So I've seen a lot of the episodes. The strength of the series is definitely the ability to take aspects of modern life and spin them to their logical extremes to make a point. So, for example, you take a world that shares and rates every aspect of our lives on social networks and imagine a world where those networks aren't just harmless wastes of time but can actually impact your ability to get a job or find a place to live. Or you look at our modern democratic system that constantly monitors public opinion to make policy and imagine a situation where a politician must do truly disgusting things to appease the masses, even at the expense of their dignity and family.

There's nothing wrong with these ideas; science fiction has a long and storied history of critiquing society to point out potential issues and moral hazards. The problem I do have is the way the stories wind down and the conclusions they draw. Almost without exception the conclusions are bleak. Characters never make the right choices or even if they do they are inevitably crushed by the systems they rebel against.

If you think of these stories as little horror movies, it's the point at the end of the film where the survivors either get to walk away having experienced something horrible but having survived and learned a little bit about themselves along the way, or they all get slaughtered and the last scene is the final survivor being pulled back down into the darkness by the monster and the camera panning twenty feet over to the safety they almost reached.

Both types of endings have their place. But when you choose to use only one of them the negativity starts to get a bit stifling. There has to be hope sometimes or it just feels depressing and pessimistic. I suppose this may just be a personal thing, others may not mind the continuously bleak outlook, but for me it gets really hard to watch more than one or two of these in a month.

The acting is usually pretty decent, as are the production values. The writing is also usually quite decent, although they often stretch logic to the breaking point to get the ending they envision. I guess this would be a mini spoiler warning, but there is one episode where a sophisticated device malfunctions to lethal effect because of interference from a common, everyday piece of personal electronics, the equivalent of a commercial airliner hurtling into the ground because you didn't turn your cell phone off. To call that absurd doesn't really even begin to cover it; it could never happen.

So in the end, my feelings about the show are rather mixed. To some degree I really like the creativity of the concepts and the decent execution, but on the other hand I find myself feeling rather depressed by the constant negativity and a little irritated that I can usually guess how the story will end half way thru because it is always the most bleak ending that they run with.