Black Mirror vs The Twilight Zone: Charlie Brooker almost copied the one element everyone compares them for

The two shows are half a century apart. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone ran on CBS from 1959 to 1964, five seasons and 156 episodes, and Serling wrote or co-wrote 92 of them. Brooker's Black Mirror started on Britain's Channel 4 on December 4, 2011, with three episodes, moved to Netflix in 2016 and is now up to seven seasons, 33 episodes and an interactive film, Bandersnatch. Netflix renewed it for an eighth season in January.

What they have in common

The basic machine is the same: a new story and a new cast every week, one strange idea, followed all the way to its least comfortable conclusion. Brooker has described the difference as a matter of what powers the strangeness.

"They'd use aliens or magic to explain how something unusual was happening," Brooker told Creative Screenwriting. "We'd use technology."

Serling's show had gremlins on airplane wings and mannequins that come to life. Brooker's has five-star ratings for everyday life, memory implants and a dating app that runs the same relationship a thousand times.

The thing Brooker almost took

Serling's narration is the signature of The Twilight Zone: the host stepping in at the start and the end of every episode to frame the story. Brooker nearly gave Black Mirror one too.

"We did think about having a character who introduces them," he told GamesRadar in 2013, "Tales From the Crypt style." In the end, he decided it would be "a bit weird."

"And then if we invented a character, why are they there?" Brooker said.

The first season also shrank to three episodes, which made a recurring frame less necessary. Black Mirror ended up with no host, no narration and no frame around the episodes at all.

Brooker doesn't think it was the point anyway

His own take on the comparison is slightly contrarian. In the same interview, he argued that "when you think of The Twilight Zone you don't actually think of Rod Serling."

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Hollywood seems to disagree. Every revival of The Twilight Zone has kept a narrator, and the most recent one, which ran on CBS All Access in 2019 and 2020, gave the job to Jordan Peele.

Where they part ways

The two shows aim at different targets:

• The Twilight Zone used fantasy as cover. Serling could get stories about prejudice, paranoia and the bomb past network sponsors by dressing them up as science fiction.
• Black Mirror is about the tools themselves: phones, screens, social media, the things the audience is holding while it watches.

Black Mirror has the trophies to show for its version: it won the Emmy for outstanding television movie three years in a row, for "San Junipero," "USS Callister" and Bandersnatch.

For the record: Serling barely appeared on camera in the first season of The Twilight Zone either. Until season 2, he was mostly a voice.

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