The sixth season of Charlie Brooker’s trippy sci-fi drama Black Mirror is not only dominating Netflix at the moment as the #1 series on the streamer in the US, just days after its release. The new season is also easily the most meta of the series, now that Netflix has launched a fake Streamberry website based on Joan of Arc. That’s the title of the first episode of Black Mirror Season 6, in which an ordinary woman discovers that her life is being turned into a TV show on a Netflix-like streaming service called Streamberry, one that even features the familiar tu-dum sound.
You can check it out yourself, at streamberry.tv. The site includes an interface that’s extremely reminiscent of Netflix’s, complete with all sorts of fake show titles on its homepage that allude to other Brooker projects and Black Mirror episodes. The official Netflix UK and Ireland Twitter account on Tuesday even changed its name to “Streamberry UK and Ireland,” replacing the Netflix logo’s “N” with an “S.”
The Joan of Arc episode, especially, set the Internet abuzz in recent days, leading so many viewers to wonder — wait, hold on, can Netflix do that? It’s also just another example, if you ask me, of how the show has become a cult classic for the way it teases dark and dystopian narratives out of what might otherwise seem like the forgettable and the ordinary.
“Only black mirror could have me on the edge of my seat, absolutely s******g myself, when it’s just an old lady making a shepherds pie,” one Twitter user quipped this week about the show. No wonder the new season immediately rocketed to #1.
Meanwhile, if Black Mirror is the kind of Netflix show you can’t get enough of — trippy, mind-bending, and ominous as hell — keep reading for our picks of five more Netflix series along these same lines to add to your watch list if you haven’t already.
Mind-bending Netflix shows for Black Mirror fans
We’ll start with two shows that come from the same creators:
- Dark: Per Netflix, “A missing child sets four families on a frantic hunt for answers as they unearth a mind-bending mystery that spans three generations.”
- 1899: From the creators of Dark, this 1-season Netflix series tells the story of mysterious events that change the course of an immigrant ship headed for New York in 1899, when a mind-bending riddle unfolds for its passengers.
- The OA: Anything starring the ethereal Brit Marling is always pretty much guaranteed to be a trip. In The OA, she plays a young woman (Prarie Johnson, aka the Original Angel/the OA) who returns seven years after vanishing from her home. She has mysterious new abilities and recruits five strangers for a secret mission. Be warned, though: Netflix canceled this fan-favorite series after two seasons, ending the story on a cliffhanger.
- Manifest: The canceled-too-early NBC series, reborn as a Netflix hit. The show offers an addictive mix of drama, sci-fi, and spirituality, about a plane that mysteriously lands years after takeoff. The people onboard it subsequently return to a world that’s moved on without them.
- Love, Death & Robots: This series about everything from monsters to technology is basically a blank canvas upon which creators use vastly different styles of animation to illustrate the stories they want to tell. It’s an animated fantasia that mixes sci-fi, fantasy, dark comedy, and some NSFW elements to create one of the most extraordinary Netflix shows you will ever come across.
