In Decision Maker

At Netflix, Carla Engelbrecht Creates Television Shows That Demand To Be Played, Not Just Watched.

- Antonia Hitchens

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Carla Engelbrecht flew to Phoenix, sat on the couch in a stranger’s living room, and observed the stranger watching—or possibly playing 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 success.” 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.