Why Are There So Many Anthology Shows Like 'Black Mirror'?

​If the plans of various networks and streaming services pan out, our current Peak TV era is about to enter a new phase: the full-fledged comeback of the episodic anthology series. Spurred by an ever-shifting televisual and technological landscape, bite-sized "what ifs" are on the rise again. It's the medium looping back on itself, returning to a format with roots in adapted stage plays, short-fiction magazines and appointment radio programs, then tweaking it to thrive a media ecosystem that's increasingly suspicious of the creative engines that drive it. Some of the corporate mechanisms driving the anthology revival would make for a good "Black Mirror" episode.

The episodic anthology series (e.g. "Black Mirror" and "The Twilight Zone"; not "Fargo" or "American Horror Story") should also be seen as a potential creative godsend to a medium in many ways is beleaguered by too-lengthy narratives. For every serialized television show that never fails to impress us, there are a handful that take their sweet time getting good, and plenty that are never worth a damn. If you've ever involuntarily rolled your eyes when a friend swore their favorite show "gets there by the third season," then having your pick of a bunch of one-shot, low-investment stories from all sorts of writers and directors could be a welcome reprieve.

Whether you love or hate "Black Mirror" — or have episodes you like and those you don't — just know that you're about to have a lot more shows to pick from. Jordan Peele ("Get Out") is helping revive "The Twilight Zone," Steven Spielberg is bringing back "Amazing Stories" for Apple, the Coen Brothers are signed on for a Netflix-bound western anthology… really, there are too many to list in one place.

In this non-standard installment of Fan Service, rather than look at one lore-heavy franchise, we'll trace out the history of televised episodic anthologies. By examining the creative and corporate contexts in which the form thrived, we can pick apart the ways new episodic anthologies like "Black Mirror" position themselves in the culture differently from their forebears.

First, What Ones Should You Watch?

Given that episodic anthologies have absolutely no meaningful continuity between episodes, I'm going to spare you a lengthy directive about a watch order here: start with whatever strikes your fancy. If you want to see how a show like "The Twilight Zone" or "Black Mirror" has evolved over time, just watch the older stuff first. Poke around enough and you're bound to find something you like — that's the nature of it. In any case, here are some of the most iconic episodes from the shows that are discussed later in this piece:

"The Twilight Zone" (Seasons 1-3, 5 available on Netflix)

"Time Enough at Last"
"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"
"To Serve Man"
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"
"Living Doll"

"The Outer Limits" (Seasons 1 and 2 available on Hulu)

"Soldier"
"Demon with a Glass Hand"
"I, Robot"
"The Architects of Fear"
"The Sixth Finger"

"Amazing Stories" (Season 1 available on NBC.com)

"The Mission"
"Ghost Train"
"Mirror, Mirror"
"Remote Control Man"
"Hell Toupee"

"Black Mirror" (Seasons 1-4 available on Netflix)

"Fifteen Million Merits"
"The Entire History of You"
"Be Right Back"
"San Junipero"
"USS Callister"
"Black Museum"

"Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams" (Season 1 available on Amazon Prime)

"The Commuter"
"Kill All Others"
"Human Is"

The Only Format That Made Sense

As televisions crept into American and British homes throughout the '40s, the one-and-done nature of live broadcasts constrained what could be accomplished with the medium. Episodic anthologies were practically the norm for fiction on television — early sitcoms and procedurals starred the same characters episode-to-episode, but transmit a continuous drama in a piecemeal format and you'd risk losing loyal audience members the moment they missed anything. Even with the eventual advents of re-runs, home recording and cable syndication, you could argue that heavily serialized television only overcame that perceived risk once DVD box sets came about in the '00s. Home video helped usher us into Peak TV in another way: it meant shows weren't supported solely by advertising dollars.

Go back to early episodic anthologies on TV and advertising is the first thing you see: it's right there in the name of "Kraft Television Theater." Advertisers were more embedded in the creative process of '40s and '50s television: Instead of bidding for ad space on networks, companies would directly finance the production of shows and only air ad breaks for their products (Kraft peddled their new invention, Cheez Whiz). The practice was carried over from radio, where even serialized programs were specifically engineered to target captive ad-receptive audiences (like the first soap operas advertising literal soap to housewives and Ovaltine-peddling fiction serials for children). If you think television advertising sucks now, imagine trying to make anything interesting fly under the warped morals of mid-century corporate juggernauts.

Still, try they did. TV dramas were treated like plays — in addition to original productions, adapting existing scripts and short fiction were no-brainer propositions. Live TV made it possible for play performances to be enjoyed outside of the theater while preserving the same ephemerality, and short fiction occupied a familiar place in the Western psyche by way of popular magazines¹ like Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. Anthology series would continue to borrow, emulate and riff on storytelling popularized on radio, in theaters and in print for some while before finding an identity that's more recognizable as uniquely "TV."

