Charlie Brooker, the comedy writer who keeps disguising his jokes as nightmares

Charlie Brooker

Photo: MTV UK / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 3, 1971 Reading, Berkshire, England, UK
Occupation	Screenwriter, producer and television presenter
Known for	Cunk on Life
Awards	5 Emmy · Emmy (shared) · BAFTA · British Press Awards Columnist of the Year

Ask Charlie Brooker where a Black Mirror episode comes from and the answer is rarely a fear. It is usually a joke. He has described his premises as a “worst case scenario compounded”, the same engine that drove the television reviews, spoof listings and rants that made his name, and he has admitted that many of the ideas that end up as forty-minute descents into dread started by making him laugh. The pig in the first episode, the dating app that cycles through partners, the woman whose life is turned into a streaming series without her consent: each one is a gag that kept going after the punchline should have arrived.

That is the quiet contradiction at the centre of his career. The writer whose name became shorthand for technological doom, so that any unsettling gadget headline now gets called “very Black Mirror“, spent his first two decades in comedy and has never really left it. His next series for Netflix is, by its own billing, “an absurd comedy disguised as an incredibly serious crime thriller”. It is called Blackmere. The name is close enough to his most famous work that the resemblance can only be a joke, and that seems to be the point.

Brooker is a screenwriter, producer, presenter and former columnist who has worked in nearly every corner of British media without settling comfortably in any of them. He reviewed video games, drew cartoons, invented a fake television listings website, wrote a decade of television criticism for The Guardian, co-wrote a sitcom with Chris Morris, hosted a run of review shows on BBC Four and BBC Two, created a zombie drama set inside Big Brother, and then built an anthology series that moved from Channel 4 to Netflix and became one of the streamer’s longest-running shows. He also invented Philomena Cunk, the most cheerfully ignorant documentary presenter in television.

A Quaker childhood and a dissertation nobody would accept

He was born Charlton Brooker in Reading, Berkshire, on 3 March 1971. The name has a sitcom origin. His parents were fans of Bewitched and named him after a character from a single episode of the show; his sister Samantha got the name of its lead. He grew up in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, a village in south Oxfordshire, in what he has called a “relaxed” Quaker household, and he still describes himself as a Quaker because of that upbringing, even though he is an atheist. He contributed to The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas without seeing any contradiction in the two labels.

The comic instinct showed up early. As a teenager he was writing and drawing for Oink!, the anarchic British children’s comic of the late 1980s, which gives him the unusual distinction of having been published in a magazine aimed at his own age group. He went to Wallingford School and then to the Polytechnic of Central London, which became the University of Westminster during his final year, to study media studies. He did not graduate. By his own account, the problem was his dissertation, which was about video games, a subject his tutors did not consider acceptable for serious study. Three decades later, games are one of the most studied media on university courses, and Brooker would go on to front a Channel 4 history of them.

His comic touchstones are easy to see in the work: Monty Python, The Young Ones, Blackadder, Vic Reeves and, above all, Chris Morris, the satirist whose deadpan parodies of news broadcasting shaped a generation of British comedy writers. Brooker would end up writing with Morris before he was thirty-five.

From a shop counter to PC Zone

Before journalism, there was retail. Brooker worked in the video game department of Music and Video Exchange, a second-hand shop in Notting Hill Gate in west London. When some of the staff left to set up their own business, he went with them. That business was CeX, the second-hand electronics chain that now has branches across the United Kingdom and abroad. Brooker worked in its first shop, drew its cartoon advertisements and designed its logo, a fact that surprises people who have handed over an old console at a CeX counter without knowing who drew the sign above it.

Those cartoons were his way into print. Some of them appeared in PC Zone, a British computer games magazine, and the editors invited him to write. Through the mid-to-late 1990s he reviewed games, including System Shock and Fallout, and developed a voice that was half critic, half heckler. He drew a comic strip called “Cybertwats” and ran a letters column, “Sick Notes”, in which he insulted the readers who wrote in and offered a £50 prize for the best letter.

