The 2018 interactive Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch will leave Netflix on the 12th May. It’s currently unclear whether it’ll ever appear on the service again.
Roughly seven years after it first appeared on the service, the interactive Black Mirror episode, Bandersnatch, is days away from being removed from Netflix. As noted by What’s On Netflix, the scheduled departure date is set for the 12th May 2025. The similarly interactive Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode Kimmy Vs The Reverend, from 2020, will also leave Netflix on the same day.
Co-written by Charlie Brooker and set in the 1980s, Bandersnatch is a paranoid horror yarn about a young programmer unravelling as he tries to adapt an adventure book into an 8-bit videogame. Filled with nostalgic nods to the era’s games industry, it’s among the most ambitious pieces Netflix greenlit in its five-year dabbling with interactive media.
Although you can get to the end credits in around 40 minutes, the number of alternate endings and other story branches means the whole experience takes in some five hours of footage – far more than casual viewers will ever see.
Read more: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch | Revisiting its ambitious interactive episode
This is probably why Netflix never greenlit another concept quite as expansive afterwards; its later interactive offerings were quiz-based affairs like Cat Burglar (also written by Brooker). In 2023, the streaming giant announced that it was abandoning interactive shows entirely, its focus moving to mobile gaming and (by the sounds of things) AI.
Bandersnatch may be seven years old now, but its timing is slightly unfortunate given its connections to Black Mirror’s latest series, which began streaming less than a month ago. Series seven episode, Plaything, has close narrative connections to Bandersnatch, and reintroduces Will Poulter’s maverick programmer, Colin Reitman, from that earlier show. You won’t need to have seen Bandersnatch to appreciate Plaything, but curious viewers may want to go back and experience the 2018 instalment to see what they’d missed. If that’s the case, they now have less than a week to do so.
Read more: Black Mirror series 7 | The retro Britsoft videogame stylings of Plaything
Bandersnatch's departure also raises, once again, an important question about media preservation in the age of streaming. At present, the show is available on Netflix and nowhere else; given its track record, it’s unlikely that the company will release it on disc for fans to enjoy in the future. This begs the question: will it appear on Netflix again? If not, the episode runs the risk of vanishing into a digital archive forever.
We’ve contacted Netflix about its future plans for Bandersnatch, and will update this post if we get a reply.
