I'm Bob Garfield.

Happy New Year, everybody.

Gosh, can it be season two already?

Season one, of course, ended with the president of the United States,

lying about his record, lying about the new tax law,

and lying about the Russia investigation.

And, come on, you thought, no way can the next season be as nutty and terrifying as this.

Wrong.

When the genre is slow-motion apocalyptic fantasy, you've got to suspend your disbelief.

So Donald Trump opened to season two by immediately antagonizing the fragile nuclear state of Pakistan,

accusing his own Justice Department of conspiring against him,

and threatening the nuclear annihilation of North Korea via Twitter.

It was so simultaneously unreal and all too real that you'd be forgiven for thinking you were just

watching the new season of Black Mirror, the British TV series that specializes in technological

dystopia as believable as it is otherworldly. In fact, this week does come with the new season

of Black Mirror, the fourth.

Back in 2015, Brooke spoke with the show's creator, Charlie Brooker, about that very tiny gap between the unimaginable and the imaginable.

The initial idea behind it was to come up with our version of a kind of eerie anthology show in the

vein of the Twilight Zone, although they may sometimes look slightly campy from our perspective now,

you know, 60 years on, what they were talking about at the time was extremely contemporary concerns

about the Cold War, McCarthyism, psychology, and all these things people

were interested in. And so I was thinking what's in the ether now. And I guess probably while

...