One one-page cartoon caused real trouble. Presented as an advert for “Helmut Werstler’s Cruelty Zoo”, a theme park designed by a fictional psychologist where children could work out their violent impulses on animals rather than on other people, it came with doctored photographs of children attacking monkeys, badgers and an orangutan. The joke was originally aimed at the animal body count in the Tomb Raider games and was first titled “Lara Croft’s Cruelty Zoo” before being changed for legal reasons. Many British newsagents pulled the magazine from their shelves. It was an early sign of a pattern that would repeat: Brooker’s sense of where a joke stops was not always the same as everyone else’s. In October 2008, when PC Zone reached its 200th issue, he was invited back with other former writers and reviewed Euro Truck Simulator.

TVGoHome and the first television jobs

From 1999 to 2003 Brooker ran TVGoHome, a website that published fake television listings in the style of the Radio Times. The programmes it described did not exist and could not have been broadcast; the listings mixed savage satire of the industry with surreal invention, and they spread through the technology newsletter Need To Know at a time when a funny website could still feel like a private discovery. Fourth Estate published a book version in 2001, and the digital channel E4 adapted it into a sketch show the same year. One of its fictional programmes followed a self-regarding media trendy called Nathan Barley. He would get a series of his own a few years later.

Television work arrived alongside the website. Brooker made his presenting debut with Gia Milinovich on The Kit, a gadget review show on BBC Knowledge, and appeared as a hooded expert called “the Pundit” on the short-lived Sky games show Games Republic. In 2000 he became one of the writers on Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show. In 2001 he was among the writers on “Paedogeddon”, the Brass Eye special about media hysteria over child abuse, which provoked a storm of complaints when it aired. In 2003 he wrote and narrated “How to Watch Television” for Channel 4’s The Art Show, a partly animated film in the style of a public information broadcast.

Nathan Barley, co-written with Chris Morris and directed by Morris, reached Channel 4 on 11 February 2005. Nicholas Burns played the title character, a webmaster, guerrilla filmmaker and self-described “self-facilitating media node”, with Julian Barratt as the weary journalist Dan Ashcroft and a supporting cast that included Richard Ayoade and Ben Whishaw. It ran for one six-episode series and was received coolly at the time. It has aged into something closer to prophecy: its gallery of east London media hangers-on, desperate to be seen with the right gadget and the right haircut, now reads like a field guide to influencer culture years before the word was in common use. Brooker also wrote for Spoons, a Channel 4 sketch show made by Zeppotron, the production company where he would later become a creative director.

Ten years of Screen Burn

The work that made Brooker’s name with a wider public was a newspaper column. In 2000 he started writing “Screen Burn”, a weekly television review column for The Guide, the Saturday entertainment supplement of The Guardian. He kept it until October 2010. The column treated television as a subject worth hating properly: reality shows, rolling news, celebrity formats and the people who presented them were described with a level of invective that was rare in a national paper, and often very funny. From late 2005 he also wrote “Supposing”, a free-associating column in the paper’s G2 section, which expanded into a full page on Mondays the following year.

The column brought him the 2009 Columnist of the Year award at the British Press Awards, and a series of collections published by Faber: Screen Burn in 2004, Dawn of the Dumb in 2007, The Hell of It All in 2009 and I Can Make You Hate in 2012. Before those came two books built from his own inventions, the print edition of TV Go Home in 2001 and Unnovations, a spoof gadget catalogue, in 2002.

It also produced the worst week of his early career. On 24 October 2004, days before the United States presidential election, a “Screen Burn” column about George W. Bush ended with a line that appeared to wish for the president’s assassination. The paper withdrew the piece from its website and published an apology from Brooker. He later explained that he had recycled a very old joke, a variant of graffiti he had first seen in the 1980s, and that within minutes “half the internet” was convinced the newspaper was officially calling for a killing. His inbox, he wrote, overflowed with death threats.

When he gave up “Screen Burn” in 2010, the reason he gave was revealing. His final column said that it had become increasingly hard to reconcile his role as a scabrous critic with his work as a television producer, and to write objectively about people he now worked and socialised with. The man who had built a career attacking television had become part of it. Grace Dent, a regular contributor, took over the column. Brooker kept writing occasional comment pieces for the paper, the last of them in May 2015.

