Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror began as a Channel 4 anthology in December 2011, three episodes commissioned in part because Brooker wanted a series that could function as The Twilight Zone for the smartphone era. Netflix acquired it after the second series and expanded its scale and budget. By its eighth season the series had won an Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie (for San Junipero) and the BAFTA for Best Drama Series, and had become the defining work of speculative television in the 2010s.

Each episode is standalone and dystopian: a politician forced into bestiality by a hostage-taker; a society of social-media scores; a memory-replay implant that destroys a marriage; a hologram boy band stuck in commercial purgatory; a virtual afterlife built into a beach town in 1987. The series moves between high-concept satire (Nosedive, The Entire History of You) and genuine emotional gut-punch (San Junipero, Be Right Back, USS Callister). Performances range from Daniel Kaluuya's breakthrough in Fifteen Million Merits to Jodie Foster directing Rosemarie DeWitt in Arkangel.

The series is uneven by design (anthology format means each episode lives or dies on its own terms) but its best work has aged remarkably well. Several episodes have been quoted in academic papers on technology ethics; the term Black Mirror has become shorthand in news writing for the weirdness of contemporary life.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most consistently provocative anthology drama since The Twilight Zone, and the show that proved British genre television could compete with the largest American budgets on its own intellectual terms.