ANTONIA HITCHENS
is a writer based in
Los Angeles. This is her
first story for wired.0
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E A R L I E R T H I S Y E A R , Carla Engelbrecht flew to
Phoenix, sat on the couch in a stranger’s living room,
and observed the stranger watching—or possibly play-
ing or experiencing—a movie-length installment of
Black Mirror. In the film, called Bandersnatch, a young
English programmer named Stefan tries to adapt a
nonlinear fantasy novel into a nonlinear videogame,
and the result is itself a nonlinear story in which
the viewer exerts influence over the plot. Using a
remote or videogame controller, the viewer makes
choices about what Stefan should eat for breakfast
and whether he should kill his father. As the director
of product innovation at Netflix and an architect of
this unusual form of entertainment, Engelbrecht was
intent on studying the emotional responses of Netflix
subscribers to Bandersnatch’s choose-your-own-
adventure approach.
The woman sitting beside Engelbrecht reported
that, while watching the movie, she had “just wanted
Stefan to get a good job, finish the game, and meet a
nice girl,” Engelbrecht tells me later. “She’d completely
forgotten that this was Black Mirror”—a frequently
dark and sometimes meta science-fiction show about
the human relationship to technology—“but she had
this deep empathy, and she was so invested in his suc-
cess.” Engelbrecht was pleased by the observation, but
not every viewer felt similarly engaged; reviews of
Bandersnatch were as varied as the pathways through
it. Though critics praised its intrepid originality, they
often found the process stressful or irritating. Many of
the choices “read as eye-roll-worthy contrivances only
a small child would get excited about,” remarked one
New York Times review.
If Bandersnatch was not an unmitigated success, it
was, from Netflix’s point of view, a peek into a possible
future. In a 2016 interview, Reed Hastings, the com-
pany’s cofounder and CEO, predicted that “new forms
of entertainment will supplant movies and TV shows.”
Two years later, in an earnings report, Netflix stated
that it competes more with Fortnite, the massively
popular online videogame, than it does with HBO.
This past July, Netflix announced it had lost 126,000
US subscribers, its first quarterly drop in eight years.
Engelbrecht’s work could—if viewers play along—chart
a course for how Netflix stays relevant and designs ever
more bingeable stories. As Andy Weil, Netflix’s direc-
tor of original series, puts it: “Carla’s the authority on
what’s possible.”
Nonlinear TV is far less passive than the comforting,
familiar rhythm of a 22-minute multicam sitcom, the
type of show CBS might refer to as “dishes and laundry”
(activities one can do while lightly following along), or
a procedural whose formula one can breezily jot down
on a whiteboard in a writers’ room. Engelbrecht wants
viewers to become more involved participants in the
stories they consume. In her mind, adding choice to
the narrative can be a way for television to engage us
more deeply. “You’re taking in information and decid-
ing, but the decisions get harder and harder,” she says.
“So you start to feel the emotional impact of making
these decisions.” But even Engelbrecht, who developed
and implemented Bandersnatch’s interactive frame-
work, admits to an initial reluctance. “My fear,” she
says, “has always been that the act of making a choice
would break the magic of storytelling in live-action
video—that the two couldn’t coexist.”ENGELBRECHT, WHO IS 42, grew up outside
Syracuse, New York. As a kid, she coded fortune-telling
programs on her parents’ Texas Instruments computer
and enjoyed games like Oregon Trail and Zork, which