'Black Mirror' Season Six Now Has a Nightmarish First Trailer Ahead of the Show's Return in June

Your worst technological nightmares are returning to your streaming queue. No, we don't just mean forgetting your password, having trouble logging in, getting an error message that your account doesn't exist after you just used it yesterday or being stuck watching buffering instead of the program you're trying to see. First, Black Mirror's Twitter account broke a four-year silence. Next, Charlie Brooker's dystopian sci-fi hit has dropped a sneak peek at its next batch of technological nightmares — aka the first trailer for the show's long-awaited sixth season.

This season is being teased as "the most unpredictable, unclassifiable and unexpected season yet", which is saying something given everything that Black Mirror has thrown at the screen in past seasons (and in choose-your-own-adventure-style movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch).

"I've always felt that Black Mirror should feature stories that are entirely distinct from one another, and keep surprising people — and myself — or else what's the point? It should be a series that can't be easily defined, and can keep reinventing itself," Brooker told Netflix about season six.

"Partly as a challenge, and partly to keep things fresh for both me and the viewer, I began this season by deliberately upending some of my own core assumptions about what to expect. Consequently, this time, alongside some of the more familiar Black Mirror tropes we've also got a few new elements, including some I've previously sworn blind the show would never do, to stretch the parameters of what 'a Black Mirror episode' even is. The stories are all still tonally Black Mirror through-and-through — but with some crazy swings and more variety than ever before."

Wondering when you might be staring at your own black mirror again to watch Black Mirror? The show will return to Netflix in June, ready to add some extra chill to winter Down Under — with an exact date yet to be announced.

Cast-wise, the series makes a comeback with another stacked roster of familiar faces, including Zazie Beetz (Atlanta), Annie Murphy (Kevin Can F**k Himself), Paapa Essiedu (Men), Josh Hartnett (Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre), Himesh Patel (Station Eleven), Rob Delaney (The Power), Rory Culkin (Swarm), Salma Hayek Pinault (Magic Mike's Last Dance), Aaron Paul (Westworld), Kate Mara (Call Jane), Michael Cera (Life & Beth), Danny Ramirez (Stars at Noon), Clara Rugaard (I Am Mother), Auden Thornton (This Is Us) and Anjana Vasan (Killing Eve).

How exactly will the series manage to be even more dispiriting than reality over the past few years? That's increasingly been one of its dilemmas — and noting that something IRL feels just like Black Mirror has become one of the cliches of our times — but this'll be the mind-bending effort's first round of episodes following the pandemic.

No one has ever watched the Brooker-created series for a pick-me-up, though. Since first hitting the small screen in 2011, Black Mirror has spun warped visions of where technology may lead us — and, no matter what tale the show has told so far across its 22 instalments (including that interactive movie), the picture has usually been unnerving. So, imagine what the program will cook up after what we've all been living through since it last aired.

Brooker has already riffed on COVID-19 in two Netflix specials, actually: Death to 2020 and Death to 2021, which offer satirical and star-studded wraps of both years with mixed success.

For something completely different, he also jumped back into choose-your-own-adventure content with animated short Cat Burglar, which hit Netflix back in 2022, has viewers play through it as a thieving feline called Rowdy and gets you to answer trivia questions to advance the story.

Check out the first trailer for Black Mirror's sixth season below:

Black Mirror season six will stream via Netflix some time in June. We'll update you when an exact release date is announced.

Images: Netflix.