Netflix's 45-Episode Sci-Fi Masterpiece Is A Better Black Mirror Show Than Black Mirror

Published Oct 8, 2026, 3:54 PM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. Charlie Brooker has deftly updated The Twilight Zone’s anthology format for the modern age with the dystopian tech nightmares of Black Mirror. Whereas Rod Serling used The Twilight Zone’s sci-fi and horror allegories to reflect contemporary social and political issues like McCarthyism and the Civil Rights Movement, Brooker has used the near-future terrors of Black Mirror to explore our increasing reliance on technology, and our zombification at the mercy of our ghoulish LED screens. When it premiered in 2011, Black Mirror was but a lowly satire being broadcast to a niche audience in the UK on Channel 4. But after two seasons, it got picked up by Netflix, and promptly became a global phenomenon. The success of Black Mirror led to a resurgence in chilling anthology shows: Room 104, Inside No. 9, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. For the most part, Black Mirror remains the gold standard of the modern TV anthology. Every season is wildly hit-and-miss, with both incredible episodes and utterly forgettable ones, and that’s par for the course in the anthology genre. Even The Twilight Zone had a couple of duds, few and far between though they may have been. But when Black Mirror hits, it really hits. A really great Black Mirror episode is an eye-opening, jaw-dropping experience, and very few shows have managed to reach those heights. But a different Netflix sci-fi anthology has since beaten Black Mirror at its own game. Love, Death, and Robots has always been more consistent than Black Mirror. It has some weak installments, as any anthology show is bound to, but it had a lot more hits than misses across its four seasons. Since it was animated, Love, Death, and Robots had far fewer limitations on its visuals than Black Mirror, and had a lot more variety in its storytelling. Love, Death & Robots Never Settled Into A Formula Black Mirror’s biggest problem is that it settled into a formula. In its early seasons, the sky was the limit. One episode, the British Prime Minister would be engaging in bestiality on national television. The next, video game scores would be determining the social hierarchy. The next, a murderer would be experiencing horrific eye-for-an-eye punishment for her crimes. But, seven seasons in, Black Mirror has been reduced to a formula. There’s a very specific equation to create the perfect Black Mirror episode: futuristic tech + tragic antihero = shocking twist. That formula can still hit. In “Eulogy,” a lovelorn man pores through the wreckage of a decades-old romance. In “Beyond the Sea,” the isolation of outer space got to two astronauts and led to some digital cuckolding. Brooker can still knock it out of the park every now and then. But new Black Mirror episodes are no longer a guaranteed banger. The show’s style has gotten so rote and familiar that it feels like Black Mirror is trying to be like Black Mirror, just like post-2010s Pixar is trying to make movies that feel like Pixar movies. Love, Death, and Robots never settled into a formula. It never even settled into a single animation style, or a single genre. Every single episode explores an entirely different visual style, ranging from scratchy old-school cartoons to eye-popping photorealism. Across 45 episodes, Love, Death, and Robots jumped all over the genre spectrum; it has sci-fi episodes, fantasy episodes, horror episodes, comedy episodes — it’s an embarrassment of riches (and tonal variety). Black Mirror is still one of the best anthologies on TV, and still delivers one or two classics each season. But Love, Death, and Robots is much more consistent, much more visually interesting, and experimented a lot more with its genre and style.