7. Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011 - Present)
Thank god for Charlie Brooker. Black Mirror provided something different, something to challenge people's thought processes in a TV schedule saturated with talent show and soap banality. To say that it was a welcome change would be a gross understatement. All six episodes offer biting satire and moral quandaries; here's my top three: 3.
The National Anthem - no-one can accuse Charlie Brooker of shying away from controversy. Within the first five minutes of this, the first ever episode of Black Mirror, the Prime Minister is faced with kidnappers holding a Princess (Diana-esque, just to annoy the Daily Mail even more) ransom with one demand - that the PM have sex with a pig live on national TV. Right. This definitely isn't Downton Abbey. What makes this episode so blackly, almost farcically comic is the reaction of the media. "The Guardian are running a live blog, and a short think piece on the historical symbolism of the pig". But it's also extremely uncomfortable viewing, taking the public's unspoken love of humiliation to its absurd yet logical extreme. 2.
15 Millions Merits - it's a tired (and chronically misused) buzzword, but there is no other term for the world we encounter in 15 Million Merits. It's Orwellian. But it's Orwell with a modern twist, focusing less on the authoritarian and more on the technological. Our Winston Smith is disillusioned drone Bing (Daniel Kaluuya), trapped in a world where he is forced to endlessly cycle on a static bike to generate merits for himself. These merits buy him privileges such as the ability to skip semi-pornographic adverts that are pumped into his frontal lobe 24/7, as well as a talent show that (much as it does in reality) provides a distraction for the cogs in the machine, providing all but unattainable aspiration. He finds his Julia in the angel-voiced Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay), an equally disillusioned drone. He wants her to enter the talent show, and is willing to donate his hard earned merits so she can do so. When she proves a modest success, the judges propose a more sexed up image. There's a great quote from the most misogynistic judge - "forget all the shame. We medicate against that". I wonder if that's what Simon Cowell says to his contestants. 1.
White Bear - an episode that is without doubt one of the most uncomfortable hours of television drama ever broadcast, White Bear takes the thinly-veiled mob justice of Twitter at its worst and stretches it to its nightmarish extreme. A young and unnamed girl comes round in a dingy council house not remembering who she is. She ventures out to find stoic figures at windows armed with camera phones, filming her every move. To makes matters worse she is pursued by masked figures, apparently intent on killing her. It's difficult to go further without spoiling the plot. More than anything it highlights the fine line between sadism and punishment, between our desire for justice and darker shades of voyeurism that lurk beneath the surface of the Twitter generation.