Prior to producing Black Mirror, Brooker had done several end-of-year topical comedy specials for the BBC based on his Weekly Wipe series up through 2016.

Additionally, Diane Morgan appears in a different role—rather than recurring Wipe character Philomena Cunk, she plays Gemma Nerrick, ostensibly "one of the five most average people in the world".

[4] Actor Hugh Grant revealed the project's existence in an interview with New York magazine in late November 2020, saying Brooker had written a mockumentary about the year 2020, which was dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and described by some as a real-life version of a Black Mirror episode.

[14] In a one star review for The Independent, Ed Cumming found that he was often "waiting for punchlines that never arrive", saying that Grant is "not given a single decent line".

Cumming criticised the absence of Brooker's narration, as found in the Wipe series, and wrote that the work "can't make up its mind whether it is for a British audience or an American one".

[15] Chris Bennion gave the special two stars out of five in a review for The Telegraph, believing it to be a "huge disappointment" in which the humour is "as predictable as the targets of the jokes".

Though reporting that most of the jokes are "at best wearily familiar", Bennion did find a few that "carry Brooker's acidic wit and giddy surrealism" and praised that Grant "adroitly captures the pomposity of the Grand Old TV Don".

[18] The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg summarised the work as a "generally hacky piece of recycled political satire and tired documentary parody".

Finding it "astonishing how lazy everything is", he viewed it as worse than many American topical comedies and said that the humour comes "almost exclusively from the enthusiasm of an impressively star-studded cast".

However, Fienberg praised Milioti and Morgan and found it "appropriate" that Jackson discusses most of the material revolving around George Floyd protests with "only anger and outrage".

[8] The Los Angeles Times called the mockumentary a "bitingly funny, hastily assembled and slightly deranged comedic retrospective".

Alongside returning cast such as Grant, Ullman and Morgan, the mockumentary starred new members including Lucy Liu, Stockard Channing and William Jackson Harper.