Nosedive (Black Mirror)

"Nosedive"
Black Mirror episode
Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard) gives a rating using her phone. The episode's pastel colours distinguish it from most Black Mirror episodes.
Episode no.	Series 3 Episode 1
Directed by	Joe Wright
Story by	Charlie Brooker
Teleplay by	Michael Schur Rashida Jones
Cinematography by	Seamus McGarvey
Original release date	21 October 2016 (2016-10-21)
Running time	63 minutes
Guest appearances
Bryce Dallas Howard as Lacie Pound Alice Eve as Naomi Blestow Cherry Jones as Susan James Norton as Ryan Pound Alan Ritchson as Paul Daisy Haggard as Bets Susannah Fielding as Carol Michaela Coel as Airline Stewardess Demetri Goritsas as Hansen Kadiff Kirwan as Chester Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù as Man in Jail Andrew Roux as Electro Station Attendant
Episode chronology
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List of episodes

"Nosedive" is the first episode in the third series of the British science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. Michael Schur and Rashida Jones wrote the teleplay for the episode, based on a story by series creator and co-showrunner Charlie Brooker, while Joe Wright acted as director. It premiered on Netflix on 21 October 2016, alongside the rest of the third series. The episode is set in a world where people can rate each other from one to five stars, using their smartphones, for every interaction they have, which can impact their socioeconomic status. Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a young woman overly obsessed with her ratings; she finds an opportunity to elevate her ratings greatly and move into a more luxurious residence after being chosen by her popular childhood friend (Alice Eve) as the maid of honour for her wedding.

Under Netflix, the episode was given a much larger budget than the previous episodes of the programme, when it had been under Channel 4. Brooker wrote an outline for the episode, then Schur wrote the first half of the episode and Jones wrote the latter. Production was undertaken in a manner similar to a short film; "Nosedive" was filmed in South Africa, with Seamus McGarvey as director of photography and Joel Collins and James Foster as the production designers. The tone of the episode is less bleak and more comedic than other Black Mirror episodes, with the ending significantly more positive than in episodes of the programme's prior two series.

The episode received mainly positive reviews and is middling in critics' lists of Black Mirror episodes, qualitatively. The pastel visual aesthetics were widely praised, along with Max Richter's soundtrack and Howard's performance. A criticism from several reviewers was the episode's predictability and ending, though the script and comedic undertones were praised by some. Many critics noted the similarity of the episode to real-world app Peeple and China's Social Credit System, along with fictional works about social media with themes of gender and obsession with image. The episode won a Royal Television Society Craft & Design Award. It was nominated for several awards, including a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Howard and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for McGarvey. A board game Nosedive, based on the episode, was released in 2018.