The New Season of 'Black Mirror' Features Only Female Leads
If you haven’t watched Black Mirror, now is a very good time to start: The British show, now on Netflix, has four incredible seasons on the streaming platform. If you haven’t seen it, it’s set in a not-so-unrealistic future, usually with varying levels of hits-far-too-close-to-home dystopia commenting on things like dating, marriage, and, of course, governments gone awry—a Twilight Zone for 2017. And each episode is a different story with different characters, like a mini-movie each time. The six-episode fourth season, which hit Netflix on Friday, has a twist, though: every single one of the season’s main characters is a woman.
Of course, if every character was a man, this wouldn’t exactly be news. But the stats still show that women are a minority when it comes to owning lead roles on television: in the U.K., where Black Mirror hails from, of the top 50 television shows, just 18 have female protagonists. In the U.S., only 42 percent of shows have women playing a “major character,” according to a study covering 2016-2017 shows from the Center for the Study of Women in Film and Television at San Diego State University.
Apparently casting a woman for each lead role wasn’t the intention—it just kind of happened, according to The Hollywood Reporter, who talked to Annabel Jones, a co-executive producer on the show (alongside creator Charlie Brooker).
“Charlie and I don’t tend to think about the stories that way. Sometimes, it just comes out,” Jones told the publication. “But it’s great — great! — that they’re all strong female protagonists. I think what’s lovely about the show is that it’s not a strident statement. It’s more: Why not? We don’t even think about it from a gender perspective and I hope that’s progress. It’s more that we explore the best story and the best way to tell it.”
If that weren’t enough to get Black Mirror on your watchlist, the new season sounds empowering AF: “Whether they are survivors in the traditional sense or not, they each reach a moment in their story where they are challenged to reclaim their power, stand up to some level of tyranny or fight to write their own ending,” writes The Hollywood Reporter. Sounds like just what we need to close out 2017.
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