The Wipe years

The television version of the column began in 2006. Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe launched on BBC Four with a short pilot series in April that year and returned for further runs through 2008, with Christmas editions and end-of-year reviews. The format was simple and new: Brooker, sitting in a dim room in front of a television, explaining what was wrong with the programmes on it, with clips, cutaways and long, precise rants. Episodes were built around themes such as American television, news, advertising and children’s programming. For the last one he joined the cast of the ITV children’s show Toonattik for a week as “Angry News Guy”. Another edition interviewed several of Britain’s best-known screenwriters about their craft. The fifth series, in late 2008, was the first to be repeated in prime time on BBC Two. The theme music was “A.M. 180” by the American band Grandaddy, and Brooker usually signed off with the same line: “Thank you for watching. Now go away.”

Newswipe with Charlie Brooker applied the method to news coverage from 25 March 2009. It examined how broadcasters and newspapers manufactured fear and filled airtime, and it won the Royal Television Society’s award for best entertainment programme in 2010. A second series began in January 2010. On 29 September 2009 BBC Four broadcast Gameswipe, a one-off special about video games, the subject his tutors had refused to accept. From 2010 the format became an annual tradition with end-of-year Wipe specials, the last of which aired on 29 December 2016. That final edition, Charlie Brooker’s 2016 Wipe, won the BAFTA for best comedy and comedy entertainment programme in 2017.

Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe arrived on BBC Two on 31 January 2013, combining the TV and news formats with a regular cast and guest contributors, and ran for three series to 2015, plus a 60-minute Election Wipe in May 2015. It also introduced the character who would outlast the format: Philomena Cunk, played by the comedian Diane Morgan, an earnest interviewer who asked academics questions so stupid they circled back to profundity in a recurring segment called “Moments of Wonder”. The franchise came back once more, on 14 May 2020, for Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe, a 45-minute BBC Two special about life under lockdown made with the crew of a postponed Cunk series. Brooker turned the idea down at first and agreed only when it became clear that the format, which relied on archive footage and few people on screen together, could be made under pandemic rules.

Around the Wipes he became a regular on British panel television. He appeared on Have I Got News for You, 8 Out of 10 Cats, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Would I Lie to You? and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year. He hosted the Channel 4 panel show You Have Been Watching from 2009, presented How TV Ruined Your Life on BBC Two in early 2011 and was one of four hosts, with David Mitchell, Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne, of Channel 4’s alternative election night in May 2010. He found live television so frightening that he later joked about losing control of his bladder during the broadcast; the four hosts nevertheless returned in January 2011 with the weekly topical show 10 O’Clock Live. On BBC Radio 4 he presented So Wrong It’s Right, a comedy panel show celebrating failure, across three series between 2010 and 2012.

Games stayed close to the centre of all of it. In November 2013 Channel 4 broadcast How Videogames Changed the World, a long special in which Brooker counted down 25 significant games, from Pong to Grand Theft Auto, with contributions from Jonathan Ross, Dara Ó Briain and designers including Will Wright and John Romero. For a man who had left university without a degree because of a dissertation on the subject, it read like a late, very public resubmission.

Dead Set and the turn to drama

His first drama was a horror series, and it was set inside the programme he had spent years mocking. Dead Set, five episodes made by Zeppotron for E4, aired in October 2008 to coincide with Halloween. A zombie outbreak overruns Britain on the night of a Big Brother eviction, and the housemates, cut off from the outside world, are the last to find out. Jaime Winstone played a runner on the show, and the real Big Brother presenter Davina McCall appeared as herself, which gave the premise a nasty extra layer of plausibility. Brooker, a long-standing horror fan, insisted it “could not be described as a comedy” and said he hoped it would “surprise, entertain and appal people in equal measure”.

It did. Dead Set was nominated for the BAFTA for best drama serial and was repeated on Channel 4 the following January, timed to Celebrity Big Brother. More importantly, it showed that Brooker’s ideas could hold an audience without a narrator explaining the joke. The satire was in the situation: a nation’s attention fixed so completely on a reality show that the end of the world becomes background noise.

Black Mirror on Channel 4

The idea for an anthology came while he was making Newswipe and thinking about The Twilight Zone. Brooker noticed that Rod Serling had smuggled arguments about contemporary issues past the censors of his time by placing them in fictional settings, and he saw that the same trick could work on technology. He developed the series with Annabel Jones, the producer he had worked with since Screenwipe, and their first pitch to Channel 4’s comedy department was for eight half-hour episodes by different writers. It became three hour-long films. The title, partly inspired by an Arcade Fire song, named something everyone owned. “The ‘black mirror’ of the title is the one you’ll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand,” he wrote in The Guardian: “the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.”

