The TV show that changed everything is back. I still can’t believe who made it.

I wouldn’t presume, seven seasons and 14 years in, that you need any introduction to Black Mirror. The massively popular anthology show charting all the most vile things technology might inflict on human life has become a byword for dystopia itself. Everyone has seen some of it, particularly since it went to Netflix in 2016.

But before that, Black Mirror was a treat just for British viewers. The first episode, “The National Anthem,” blew heads off when it first aired here in the U.K. in 2011 on our Channel 4, with its deliberately shocking and gross premise, in which the prime minister of the United Kingdom is forced to have sex with a pig live on television to secure the release of a kidnapped princess. It remains a brilliant and nasty little piece of television, and was essential viewing at the time. The episode then took on extra and bizarre resonance four years later when it came out that then–Prime Minister David Cameron had reportedly once put his penis inside a dead pig’s mouth while participating in some godawful university initiation rite.

People have been complaining online here for a while now about the show losing its Britishness since its move to Netflix. Charlie Brooker, its creator and showrunner, responded to this kind of critique earlier this week. “I hear that a lot,” he told a British tabloid, people missing what he dryly called “the charm of the pig-fucking episode.” Black Mirror is certainly a different-feeling show now than it was then, on the whole. It’s been “Americanized,” by which here I mean “made glossier,” for the most part. Original Black Mirror was depressing both in content and style—all wrinkled shirts and gray lighting—and I personally liked it better that way, sure. But it’s a well-worn complaint when a British show gets picked up by a big U.S. streamer. It happened when Doctor Who made the move to Disney+ after decades at the BBC last year, for instance. Increasingly, British productions are being offered much more money to make their programs with streamers than with U.K. broadcasters and, understandably, they’re listening. It is what it is. And both Black Mirror’s original shock factor and British flavor are still there at times: A Season 6 episode, for instance, is set in Scotland and features a torturer defecating in victims’ mouths.

What interests me is not whether Black Mirror is too shiny these days. It’s that because of Black Mirror’s international success, the vast majority of viewers are not aware of the origins of its creator, and his almost mythic status as some kind of oracle about queasy possibilities of the all-too-near future. So I am taking the debut of Season 7 on Netflix as opportunity to introduce you not to Charlie Brooker, father of one of the biggest Netflix shows of all time, but Charlie Brooker, national treasure slash basement goblin.

According to an immortal Twitter post from 2017, Black Mirror “is written by one stoned british dude who just mutters shit like wot if ya mum ran on batteries.” This is not true, but it is also not completely untrue. To Brits, it is still quite weird that Brooker is the man behind this global era-defining piece of television because of how we first got to know him. He was a writer on several of Britain’s most beloved cult comedies of the 2000s (the noughties, for my at-home crowd), including Nathan Barley, Brass Eye, and The 11 O’Clock Show, all of which I beg you to track down. Between 2006 and 2017, Brooker wrote and presented these shows called Newswipe, Gameswipe, and Screenwipe, where he would sit in a drab basement, or at the very least a windowless room, surrounded by jars of peanut butter and half-drunk tea and complain about things on the television, the news, and video games. If he wasn’t in fact stoned, it was the kind of setting in which one would expect to find a stoned person. He also did an annual show where he would rant about what had happened in the world in the year just gone. Rant and complain are run-of-the-mill words for the art of what he was doing in these shows, though. Nobody could monologue so corrosively and to such great comic effect as he could. He also wrote columns for the Guardian cussing out various elements of contemporary life, from Apple system updates to the norovirus to the Avengers. To people like me, entry-level misanthropes, Brooker was the authority on what culture was shit, and what culture was even shitter.

He is one of the key figures who shaped British humor of the past 20 years. If you were a cynical teenager, you knew his stuff inside out, and I am certainly not the only British writer who spent their early career years turning out two-bit imitations of Brooker’s crabbily florid style. Vintage Brookerisms live in my head to this day. For instance, he once described himself, on an episode of Screenwipe, as having a face like “a rucksack full of dented bells.” Some more appealingly puerile Brooker gems: Bill O’Reilly sat on camera “pulling a face like a tortoise that’s learned to enjoy the stink of its own farts,” and Donald Trump was an “ageing He-Man cosplayer dressed for court appearance.” The point of connection between the Brooker of then and the Brooker of now is his sharp eye for the world around him. He’s not a soothsayer or techno-pessimist prophet who can somehow see into the future. He’s just a guy who’s paying attention and knows how to show it.

I guess it’s no surprise, then, that Brooker has hit the biggest time imaginable. He is, to my mind, a genius of the vulgar and the unsettling, and deserving of worldwide acclaim for it. But Brooker’s proximity to Hollywood now does inspire strange feelings in me, like hearing that Zendaya knows your uncle or that George Clooney has a favorite pub in Swindon. I would have pegged Brooker as the kind of guy that only really makes sense in his proper context: Britain, in all its dreary and absurd contradictions. And still, when I watch Black Mirror with its newer bajillion-dollar streaming-service sparkle, I feel like turning to the imaginary non-British viewer next to me and saying, “Back in my day, they used to have this guy sitting in the dark on the cheapest sofa you’ve ever seen to give you his insights.”

I do feel that Black Mirror has run its course now. We know pretty categorically after seven seasons wot would happen if ya mum ran on batteries. But whatever he does once it’s over and done with is likely to be a) good and b) enormously popular outside of the United Kingdom. In my head, though, Charlie Brooker will forever still be sat in that musty British front room eating Wotsits (a far superior cousin to your vile Cheeto) and smearing their residue on an Xbox controller. That is where I like him.