Did ‘Black Mirror’ Creator Charlie Brooker Know About That ‘Community’ Episode When He Made “Nosedive”?

Black Mirror is back in our lives, standing as the horrifically innovative shining light in our streaming tunnel. Season Three has been everything we wanted it to be and more — more nuanced, more disturbing, more human, and, at least in one episode’s case, surprisingly more romantic. However, one episode has caused a bit of eyebrow raising among dedicated television nerds. The premise of Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” is suspiciously similar to an episode of Dan Harmon’s Community.

The Greendale saga in question is the Season Five episode “App Development and Condiments.” Greendale becomes the test school for a new social media app, MeowMeowBeanz, which allows users to rate one another on a one to five scale. It’s basically Uber and Yelp for people, and as both Community and Black Mirror explore, it’s a horrible idea. Within a few days, Greendale transforms from a relatively normal college (I’m being exceedingly generous with the word normal) into a dystopian society ruled by the almighty and beloved Fives. You can remember the ranking system through this helpful jingle from Dean Pelton (Jim Rash):

The funniest part of the episode is how quickly this new app takes over every aspect of Greendale. A far darker but brightly lit version of this technology exists in the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive.” Starring the flawless acting force that is Bryce Dallas Howard, Charlie Brooker, Rashida Jones, and Mike Schur’s take on this technology follows Lacie, a Four who wants to boost her rank so she can move into a nicer apartment. When she becomes the maid of honor for her high-ranking former best friend (Alice Eve), Lacie sees that as an opportunity to achieve her goals, and things quickly descend into fake-smile-tinged disaster from there. On a recent conference interview with Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, the creator and producer of the series respectively, Decider asked whether Brooker knew about the existence of the Community episode prior to working on “Nosedive.”

“I didn’t know about the episode, and subsequently people have said that to me,” Brooker said. He also elaborated on what the darker first script of the episode looked like. “Originally, the first idea for ‘Nosedive’ was quite different. It was — and this was going back five years ago — where it was more of a Brewster’s Millions type of idea, and at that point it wasn’t so much about the rankings. Well, it was an overall ranking which I think I was seeing a numerical from 100 to 0 kind of thing, and the idea was that it was a very high status person being forced by a blackmailer to reduce their status to 0 against the clock. Then the idea was that they get into a Charlie Sheen situation where, as they did more and more outrageous things, they actually became more popular. So that was the kernel for it.”

“So I don’t know that Community — I think it’s on Netflix in the UK, but I don’t know that it’s ever been on broadcast television, so I wasn’t aware of it,” he said. “I know lots of people have pointed it out, and you just kind of have to go, ‘Oh well.’”

“Nosedive” has also been compared to its disturbing real-life doppelgänger, the social media app Peeple. The app, which allows users to rate each other, was released last year and was thankfully met with immediate backlash. Though Dan Harmon’s take on social media didn’t influence “Nosedive,” the real product did. “I remember we were in … pre-production. Our ball was already rolling when I saw news stories about [Peeple], and I did get worried by that because I thought, initially, I thought it was going to be viral marketing for a comedy show,” Brooker said.

“I was kind of worried that maybe somebody was doing something that was in a very similar ballpark to what we were working on, but it turned out that that really was happening, and then there was a backlash,” the creator and writer said. “I was quite worried about the Peeple app. At one point, I was thinking, ‘Oh shit, does this mean we can or can’t do that?’ I tried to avoid thinking about other stories or things that might have used similar concepts or had similar sort of world views.”

Thankfully for us, Brooker and his team decided to move on with the episode, giving us a brilliantly constructed look into how painfully inauthentic our social media presences have become. “You can’t think about that too much,” Brooker said about Peeple and concepts that are similar to Black Mirror episodes. “Obviously no one just accidentally completely replicates something, but you can’t think about too much. I’ve seen that happen the other way, when I’ve written something and then you see something that’s similar to it come along. That’s kind of the nature of the world. I guess you can’t let that hamstring you.”

Even though they are similar, Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” and Community’s “App Development and Condiments” watch as two sides of the same coin. Whereas the main takeaway from Community is how quickly our obsessive need to judge others can take over our lives, “Nosedive” presents a deeply discomforting look into the danger and inhumanity of forced kindness. Both are great episodes and are definitely worth watching if you ever feel like social media has a noose around your neck. But no. Black Mirror did not steal anything from Community. The world is just corrupt, judgmental, and technology obsessed enough for two different creators to arrive at the same deeply unsettling premise. Yay?

[Edit: A previous version of this article misquoted Brooker as using the term “black male” instead of “blackmailer.” It has since been corrected.]

[Watch the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” on Netflix]

[Watch the Community episode “App Development and Condiments” on Hulu]