Upside to Hi-Tech’s Dark Side

SoHo will make up for the lost time between tonight’s premiere of Black Mirror and when the Emmy-winning sensation first went to air in Britain one-and-a-half years ago.

It’s announced the second series, which screened four months ago in the UK, will screen from July 3, opening with Be Right Back, in which Hayley Atwell uses virtual reality to speak to dead people.

Said The Guardian: “Charlie Brooker‘s second series of dystopian fables started brightly (which is to say darkly) with a tale encompassing his favourite themes – technology, social media and the vanity of human wishes.”

And while The Daily Telegraph thought the first series “not just painful to watch – at times it was unwatchable”, it found the season two premiere “much more sympathetically engaging …

“The show touched on important ideas – the false way we sometimes present ourselves online, and our growing addiction to virtual lives – but it was also a touching exploration of grief.”

Concurred The Independent, “Out of all the episodes of Black Mirror to date, Be Right Back was surprisingly sentimental, particularly after the bestiality, jealous husbands and aspiring singers-turned-porn stars that made up the first series.”

Bestiality figures in tonight’s 9.30 premiere of The National Anthem.

It explores how information is disseminated so quickly now and public opinion is so loud, powerful and quick to change, that life is very much harder for the rich and supposedly powerful.

The Telegraph called it “a ballsy, blackly comic study of the modern media” while the Sydney Morning Herald rated it 5/5: “Not because it reinvents the Twilight Zone milieu but because it offers provocative drama with ample doses of dark comedy and a sense of the foreboding that accompanies our rapid embrace of technologies offering instant everything — notably communication, gratification and recall.”

Not surprisingly, our own Herald warns: “It’s not a show for delicate sensibilities, especially as it’s delivered straight and with such grim tension.”