The first episode, broadcast on 4 December 2011, was “The National Anthem”, in which a British prime minister, played by Rory Kinnear, is told that a kidnapped princess will be killed unless he has sex with a pig on live television. It drew 145 complaints to the regulator Ofcom and announced the series as something other than respectable science fiction. “Fifteen Million Merits”, co-written with Brooker’s wife, Konnie Huq, starred Daniel Kaluuya as a man in a world where people pedal exercise bikes to earn currency and the only way out is a talent show. “The Entire History of You”, written by Jesse Armstrong, imagined memory implants that let a jealous husband replay every moment of his marriage. In 2012 the series won the International Emmy for best TV movie or miniseries.

A second series followed in February 2013, with Hayley Atwell grieving through an artificial copy of her dead partner in “Be Right Back” and an animated bear standing for Parliament in “The Waldo Moment”. Brooker said he had deliberately written female leads for the opening episodes after realising every protagonist of the first series was a man. Then came the special “White Christmas”, broadcast on 16 December 2014, with Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall, and a long, frustrating silence. The show was still being paid for out of the comedy budget, and it was expensive: an anthology has no recurring sets or cast to spread the cost across. New executives asked for detailed synopses before committing, and some of Brooker’s ideas came back with the verdict that they “weren’t very Black Mirror“.

A Touch of Cloth

While Black Mirror waited, Brooker went back to straight comedy. A Touch of Cloth, which he wrote with Daniel Maier for Sky1, began on 26 August 2012. It was a spoof of the British police procedural, the genre of grim detectives, rain and personal tragedy, starring John Hannah as Detective Inspector Jack Cloth and Suranne Jones as his colleague Anne Oldman, both actors chosen partly because they had starred in genuine crime dramas. The title combined a nod to A Touch of Frost with a crude British expression. Two more series followed in 2013 and 2014, the last with Karen Gillan joining the cast. The show was made at the same time as the first series of Black Mirror, which tells you something about how Brooker works: the same writer was building one of television’s bleakest dramas and a joke-a-second parody in the same months.

That parody turned out to have a long afterlife. Much of its writing team, including Maier, Ben Caudell, Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, is behind Blackmere, the police spoof Netflix plans to release in 2027.

The move to Netflix

The Channel 4 years ended in a bidding war. Netflix had begun streaming the first two series in the United States in December 2014, which brought the show a large new audience, and American networks including AMC, Syfy and HBO showed interest. Brooker and Jones have said they would have liked Channel 4 to stay as an equal partner, but the channel offered only a short renewal on terms they distrusted. In September 2015 Netflix commissioned twelve episodes. In March 2016 it outbid Channel 4 for the UK rights as well, reportedly with a bid of around 40 million dollars. It was the first time a streaming service had taken a series away from a broadcaster that wanted to keep it, and the episode became a reference point in arguments about what streaming would do to British television.

The first Netflix episodes, released worldwide on 21 October 2016, changed the show’s range. Brooker wrote “San Junipero” first, as what he called a “deliberate raspberry-blow” at fans who feared the move would Americanise the series: a love story between two women, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis, in a seaside town that turns out to be a digital afterlife. It has a happy ending. “Nosedive”, with Bryce Dallas Howard as a woman whose life is ruled by a five-star social rating, came from a story by Brooker scripted by Michael Schur and Rashida Jones. The fourth series, released on 29 December 2017, opened with “USS Callister”, a space-opera pastiche co-written with William Bridges in which a bullied programmer, played by Jesse Plemons, traps digital copies of his colleagues inside a Star Trek-style game. “Hang the DJ”, in the same batch, starred Georgina Campbell and Joe Cole as a couple matched by an algorithm.