Rod, The Re-Run And Alfred

The writer later responsible for television's most iconic episodic anthology was also the person behind the first re-run (in its case, a second live broadcast performance). In 1955, writer Rod Serling's "Patterns" aired on Kraft Television Theater and received a rave review from critic Jack Gould in The New York Times. Gould was so enthusiastic in his praise for Serling's work that he included the following: "a repeat performance at an early date should be mandatory."

This was an odd thing to call for because it hadn't been done — but, confident they could capture a sizeable number of eyeballs again, the production company actually granted Gould's wish. "Patterns" was performed again a month later, and a year after that it was made again as a feature film. It was more than a success for Rod Serling; it was a validating breakthrough for television as a medium.

Later in 1955, another crossover in the film and television worlds began: with the success of "Rear Window" and "Dial M For Murder" behind him, Alfred Hitchcock took to the small screen. His anthology drama series, "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," started and ended every episode with Hitchcock in his role as host. Over the course of the show's long run, Hitchcock only directed a handful of episodes. Hitchcock's involvement signaled a particular mood and promised a level of quality on-par with what films had to offer. In more cynical terms, Hitchcock had a good personal brand to pin on a TV show.

Meanwhile, Serling found more work in television off the success of "Patterns." Formerly a radio writer, Serling was well-acquainted with the demands of churning out story ideas and plenty familiar with rejection, but now the fit was right and the jobs were coming to him. His next success was with a drama about a boxer on "Playhouse 90," an anthology series that aired 90-minute long episodes. In the course of writing scripts for shows like "Kraft Television Theater" and "Playhouse 90," many of Serling's stories had been altered heavily at the request of the sponsors, who wanted to avoid subject matter deemed too serious (like taking on prejudice and racism). On occasion, these anthology programs dipped into science fiction², which Serling noticed was able to get away with touchier themes under the watch of censorious sponsors simply because the stories were dressed up in fantastical clothing. You can guess where this is going.

Rod Enters His Zone

The initial pilot script for Serling's "The Twilight Zone" made a detour on the way to launching a full-fledged series — it was produced for "Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse," another episodic anthology series produced by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball (yes, this means Ball helped another sci-fi property off the ground before Gene Roddenberry ever came knocking). The "Playhouse" production was a success and Serling received the green light from CBS for "The Twilight Zone" in 1959.

Serling introduced and narrated each episode, and personally went on to write the most episodes of any contributor. Unlike Hitchcock before him, Serling was in a prominent role at the helm of one of television's most exciting programs as an emissary for the medium of television. Were it not for his work on "Kraft Television Theater" and "Playhouse 90," the show wouldn't exist — Serling was amongst the first creators who cut their teeth on television work before getting an early shot at pushing its boundaries.

The most emblematic episode of "The Twilight Zone" — to me, at least — is "Time Enough at Last." Adapted by Serling from a short story written by Marilynn Venable, the episode follows Henry Bemis, a coke-bottle glasses wearing bookworm played by Burgess Meredith. Serling's opening narration introduces Bemis thusly:

Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers, a bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself, without anyone.

The first few minutes of the episode depict an ordinary day in Bemis' life: he gets caught reading at his bank job, his wife berates him in a cliché manner for sneaking a book in his pocket. Not the slightest bit discouraged, Bemis sneaks down to the bank's vault with a book and a newspaper the next morning. While down in the vault, a hydrogen bomb obliterates the town above him, leaving Bemis as the only man left alive for as far as he can see.

"Time Enough at Last" features a nuclear holocaust, but that isn't its main thrust. Yes, the town is reduced to rubble, but Bemis has no trouble avoiding fallout or finding food. Bemis, bored to madness, finds a gun and briefly considers taking his own life before the story sets up its real tragedy: Bemis discovers the library is intact. He gleefully races up its steps and meticulously arranges the library's contents in tidy stacks for each month of the year, and each month of the year after that. As he stoops over to collect a book, his glasses tumble off his face and shatter. Fin.

The key traits of your average "Twilight Zone" tale are all present in "Time Enough at Last" — mundane beginning, a dramatic turn in the state of the world and a twist ending with a moral pull. Though "The Twilight Zone" would use nearly every sci-fi/fantasy device in the book to deliver its doses of horror and spectacle, the fantastical was almost always subordinate to the story's lesson or takeaway. The show established a formula, and though that formula exposed the show to parody after parody after parody (not a bad thing, mind you), the consistency cemented "The Twilight Zone" as a pop culture institution — and it changed the kinds of anthologies that were made for television.

