Did Cunk on Earth Just Sneakily Tease Black Mirror Season 7?
Netflix's strangest comedy franchise has a Black Mirror Easter egg hiding in plain sight.
Before there was Black Mirror, there was Charlie Brooker. The British writer has never settled on one genre: he’s been a cartoonist, a video game critic, a columnist, and a satirist. At one point, he even created a successful zombie series focused on the Big Brother house. But in 2024, he’s made a name for himself with two equally brilliant creations courtesy of Netflix’s streaming platform: dystopian anthology series Black Mirror, and Diane Morgan’s deadpan parody documentarian Philomena Cunk.
While they both have so much in common, these two brainchildren have remained estranged, existing in separate worlds with wildly different tones. While Philomena Cunk has been comparing history to the Belgian techno anthem “Pump Up the Jam,” Black Mirror has been telling twisted stories of technology gone wrong.
But in Philomena’s latest endeavor, the lines between the two halves of the Brookerverse get very blurry — possibly hinting at something to come in the future Black Mirror Season 7.
Cunk on Life, the 70-minute Philomena Cunk special now streaming on Netflix, follows Philomena as she tackles the biggest topic possible: life itself. She interviews philosophers, professors, and physicists as she tries to come to terms with the meaning of life, from the miracle of reproduction to the possibility of life among the stars. She interviews experts on how people derive meaning and purpose from existence: religion, art, science, imagination, and exploration.
The result is wildly funny and classically Cunk, and there are a few moments where it’s very obvious the creator of Black Mirror had a hand in the script. For example, when Philomena sits down with an expert to talk about the Ten Commandments, she says “How did God boil his terms and conditions down to ten sentences when the iPhone end user agreement is 100 pages long?"
In a particularly bleak chapter, Philomena wonders what exists to help distract from life’s miseries. To find out more, she visits the headquarters of streaming service Streamberry to learn about the future of entertainment. The twist is that Streamberry doesn’t exist at all, it’s the fictionalized version of Netflix introduced in Black Mirror Season 6’s “Joan is Awful.”
Philomena Cunk replaces her tactic of interviewing real-life experts with interviewing a fictional streaming executive.
In speaking with (again, fictional) “Content Empress” Jacqui Flink, Philomena learns about the suite of programming Streamberry has released aimed at “viewers who have given up all hope,” including a category called “Standing on a Ledge Right Now,” which is aimed at viewers standing on a ledge right now. In a segment that could be pulled out of a Black Mirror episode; we even watch a snippet of a “Standing on a Ledge Right Now” show aimed at younger viewers.
Cunk on Life is already an incredibly ambitious series, taking the Cunk character to its absolute extremes as she even dwells on existential dread and suicide. But it’s secretly doing something else entirely: possibly setting up Black Mirror Season 7, which is coming later this year. Streamberry was the series’ way of biting the hand that feeds it, and this Easter egg proves it’s not going anywhere in the future.
