If it wasn’t just the entire coronavirus pandemic, perhaps it was the arrival of the murder hornets that was the last straw. But it’s official: the world we’re living in has been deemed too grim even by the standards of the Black Mirror creator and dystopia king himself, Charlie Brooker. “At the moment, I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart,” the showrunner told The Radio Times in an interview, speaking in reference to his decision to press pause on his own dystopian show. “So I’m not working away on one of those.” A wise choice, imo.
Instead, Charlie explained, he’s more keen to exercise his “comic skill set”, and so has been trying to write scripts that make himself laugh. As for how he’s been holding up in quarantine, the Black Mirror creator revealed that, as a glass-half-empty person, he’s been dealing with the new normal relatively well. “I’ve not been going through quite the level of psychological adjustment as some other people because I’ve really always expected something like this to come along,” he says. “If you’ve spent years anticipating the worst, oddly, when the worst happens, you can stop worrying about that possibly happening because it has, so I’m dealing with this on a personal level far better than I would have anticipated.”
