Although I love Charlie Brooker and heard nothing but good things about this show, it took me well over a year to get around to watching it. Without knowing more than people saying it was good, I sat to watch this first episode really not even knowing if it were a drama, a satire, a comedy or what it was. In the end I was very glad to come to this with no knowledge and it turned out that as a genre it really defies definition because it does so much at the same time and does it so well.
The episode opens with the Prime Minister woken by news that a young female member of the Royal family has been kidnapped and has released a video demand. The nature of this demand is the whole episode and it is darkly comic when it is revealed. At this point I thought the episode might lose the tension that it had in its early scenes but in reality it doesn't – it maintains it through the duration and all events. The ridiculousness of it all never goes away but the race against time is thrilling and really drew me in. My curiosity and my inability to look away from the screen mirrors the public in the episode and it is cleverly done in the way that it doesn't judge the reality of the news networks, the social media and the public – it simply lets it happen in a realistic way, the viewer is left to make their own unavoidable judgment and it is all the more sobering for being totally realistic.
The acting is great. There are lots of faces you will know from much lighter shows (In The Thick of It particularly) but they never let it become a comedy and they all sell every bit of it. The performances and the dramatic direction are really key in making the concept work and it works very effectively. As an episode it is not only very difficult to describe but also best not described and approached with no prior knowledge but it is well worth checking out for what it does.