TV & Beyond on 2025-05-26 20:45:00

first ever episode of “Black Mirror” features a man being forced to have sex with a pig, fans will often recommend new viewers start the show someplace else. As the debate over which “Black Mirror” episode serves as the best introduction to the series rages on, season 3’s “Nosedive” has gradually risen the ranks. The episode takes place in a world where everyone rates each other out of five stars after every little interaction, and that rating has an impact on your ability to get a job or buy an apartment. “Nosedive” is dark but not too dark, with an eye-catching sci-fi premise. It’s the perfect episode to dip your toes into the “Black Mirror” waters.

The other benefit of “Nosedive” is that it’s surprisingly funny. It’s a painfully relatable satire of just how superficial so many of our online interactions have become. We laugh as Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard) has the world’s fakest conversation with a coworker in the elevator, and later as she judges a 1-star driver from her 3-star high horse. Sure, every “Black Mirror” episode has some fun dark humor involved, but few episodes make people laugh out loud as much as this one.

A big part of this is that the episode wasn’t written by showrunner Charlie Brooker. He wrote the outline, but the script itself was penned by Mike Schur and Rashida Jones. Mike Schur is a sitcom writer famous for creating “The Office,” “Parks and Rec,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” and “The Good Place.” Jones, meanwhile, is perhaps best-known for playing Karen on “The Office” and Ann Perkins on “Parks and Recreation.” It was a big shock back in 2016 to find out these two Americans with comedic backgrounds were writing for such a bleak British series.

Mike Schur and Rashida Jones were always big fans of Black Mirror

Karen making a Jim face to the camera in The Office, season 3

NBC

In an interview with The AV Club after “Nosedive” first dropped on Netflix, Jones and Schur explained how they were hired for the job. “We were both giant ‘Black Mirror’ fans,” Jones said, “And I weaseled my way into Charlie [Brooker]’s life. He was very, very nice about it. I had a friend who worked at Channel 4; I told him I was a big fan; I asked him if Charlie (Brooker) would be okay with me emailing him. We had a bit of a correspondence.” Jones’ correspondence with Brooker seems to still be strong today, given that she starred in the recent “Black Mirror” episode “Common People.”

Schur and Jones explained how Brooker had given them an outline for the episode, with their job being to write the individual scenes. “It was a pretty complete four-page, prose description of the story,” Schur said. “We went through beat by beat and scene by scene. Part of the stated objective was to have it be comedic, and maybe slightly more comedic than the average ‘Black Mirror’ episode. I think they’re all pretty funny, but it’s a comedic idea of a woman slowly losing her place on earth.”

Schur also explained how he and Jones divided up the writing process: “There’s a midway point in the story, which is basically her finding out that her friend doesn’t want her to come. I was like ‘All right, I’ll write up to there and you write after that. So, we each wrote half, we folded it together, we blended and mixed and stuff and we rewrote it together as a team.”

In other words, Schur largely handled the part of the episode that was all about the more realistic, socially-awkward moments, the stuff we’ve seen him perfect on “The Office” especially. Jones was in charge of the more dramatic stuff in the second half, where Lacie went from politely trying to navigate social dynamics to feeling bold enough to actively yell at people who annoyed her.

The Nosedive premise seems likes a natural fit for comedy, not horror

Community, Jeff, dressed in blue robe befitting a 4, does a stand-up bit on the ways 3s and 4s behave

NBC

Some fans have complained about how much lighter “Black Mirror” has gotten since it moved over to Netflix, but it’s hard to complain much about the light tone of “Nosedive” specifically. The social rating system concept, while dark, is a premise that begs to be taken on from a comedic angle. There’s a reason why “Saturday Night Live” would go on to have so much fun with the concept, and why “Community” season 5 would have its own episode based around the general idea (“App Development and Condiments”).

The “Community” example is notable because it aired two years before “Nosedive” came out. Some fans have wondered if there was some foul play involved here on the part of “Black Mirror,” but it seems clear that the similarities in plot had nothing to do with plagiarism; performative social media behavior was simply on everyone’s minds in the 2010s. The 5-star rating system was already being used for businesses and Uber drivers, and the idea of someone’s social status being connected with how many online followers they had been around for even longer.

Which TV show handled the premise better? I actually think “Community” wins this round. Whereas the “Black Mirror” take had to be both funny and serious, the explicit sitcom format of “Community” allowed it to ramp up the absurdity as much as it wanted to — which ironically made it even more biting in its social commentary. Whereas the “Black Mirror” take on social ratings systems ends with the system still in place but the protagonist finding peace, “Community” ends with Jeff and Britta tearing down the system. Both are still entertaining sci-fi tales, but the “Community” spin on the concept felt the most impressive.

TV & Beyond on 2025-05-26 20:45:00

Mike Schur and Rashida Jones were always big fans of Black Mirror

The Nosedive premise seems likes a natural fit for comedy, not horror

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