV critic,
then a critic on TV. Black Mirror — named after the shiny objects on our desks, walls and all too often in
our hands — anticipated the tech backlash.
Now that we’re all suspicious and paranoid and neurotic, at least about technology, Black Mirror is in flux.
“We’re doing more optimistic episodes and stories, rather than just dystopian and negative ones,” Brooker
said. “We want to keep the show interesting for us.” He and Jones were, however, extremely hazy on
when the next episodes would arrive. “Bandersnatch” consumed all their attention for a year.

One thing is clear, though. The new episodes won’t be interactive. Asked if he had any advice for
someone who wanted to try the format, Brooker said in a joking-but-not-really tone: “Run away. It’s harder
than you think.”