The Genre Rut And TV's Inferiority Complex

For its five-year run, "The Twilight Zone" stood out from the pack of contemporary episodic anthologies that debuted around the same time or and from the imitators following in its wake. Shows like "The Outer Limits," "Thriller" and author Roald Dahl's "Way Out" (which ran alongside "The Twilight Zone" on CBS for a time) picked up Rod Serling's ball and ran with it, skewing focus more towards sci-fi or horror than the varied offerings of "The Twilight Zone."

This period in the early sixties, with a wealth of episodic anthologies offering up fantastic and terrifying stories, reserved the format for a narrow slice of genres (sci-fi, horror, the supernatural) that it has more or less been stuck in since. That's not to say there haven't been episodic anthologies presenting ordinary dramas since television's Golden Age… but there really haven't been many of note.

…with a notable technicality: Made for TV movies. Take, for example, ABC's "Movie of The Week," which had a consistent spot on the network from 1969 to 1975. Though technically a recurring program, it didn't have a host or much else around the edges to suggest a unified production machine backing it — all it promised was a different movie each week. Many of these movies were unsold television pilots or pilots that went on to launch series, like "Starsky and Hutch."

Often a made for TV movie is just a middling TV pilot that's been relegated to the dumping grounds.

Steven Spielberg, then a television director, made his first feature "Duel" as an ABC "Movie of the Week." This wasn't Spielberg's first work in anthology — his television debut was a segment for the 1969 pilot of Rod Serling's short-lived "Twilight Zone" successor "Night Gallery." The success of "Duel" opened the door to theatrical feature directing for Spielberg. There lies biggest the strength and the Achilles' heel of the made for TV movie in one instance — allowing directors the chance to shoot for cinema-quality experiences on TV could help bolster the profile of a network, but if they were really good, well… that person would naturally go on to make movies with bigger budgets for the silver screen.

I think it's entirely sensible to trace the roots of television's strange inferiority complex relative to cinema — today expressed by showrunners of Peak TV dramas who say they're really making a long movie or a novel — to the strange intermediate space of made for TV movies. The name "made for TV movie" elides how rare the offerings on-par with highlights like Spielberg's "Duel" really are; often a made for TV movie is just a middling TV pilot that's been relegated to the dumping grounds. By mixing clear-purposed productions in the same time slot as wannabe shows that never came to be, programs like "Movie of the Week" purposefully invited comparisons between TV and cinema offerings and then routinely shot themselves in the foot by serving up forgettable, cheap entertainment.

After a dark period, the next anthology show to really make a splash was 1985's "Amazing Stories," — as a show named for a sci-fi magazine and as a product of post-"Jaws," post "E.T." Steven Spielberg, "Amazing Stories" perfectly illustrates the perceptions that dogged episodic anthologies after the TV Golden Age.³ The opening titles tell you everything you need to know: a John Williams theme tune plays over an early CGI montage of magic, spaceships and ghosts before pulling back to reveal an audience captivated by the images on a small television. The genre adherence is clear and it desperately wants you to see it as a movie for the small screen. Spielberg, in a role similar to Hitchcock with "Hitchcock Presents," contributed many of the stories but only directed two installments. A couple other prominent film directors helmed a story here or there (including Martin Scorcese and Irvin Kershner) and big-screen actors were regularly featured in prominent roles.

Make no mistake, "Amazing Stories" did produce a lot of successful stories and on its own it makes a good case for episodic anthologies — it just did so on the name recognition of a prominent filmmaker and while avoiding conventional drama. The opening of Spielberg's "The Mission" alone is a sublime example of the talent that makes his work captivating regardless of scale: in a single shot lasting over three minutes we're expertly introduced to the crew of an American WW2 bomber plane. The sequence is impeccably staged to shift focus between the different airmen and it cleverly packs in extra visual information with each pan of the camera. The resolution of "The Mission" is as triumphant a tear-jerker as any of Spielberg's features — right out the gate, "Amazing Stories" was unafraid to mix crowd-pleasers and comedies in alongside eerie stories that would have fit with "The Twilight Zone."

Still, not long after "Amazing Stories" left the airwaves came "Freddy's Nightmares," an "Elm Street" tie-in horror anthology that rarely even featured Freddy Krueger in its stories, and HBO launched "Tales from the Crypt" with a raft of star actors and directors. As the 1990s dawned, as a form the episodic anthology was well and truly stuck in the shadow of both "The Twilight Zone" and of feature films.

Your Phone Is The Mirror, Get It?

The '90s and '00s saw revivals of "The Outer Limits" (somewhat successful) and later "The Twilight Zone" (decidedly less so⁴) in the wake of shows like "Twin Peaks" and "The X-Files," which successfully found the balance between their own week-in, week-out demands for weirdness and their serialized plot arcs. Remove Mulder and Scully from a great "X-Files" episode like "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" and you'd have a great installment of an anthology series, but lose the recurring actors and you'd lose what made the best '90s sci-fi and fantasy serials worth watching even when an individual episode kinda sucked. Procedurals and lightly serialized shows reigned in the '90s, and by the end of the '00s shows like AMC's "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" were establishing the now-familiar rhythms of Peak TV dramas.

