Will there be a U.S. version of Black Mirror?
Today, we kick off From the Hills to the Valley, our series on what divides Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and what pulls them closer? We are going to talk about a lot of different things – from creativity and fame to piracy and lobbying – but we begin with how Hollywood sees and, therefore, represents Silicon Valley.
First up is Jenna Wortham, staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, who recently wrote about Black Mirror, a dystopian British series that’s recently become popular in the US.
Black Mirror, Wortham says, is an un-Hollywood version of how technology is changing our lives. She thinks one reasons it’s difficult for hollywood to represent silicon valley is that people “sitting behind screens,” is rather “boring and hard to illustrate.”
What about The Social Network? “It was great,” she says, “but you couldn’t get away from scenes of Jesse Eisenberg furiously coding. How do you make that sexy?”
Wortham isn’t sure Hollywood could have made a series like Black Mirror.
“I don’t know that those narratives are very popular here,” she says. “When we do dystopian narratives they tend to focus on collapse of civilization or a zombie virus outbreak. Not necessarily computers have gone haywire and they are coming for us.”
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