TV Showcase: Bandersnatch

“Black Mirror” is a UK show exploring the dark side of tech and the dark side of humanity; and “Bandersnatch” is an interactive episode.

Before I go any further, I must give a content warning for Black Mirror; some episodes are very dark, I’d say as disturbing as anything on mainstream TV. You have been warned.

It’s an “anthology” series, meaning every individual episode stands alone and has a different cast. If “dark side of tech and humanity” interests you but you’d rather skip the disturbing content, I recommend individual episodes S03E01 “Nosedive” and S04E04 “Hang the DJ”, which are great fun. They are about social media ratings and dating apps, respectively.

But! I didn’t come here to write about Black Mirror; I’m here to write about Bandersnatch, and why it’s probably the only good “interactive” TV show ... ever.

Interactive

By interactive I mean that at various points in the show the action pauses, and you choose one of two options to decide what happens next.

The Plot

Bandersnatch is about a lone games programmer in the eighties—that’s how it was done!—working on an interactive game. As the story progresses he becomes obsessed with how choice works in games—and with making his perfect game. You guide him to the ending; the game you manage to complete is reviewed, and gets a score. Easy!

The Problem

I don’t mean the problem in the story; I mean the problem with interactive TV shows.

Reading the various reviews on the IMDB is entertaining—because it’s clear that they don’t understand the problem. At all.

The problem is this: combinatorial explosion.

The way an interactive TV show works is that there is no video generation or compositing or anything else; any video sequence that you see has been recorded exactly as you see it.

How long would such a show be if it had a reasonable budget—say, enough for two hours of video—and you make ten choices that affect everything that follows?

At first there is just one video clip; after the first choice, two; after the second, four; and so on, up until after the tenth: 1024 parallel clips. Sum these up and we find there are 2047 clips needed. Our budget for two hours of video means they can only be 3.5 seconds long each, for a total show length of 38.6 seconds.

Well, that doesn’t work, then.

If there are only five choices made, it’s a bit better: 63 clips, a choice every ~two minutes, for a show length of 21 minutes. That’s just about long enough.

But five choices is not very satisfying.

The Fix

So, it’s necessary to cheat: to make different choices lead to the same video.

The most brutal way to do this is that for each choice, either the choice doesn’t matter—you see one of two clips, but what follows is completely unchanged—or one of the choices leads to a “game over” and you must reset and make the other choice.

I’ve seen a few interactive shows on Netflix that do one or the other of these, and they frankly deserve all the criticism they get—they feel very shallow and pointless.

The Real Fix

The real fix is to be reuse video but keep hidden state.

So, for example, at the start of the show you might choose which color shoes to wear. Later, small slices of video where your shoe color is relevant can be swapped based on that state—the choice mattered, but because it didn’t effect every ensuing second of video, the combinatorial explosion was avoided.

Then, there needs to be some payoff: multiple endings, and a way that the various choices you make accumulate towards deciding which ending you get.

Computer game makers, incidentally, have vastly more flexibility to play with than interactive TV makers, but they still hit the problem of combinatorial explosion—and so they use tricks like this all the time.

With sufficient investment along these lines a TV show can be not terrible and gimmicky but merely lacklustre.

The Genius Fix

And here is where we get to why Bandersnatch is probably the only good interactive TV episode ... pause for dramatic effect ... ever.

The idea they had, and I do call this genius, is to make the plot about games and to play with the idea of games and choice. At the same time, they play with the mechanics of interactive TV—they turn the limitations of the format into a feature.

It works. It may never work again, but just this once, it works.

Recommended

Also, if you grew up exactly when I did and always wanted to be a late eighties games programmer, the theme of the story is something a bit special.

As far as I know it’s only on Netflix.

But Be Warned

As Black Mirror shows go, it’s tame; which is to say, by usual polite society standards it’s fairly rough. I don’t want to include details as they’d be spoilers—if in doubt, the IMDB has precise content warnings. Games programming in the late eighties was a tough gig, apparently.

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