One of the more shocking episodes of “Black Mirror” was the first, which ran on Channel 4 in Britain in 2011, but it was an outlier that focused less on high-tech excess than on human nature and political expedience in the current mass-media age.  The premise is satirical, or seems to be: A terrorist takes a princess hostage and demands that the prime minister of Britain have sex with a pig on live television.  After a variety of blunders by the government, the press and law enforcement, the prime minister feels he has no choice but to comply. 

The episode’s power is in the way it pushes the cynical amusement of the British public — and that of the viewer — into actual distress and sorrow; the story shifts from farcical to chilling and then back again. 

There aren’t many successful anthology series on television at the moment, so one asset of “Black Mirror” is that it offers a digestible narrative form at a time when viewers are overwhelmed with many multiseason series they must keep up with, or fall behind and lose their place. “ Black Mirror” is like a collection of short stories or a case of single-serve splits of Champagne: More is better, but one is sometimes enough. 

The ravaging amorality of pop culture and mass media is a persistent theme — several episodes underscore the Orwellian potential of television and especially shows like “American Idol.” ( Mr. Brooker also made a mini-series, “Dead Set,” in 2008, about a “Big Brother” reality series during a zombie apocalypse.)  The satirical depiction of entertainment and news coverage is more familiar and heavy-handed.  The better episodes pivot on wouldn’t-it-be-great scenarios, picking a seemingly useful scientific advance and then playing out how it can go wrong. 

In one, people can choose to be implanted with a device that gives them the ability to remember events perfectly and replay them in their minds like a home movie. ( Good for finding car keys, not so good for cheating on a spouse.)