The Moment Black Mirror's Creators Knew They Nailed The Series' Dark Tone

Charlie Brooker's dystopian "Black Mirror" revolves around the idea of taking a modern-day, technology-inspired concept to the extreme, often with results that are borderline impossible to predict. From the touching tenderness of the best "Black Mirror" episode, "San Junipero," to the disturbing "White Bear" and its connection to a real-life tragedy, few things are off limits for the Netflix anthology series. As such, waiting to see what kind of initial impact the show had on its viewers was an understandably important experience for Brooker and others behind the show. 

Fortunately, confirmation for the show's effectiveness came early on, thanks to "The National Anthem" — the "Black Mirror" pilot that was so on point that it accidentally foreshadowed a real-life political scandal. The episode is a pitch black satire of social media and contemporary politics, notable for playing out with a grim determination that deliberately clashes with the ludicrous premise of the prime minister of the U.K. (Rory Kinnear) being pressured to have intercourse with a pig during a live broadcast. In the book "Inside Black Mirror" by Brooker, Annabel Jones, and Jason Arnopp, the former two and the episode's director Otto Bathurst ("Peaky Blinders") revealed that seeing the audience reactions during the pilot episode's press screening was the moment they knew they got the show's tone right. 

Now that people are familiar with "Black Mirror," even those who see "The National Anthem" for the first time know to expect horrible shenanigans. Back before the pilot episode first aired, however, there was no way for the audiences to brace themselves for the way the episode patiently builds its way toward a genuinely uncomfortable conclusion. As Brooker said in the book, the slow realization that Prime Minister Callow is unable to avoid the nauseating act played out exactly as intended in the first press screening. "When the ransom demand was made, everyone just laughed, which was the reaction we wanted," he said. "'Oh, it's a black comedy!' And then gradually they got more and more worried and felt more and more sick ..." 

Bathurst went on to compare the audience's reactions to the episode's pub crowd, as both grow to understand the grim reality of what they're witnessing at the same time. "The very pivotal moment was with the onscreen people in the pub, watching the live broadcast," he said. "It suddenly becomes very clear that actually humanity, society, and media, and all of us are responsible for this. The tone in the screening room was absolutely thrilling. Everybody was completely silent." Jones concurred that witnessing this was the exact moment when the makers of the show knew that they had achieved the exact sort of unnerving atmosphere they were aiming for. "When the journalists in the press room did exactly what the people in the pub were doing onscreen, that's when we knew we'd got the tone of the series," she said.