So, really, where the hell did Charlie Brooker come from, and how did he make episodic anthologies a thing again with "Black Mirror?"

Brooker used to be a comedy writer — notably, he contributed to the best episode of Channel 4's show "Brass Eye," a darkly absurd parody of sensational "NBC Dateline"-esque news programs. He also wrote a regular TV review column for The Guardian that later evolved into a show of its own, "Charlie Brooker's ScreenWipe." On the program, Brooker serves as the on-camera host, presenting himself as an "incompetent, obnoxious misanthrope" ready to rattle off snarky quips and sharp cultural analysis. Year-in-review "Wipe" programs starring Brooker have been a staple since 2010.⁵ In 2008, Brooker penned a miniseries called "Dead Set," which parodied "Big Brother" with a high-concept twist — a zombie apocalypse begins in the middle of filming. The threads of "Black Mirror" are easy to pick out from Brooker's earlier work: the dark humor of "Brass Eye," the wry critiques of "Wipe," and the "what if" ethos of "Dead Set."

One good "Black Mirror" episode generates more buzz than a great episode of a drama that's lasted multiple seasons.

The key quirk of "Black Mirror" that sets it apart from being just another take on "The Twilight Zone" is its easily-mocked focus on technology. To be clear, nobody is ever going to make a better joke about "Black Mirror" than Mallory Ortberg's joke episode summary "what if phones, but too much" — it gets right at the simple, cynical critique of technology that drives the first two seasons of the show. Still, by confining his scripts to tech anxieties, Brooker gives "Black Mirror" a tonal identity that stays more-or-less constant across different stories and directors (surely, bearing most of the writing responsibilities like Rod Serling did helps too). The show can feel a little samey across installments, but to succeed "Black Mirror" had to possess a solid idea of what it wanted to be: individual stories, related to tech-addled anxiety, made for TV.

The episodic nature of "Black Mirror" means the success of a season isn't even determined by the set of episodes as a whole. In the hot take-hungry media landscape, the show only needs one standout a la "USS Callister" per season to grab people's attention. The investment that a viewer needs to make in a single episode is small, and so is Netflix's financial investment in that episode. One good "Black Mirror" episode generates more buzz than a great episode of a drama that's lasted multiple seasons.

"Black Mirror," though not initially intended as a rejoinder to Peak TV, has ended up becoming one. The coverage and marketing for "Black Mirror" are more focused on what the stories have to offer than on the presence of a big name actor or director because the show doesn't compete for that attention or suffer from cinema envy. Look at Daniel Kaluuya ("Fifteen Million Merits") and Jodie Whittaker ("The Entire History Of You"), whose roles on early, buzzy episodes helped boost their careers — "Black Mirror" happily exists at a kind of "launchpad" scale. The show's willingness to depart from cynicism in it's more recent seasons, best expressed in season 3's lovely "San Junipero," also lets "Black Mirror" offer up a greater variety of tone than most serialized Peak TV dramas. With bingeability often comes fear of episodic variety — just look at any Netflix Marvel offering — but "Black Mirror" almost forces you to watch it piecemeal over a number of sittings lest the doomsaying get you down. It can be thuddingly obvious, overly predictable or too cleverly twisty, but it's always different.

Judging by "Black Mirror's" success, viewers are hungry for something that's different. At least, that's more likely than viewers only being hungry for bleak technological cautionary tales.

The Future

With last week's US Amazon Prime premiere of "Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams," we're officially off to the races on what could, optimistically, turn into a healthy era for the episodic anthology. "Electric Dreams," both by leaning on Dick's short stories for inspiration and by employing a suite of known talent, suggests a little of that anxiety to be "more than TV" — but really, it wants to set itself apart from "Black Mirror." First, it debuted on Channel 4, the British network that gave up "Black Mirror" to Netflix. Second, it knows that it can't copy "Black Mirror's" tech anxiety schtick and expect to win out. Looking to Dick, whose science-fiction oeuvre can be boiled down to "what does it mean to be human?" shows that the creators behind "Electric Dreams" know that what they really need is a guiding principle, not a genre, to make the show work.

There's also Amazon's other episodic anthology "LORE," adapted from the podcast of the same name, depicts eerie true stories with a mix of factual narration and horror-style recreations. HBO's "Room 104," created by the Duplass Brothers, tells all sorts of different stories all linked by the titular hotel room. We don't even need to wait for the reboots of "The Twilight Zone" and "Amazing Stories" — the episodic anthology series is already back from the dead. Now we'll see if this zombie sticks around.