A San Junipero Sequel? The Black Mirror Team Isn't Ruling It Out

Updated on 9/24/2017 at 3:20 PM

Even though The Handmaid's Tale and Big Little Lies positively dominated Sunday night's Emmy Awards, there were still a handful of other incredible wins sprinkled throughout the night. One surprising standout was "San Junipero," a light-hearted and optimistic Black Mirror episode about an interracial lesbian relationship that won for outstanding TV movie. The fact that "San Junipero" joined the winners list is pretty remarkable in itself, seeing as queer women are chronically underrepresented in media. What's more, it marked a strong departure from other winners that focused on heavier themes like domestic abuse, looming societal dystopias, murder, and more.

Backstage in the press room, the monumental nature of the win was not lost on creator Charlie Brooker. Not only did he acknowledge that "San Junipero" upended the very premise of Black Mirror in some ways, but he also gave a little more insight into how it got added to the season. Brooker also seized the opportunity to talk about whether or not he'd consider doing a sequel and what it was like to witness such an overwhelming response to the episode.

Brooker wrote this episode before any of the others. "It was out of place deliberately. It was the first episode I wrote for this season because I wanted to blow up my preconceptions for the show."
It was originally a relationship between a man and woman! "Very deliberately, when we were first coming up with the idea, it was originally a heterosexual couple. And then, we kind of discussed it, and I threw that out, made it a same-sex couple. And it made the story much more resonant, it made it more interesting, it made it more fun for me to write, and more of a challenge, so from my perspective that was a good move."
The team felt the magic before the episode even blew up. "The way Owen [Harris] directed it, the performances, everything, we felt we'd captured something very special. And the reaction to it had been quite overwhelming, and the way people had taken it to heart . . . I'm generally a cynic, as you might tell from this series, so the fact that this has happened kind of blows up my world."
A sequel is not entirely out of the question. "We get asked whether we'd ever do a sequel. We tend not to do sequels . . . We closed the story so nicely! Sometimes, that is one thing where we think we could go back."
There was a very bleak deleted scene. "There are certainly scenes I cut out of the script. There's a scene where Kelly went to a kindergarten, and then we realize later that all these children are deceased. But it was such a dark and mournful note to hit. But we could do a whole episode about that."