The prizes followed. “San Junipero” won the Primetime Emmy for outstanding television movie in 2017 and Brooker the Emmy for outstanding writing for a limited series, movie or dramatic special. “USS Callister” repeated both wins in 2018, with the writing award shared with Bridges. In 2019 Black Mirror: Bandersnatch made it three consecutive wins in the television movie category. Released on 28 December 2018, Bandersnatch was an interactive film set in 1984, in which the viewer chose what a young games programmer, played by Fionn Whitehead, would do next, with five main endings. The format was technically demanding and delayed the fifth series; in May 2025 Netflix removed the film from its service because supporting interactive titles was holding back other technical work. The Emmy voters’ enthusiasm also changed the rules, as critics argued that episodes of a series should not be competing as television films.

Where the critics push back

Brooker has never had an easy relationship with consensus, and the consensus about Black Mirror has not always been kind. The three-episode fifth series, released on 5 June 2019, was received more coolly than its predecessors; one BBC critic counted “one good episode to two middling-to-bad ones”. The recurring complaints are familiar to anyone who follows the show: that its morality can feel formulaic, that too many episodes turn on the same device of a human mind copied into software, and that its twists became predictable once audiences learned to expect one. Brooker came close to agreeing. When he began the sixth series he said he wanted to stop the programme from being “the show about consciousness being uploaded into a little disc”, and set out to deliberately upend his own core assumptions about what it was.

The bigger contradiction is commercial. A show built on suspicion of technology companies is made for one of the largest of them, and Brooker has made that awkwardness part of the work. The 2023 episode “Joan Is Awful” follows a woman, played by Annie Murphy, who discovers that a streaming service called Streamberry, a near-exact parody of Netflix’s interface and sound, has turned her life into a drama starring Salma Hayek, using rights she signed away by accepting the terms and conditions. Netflix released it anyway. Brooker later suggested viewers could treat every episode as a Streamberry production. Whether that is a satirist biting the hand that feeds him or a platform absorbing its critic is a question the episode leaves for the viewer.

Not every project landed. Death to 2020, a Netflix mockumentary released on 27 December 2020 with Hugh Grant, Samuel L. Jackson and Lisa Kudrow among its cast, translated the end-of-year Wipe for a global audience and was mostly panned; critics found the jokes obvious, though some performances were praised. A sequel, Death to 2021, went ahead with Brooker in a reduced role. The format that had worked for a BBC audience who knew his voice did not survive being spread across a cast of American characters.

Broke and Bones, Cunk and the sixth series

The company behind the show changed twice in a few years. The first series was produced by Zeppotron for the Dutch group Endemol; Brooker and Jones later ran House of Tomorrow, a division of Endemol Shine. They left it around the start of 2020, with the rights to Black Mirror staying with Endemol, and founded Broke and Bones. In July 2020 Netflix agreed an unusual investment deal with the new company, its first of that kind in the UK, which gave the streamer exclusivity over its output and the option to buy it outright over five years. Under that arrangement Broke and Bones made Death to 2020, Jack Thorne’s drama Toxic Town, on which Brooker was an executive producer, and the Cunk specials. In 2022 Brooker was also credited as creator of Cat Burglar, an animated interactive short for Netflix.

Philomena Cunk had already moved from Weekly Wipe into her own mock documentaries, beginning with Cunk on Shakespeare in 2016 and Cunk on Britain in 2018. Cunk on Earth, a five-part history of human civilisation, premiered on BBC Two in September 2022 and then on Netflix, and turned a cult BBC character into an international one. Its method was the same as the Wipe shows turned inside out: instead of Brooker explaining television to the audience, Morgan’s Cunk failed to understand history in front of real experts, who often struggled to keep a straight face. Cunk on Life, an hour-long special about the meaning of existence written by Brooker with Morgan, aired on the BBC in December 2024 and reached Netflix on 2 January 2025; the special earned an Emmy nomination for its writing.

The sixth series of Black Mirror arrived on 15 June 2023 with five episodes and a deliberate change of direction. “Demon 79”, co-written with Bisha K. Ali, was a horror story set in 1979 with no technology at its centre. “Mazey Day” involved a werewolf. “Beyond the Sea”, with Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett, was set in an alternative 1969. Netflix reported 60 million hours viewed in the week of release, but reviews were mixed. The same month, Brooker told Empire that he had asked ChatGPT to write a Black Mirror episode. The result, he said, read plausibly at first glance and then, on second glance, was “shit”, because all it had done was look up the synopses of existing episodes and mush them together. It is hard to think of a more on-brand anecdote.

