5 Series to Watch After Finishing “Black Mirror”

"Black Mirror" does what great science fiction stories have been doing for over a century, using the possibilities of technology (and, in the case of the latest season of the series, the options of the media) to reflect the current state of humanity from a variety of premises, both realistic and absurd. If the ethical dilemmas, questions about existence, and dystopia posed by "Black Mirror" are your thing, you might also like these series:

Severance

What if your consciousness could be divided between your personal and work life? This premise builds one of the best series of 2022 and one of the best current meditations on late capitalism. When Mark (Adam Scott) realizes that there is a world outside the office that he does not know, he begins to question everything he thinks he knows and, together with his co-workers, tries to uncover the truth about what goes on at Lumon Industries.

Under the direction of Ben Stiller, this series experiments with the concepts of identity, work, and consciousness under a narrative and aesthetic construction that has been thought out down to the smallest detail. The costumes, set design, music, and camera movements all contribute to a narrative built to keep you on the edge of your seat. It has a nine-episode season, with a second season in production. You can watch it through Apple TV+.

Outer Range

A giant hole appears in the middle of the earth on a ranch in Wyoming, and strange things begin to happen around it. Royal (Josh Brolin), the patriarch of the Abbott clan, is the one who discovers it. What is initially a mystery and a secret slowly begins to unravel a web that goes beyond the hole and its implications.

Like all great Westerns, this series is a profoundly personal drama. Through the spark of mystery, the questions that haunt the souls of the characters in the series begin to unravel: the Abbott family, the Tillerson family (the rival clan that wants to take the Abbott land), and the villagers of Wabang, who will find themselves in the middle of the generational feud between the two families. In the end, no one is who they seem, and the hole reflects the darkness of each person who dares to contemplate it. It has an eight-episode season, and a second season already filming. You can watch it through Prime Video.

The Lazarus Project

You wake up one day and realize that you went back six months into the past, everything you experienced, the good and the bad, is a memory that didn't happen. You might have a mutation that very few people in the world develop, and the main effect: remembering every time a time loop is restarted. This happens to George (Paapa Esssiedu), who is recruited by the Lazarus organization, a top-secret operative tasked with preventing catastrophic events that could wipe out humanity.

A series that takes concepts that may already seem trite, such as the secret organization ("Mission Impossible" and any spy movie), time loops ("Groundhog Day" and all its derivations), and the possibility of changing the future ("The Butterfly Effect"), but puts them together in a narratively masterful and unclichéd way to create a series that can enter the mainstream of British science fiction (of which "Black Mirror" was a part until Netflix acquired it) through the front door.

It has one season of eight episodes, with a second in production. It came out last year in the UK, has just been released in the US, and is likely to air soon in Latin America.

Also read: Film and television characters who represent the LGBTIQ+ community

The Peripheral

What if you could connect yourself to a machine capable of sending your consciousness into the future? This is the question posed by the most recent adaptation of a work by William Gibson, one of history's most influential science fiction authors and the father of Cyberpunk. From the hand of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (creators of "Westworld"), we can explore what it would mean to take virtual reality to its ultimate consequences: flesh and blood avatars controlled remotely as if it were a videogame, with the aggravating factor that these avatars are located 70 years in the future, after an imminent catastrophe that annihilated a large part of humanity.

Chloë Grace Moretz (who we remember as Hit Girl in the "Kick-Ass" movies) plays Flynne, a reluctant heroine embroiled in a conspiracy that spans her present, a future, and will try to avoid the end at all costs. This series has an eight-episode season and has already been renewed for a second season; you can watch it on Prime Video.

Silo

What is known is that the little more than 10,000 inhabitants of the underground bunker are the last survivors of humanity after an undated environmental catastrophe and after a purge of all knowledge before life underground. Whenever someone decides to leave, they are granted that right, on the condition that they cannot take it back, cannot return, and if they want to, they can wipe the sensor that shows those living inside the destroyed world outside.

That's the claustrophobic and mysterious world of Apple TV+'s latest sci-fi thriller. Based on a series of nine books published by author Hugh Howey, "Silo" is presented as a police mystery with conspiracy and post-apocalyptic overtones to be solved by the new sheriff, Juliette (played by a masterful Rebecca Ferguson). Its first season has just ended and has been renewed for a second.