Firstly, if you haven’t seen the first two seasons of Black Mirror, you should do that immediately. The previous seasons of the show, dubbed “the Twilight Zone for the digital age”, have garnered widespread acclaim from critics and the public, are available on Netflix. The streaming service just announced the U.S. version of the show will arrive October 21^st.

Black Mirror is the brainchild of acerbic British comedian Charlie Brooker, a man whose career has been built not on pulling punches, but getting underneath the fabric of popular culture. Brooker, who started off as a game reviewer and later became a wolfish critic of mainstream news media, has said that his series is the hangover of our addiction to computer technology. It’s a bloody nasty hangover, too, but entirely gripping and thought-provoking throughout.

Brooker has said he’s addicted too, by the way; the writer is definitely not a puritan. He does, however, portray a grim future that, while at times seems outlandish, is also very much believable. A future in which chip implants cause social mayhem, where gamification exhorts the public to do all sorts of wicked things and where a digital footprint can be turned into another iteration of you.

Brooker will serve as writer and also executive producer for the next installment of Black Mirror. “It’s all very exciting; a whole new bunch of Black Mirror episodes on the most fitting platform imaginable,” Brooker said in a statement upon Netflix’s acquisition of the series. “Netflix connects us with a global audience so that we can create bigger, stranger, more international and diverse stories than before, whilst maintaining that Black Mirror feel. I just hope none of these new story ideas come true.”

The list of directors for the upcoming includes Joe Wright (Atonement, Hanna), Jakob Verbruggen (House of Cards) and Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane). The series will also feature Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting, Boardwalk Empire), Wyatt Russell (22 Jump Street) and Mackenzie Davis (The Martian).

Brooker wrote the first two seasons prior to virtual- and augmented-reality technology becoming mainstream. It would be interesting to see what he and his team would make of the recent Pokemon Go phenomenon. While the episodes were probably written sometime before this happened, expect to see some kind of nightmare related to such a highly addictive game.

Photo credit: Channel 4