REVIEW: Black Mirror – Season 3

***Spoiler free review

Charlie Brooker’s dark and eminently bleak speculative fiction series Black Mirror, gets the more polished Netflix treatment, with some mixed results. 

The first two seasons of Black Mirror contain some of the most uncomfortable and difficult stories I’ve ever seen on television, both in the good and the not-so-good way. In a similar vein to the legendary The Twlight Zone, the show takes a rather ruthless look at modern society, through the lense of unforeseen consequences of our modern technology. Each episode is a stand-alone chapter, with a new story and new actors, and while each of the topics examined here is pure fiction, they leave just enough connection to our current reality to make you feel a little creeped out by it. Or sometimes, a great deal creeped out by it.

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The Streaming Wars

Netflix vs. Stan vs. Presto. We run our eye over Australia’s ‘Big 3’ streaming services

The exciting and genre-changing new world of streaming television has officially been available in Australia since early 2015, which when you think about it, isn’t that long at all. Yet in the world of digital media and mobile apps, 18 months can be an entire product lifecycle. 18 months, can see a modern tech company rise, fall, be superseded, be acquired by somebody else and get a new branding makeover. So how have the domestic streaming products held up in their short (but long) life thus far? Are we getting anything close to the service that international viewers get? Have our domestic products come close to competing with the superpower of Netflix?

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Mr. Robot – The best show you’ve never seen

Season 2 of The USA Networks’s surprising breakthrough hit Mr. Robot is pushing the boundaries of serialized story telling, but very few are getting to see it.

If you were lucky enough to get on board the Mr. Robot hype wagon last year, then you could probably relate to my frustration when you try to talk to other people about this show, and they ask you if it’s the movie with Will Smith and the I see dead people kid. USA Network is not exactly the most premium cable channel over in Trump-Land, and the ratings for this show have been steadily dropping since this year’s premiere, which were already down on last year’s finale. But here in Australia, it’s even more difficult to find other Mr Robot cultists to swoon with over this show with.

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