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Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker is making a four-part detective crime series for Netflix; it’s currently in production.

The untitled project is “a profoundly serious, stunningly original crime thriller in which a tormented detective from the Northern city of Bleakford ventures down to London on a mission to catch a ritualistic serial killer before they run out of people to kill,” the logline reads.

It then warns: “Contains blood and frowning.” Those two often go together.

The series stars Paddy Considine (House of the Dragon, MobLand), Georgina Campbell (Barbarian, Watchers) and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones, The Abandons). Probably no dragons in this one.

“I’m beyond thrilled to be saying these words for the press release,” Brooker said in a statement. “I’ve dreamt of providing a quote ever since I was a young foetus, and now here I am doing it. I’d pinch myself, but like all of us, I’m terrified that if I do that, I might wake up and discover 2025 has all been a magical dream. Please watch my show. I am begging you.”

Brooker wrote the series with Ben Caudell, Jason Hazeley, Emer Kenny, Daniel Maier and Joel Morris; additional material by Victoria Asare Archer. He executive produces it with Jessica Rhoades and Annabel Jones. Mark Kinsella is co-executive producer and Richard Webb is producer. Al Campbell directs the miniseries.

Brooker had recently teased the project in an interview, as he was working on the yet-unannounced series when he chatted with The Hollywood Reporter about the Emmy nominations for the latest season of Black Mirror, and also weighed in on his recent exit from his and Jones’ Netflix-owned banner Broke & Bones.

“I am doing something at the moment that we haven’t announced yet. It is not Black Mirror. It’s very different; it’s using my other skill set. My other hat I sometimes wear,” he said when discussing the challenge of pumping out more Black Mirror stories amid the fast-changing tech landscape. “The thing about Black Mirror now is there is definitely a shorter gap between conceptualizing a Black Mirror story and the real world, unfortunately, serving up something quite similar. I’m in a bit of an arms race with reality.”

As for season eight, he assured fans that Black Mirror’s future on the streamer still remains bright. “Well, it’s Black Mirror, so the future is looking bleak. But yes, bleakly bright.”

The husband of the tech company employee seen embracing her boss on Coldplay’s audience “kiss cam” is speaking out for the first time since his wife went viral in July.

A spokeswoman for Massachusetts entrepreneur Andrew Cabot, 61, told People Magazine on Monday that he and his wife, Kristin Cabot, “were privately and amicably separated several weeks before the Coldplay concert.”

“Their decision to divorce was already underway prior to that evening,” the spokeswoman said in a statement. “Now that the divorce filing is public, Andrew hopes this provides respectful closure to speculation and allows his family the privacy they’ve always valued.”

“No further public comment will be made,” she added.

During Coldplay’s performance at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on July 16, the band’s “kiss cam” starting displaying couples in the audience.

Kristin Cabot, Astronomer’s chief people officer, was captured in an embrace with her boss Andy Byron, then the data company’s CEO. When the camera landed on the pair, Cabot immediately covered her face and the man ducked out of the frame.

The moment prompted laughs and intrigue from the audience, and led Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, to poke fun at the awkward moment.

“Oh, look at these two. You’re all right,” he said, according to video footage from the concert that circulated widely online. “You’re OK. Oh, what? Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”

The encounter was captured on video and shared to social media, becoming an overnight sensation. Videos of the moment accrued millions of views across on X, Instagram and TikTok, spawned thousands of memes and became fodder for late night talk show hosts.

Astronomer condemned the encounter, writing that its “leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met. The previously little-known company later hired Martin’s ex-wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, for a satirical advertisement.

Byron, who is reportedly also married, and Cabot resigned from the company days after the scandal went viral. The pair have not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Cabot filed a petition for divorce on Aug. 13 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, according to court documents. The next hearing in the divorce case is a scheduled for Nov. 26.

Nearly eight years have passed since Robert Langdon, the world’s most dashing tenured faculty, found himself ensnared in a dangerous global conspiracy. That’s a long wait for the professor’s loyal readers — but his spell of peace and quiet (and peer-reviewed research, presumably) is at an end.

With the publication of The Secret of Secrets — Dan Brown’s sixth installment in a saga that includes The Da Vinci Code — this week welcomes the return of an astonishingly popular series that has sold untold millions, spawned three Tom Hanks blockbusters and occasionally stoked controversy with its greatest hits list of European conspiracy theories.

But don’t worry: If cloaked menace and mysterious symbols aren’t your bag, this week’s publishing potpourri also includes musical biography, tech memoir and a couple of established fiction veterans.

The Elements, by John Boyne

Seen from certain angles, the Irish novelist’s back catalog can resemble a constellation of neutron stars, strewn with topics — such as the Holocaust and predatory priests — that are as heavy as they are luminously rendered. Don’t expect a breezy read here either. Previously published as separate novellas in the U.K., each titled according to one of the four classical elements, the interlinked stories stitched together here trace a barbed and winding legacy of sexual abuse and trauma across Ireland.

It Was the Way She Said It, by Terry McMillan

The “she” of McMillan’s title could easily serve as a nod to the author herself. After all, if there’s one thread that unites this book’s sundry contents, it’s the voice of a veteran novelist whose Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back became 1990s bywords for strong, complex Black female-led stories. Still, singular though her voice may be, McMillan doesn’t settle for a single “way” of expressing herself here. This career-spanning anthology collects a range of shorter pieces, both previously published and as yet unseen – occasionally even unfinished – from short stories and essays to quick sketches and public speeches.

Living in the Present with John Prine, by Tom Piazza

Of all the countless lights extinguished by COVID-19, few in the pandemic’s early weeks left a darkness as deep, and as widely felt, as John Prine’s death. And few felt it as closely as Piazza, a veteran music writer who, after profiling the beloved singer-songwriter for Oxford American magazine, had planned to collaborate on the septuagenarian musician’s memoir. Now, Piazza has written a different kind of reflection on Prine’s life and legacy, weaving elements of biography, travelogue and music criticism with the grief of a bereft friend, in this slim hybrid volume.

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web, by Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee is credited with coming up with arguably the most consequential invention of the past half-century: the World Wide Web. But for all the ingenuity it took to propose and implement this system for universal information-sharing, it was another move that likely proved even more important: The British computer scientist’s decision to forgo a patent and keep the system free and available for anyone to use. In this memoir, Berners-Lee tells the origin story of his monumental invention and reflects on the danger and promise it presents users today, more than three decades since the first website went live.

The Secret of Secrets, by Dan Brown

It appears that good old Professor Langdon’s luck is as rotten as ever. Can’t a mild-mannered scholar attend even one lecture without being interrupted by yet another disquietingly inventive murder? In Brown’s latest thriller, his ivory tower sleuth once again must embark on a white-knuckle quest to get to the bottom of the homicidal happenings. Expect glamorous destinations, a shadowy organization and — of course — a menacing, mind-bending conspiracy sprung from centuries-old arcana.