Into Infinity and the end of a deal

The seventh series, released on 10 April 2025, was the first to include a direct sequel. “USS Callister: Into Infinity”, written by Brooker with Bisha K. Ali, William Bridges and Bekka Bowling, returned Cristin Milioti’s character and the crew of digital copies to a game universe now full of millions of hostile players. “Common People”, with Rashida Jones and Chris O’Dowd, followed a couple whose subscription to a brain implant is quietly downgraded unless they pay more, an idea about subscription economics that needed no exaggeration at all. Critics found the series warmer and more consistent than the previous two, and it collected ten Emmy nominations in 2025, more than any earlier batch, including a writing nomination for Brooker and Ali for “Common People”.

A few months later the five-year arrangement with Netflix ran its course. Company records show that Brooker and Jones resigned as directors of Broke and Bones on 3 July 2025, leaving the company in Netflix’s hands and freeing them to work with other outlets. The rights to Black Mirror stayed with Netflix, and both sides said they wanted more episodes. In January 2026 Netflix renewed the series for an eighth run. Brooker said Black Mirror would return “more Black Mirror than ever”, just in time for reality to catch up with it, and that the part of his brain responsible for it had already been “activated” and was “whirring away”. Production began in the summer of 2026, and no release date has been announced.

Konnie Huq and the private Brooker

Brooker met the television presenter Konnie Huq, the longest-serving female presenter of the BBC children’s programme Blue Peter, while filming an episode of Screenwipe in 2008. They became engaged after nine months and married on 26 July 2010 at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. They have two sons. Huq co-wrote “Fifteen Million Merits” with him and has since published children’s books, starting with Cookie and the Most Annoying Boy in the World in 2019. Brooker is otherwise guarded about family life, and his public persona, gloomy and self-deprecating, is something he plays with rather than a full account of himself. In January 2018 he was the guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.

Away from television, he remains in demand as a speaker on what technology does to people. In 2026 he was booked as a keynote speaker at the British Legal Technology Forum, an audience of lawyers and technologists invited to hear the man who keeps imagining how their tools could go wrong.

Blackmere, Cunk on Cinema and what comes next

The project that brings the two halves of his career together is Blackmere. Netflix announced the series, then untitled, on 9 September 2025, and it was filmed in London that September and in Manchester in October. On 24 September 2026, at a Netflix UK event in London, the streamer revealed its title and the first images. Paddy Considine plays Detective John Blackmere, with Georgina Campbell, Lena Headey and Rory Kinnear in the cast; Kinnear was the prime minister in the very first Black Mirror episode and Campbell the lead of “Hang the DJ”. Al Campbell directs, and the writing team reunites much of the A Touch of Cloth group with Emer Kenny. The official synopsis reads like a parody of every prestige crime drama: a tormented detective leaves the rain-soaked northern city of Bleakford for London to avenge his partner’s death and catch a ritualistic serial killer “before they run out of victims”. It ends with a warning: “Contains blood and frowning.” One of the first-look stills shows Considine behind police tape printed with an obscenity. When the show was first announced, Brooker supplied a press-release quote mocking press-release quotes, saying he had dreamt of providing one “ever since I was a young foetus”. The series is due in early 2027.

Philomena Cunk is coming back too. On 14 September 2026 the BBC and Netflix announced Cunk on Cinema, a three-part series written by Brooker with Diane Morgan and a team of regular collaborators, again directed by Al Campbell. It follows Cunk through the history of film, from the invention of the camera to computer-generated effects and artificial intelligence, with interviews including Michael Bay, Benedict Cumberbatch and the critic Mark Kermode. It will air on BBC Two and iPlayer in the UK and on Netflix elsewhere; no date has been set.

Between those two comedies sits the eighth series of Black Mirror, the show that made him famous by taking jokes seriously. For most of his career, Brooker’s work has been read as a warning. The more useful reading may be the one he keeps offering himself: that the nightmares and the punchlines come from the same place, and that the distance between them is often a single, slightly too plausible step. With a detective spoof, a mock documentary about film and a new batch of dystopias all in production at once, he is about to test that idea on three fronts in the same year.