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will drop on Netflix, but we do know generally what to expect: dystopian societies with harsh rules on crime and punishment; technology rooted in the present but developed into something extreme in the future that allows us a searingly emotional glimpse into the human condition; a multi-ethnic cast.

Wait, what\'s that last one? That doesn\'t sound so bad. In fact, the multi-ethnic casts of

\'s future are positive elements of the show, suggesting that racism won\'t exist in the future.

Until we get to Season 3\'s \'Nosedive\', in fact, we don\'t see any racism or opposition to mixed-race couples in the show. It\'s so much more about the content of a character\'s character than about the colour of her or his skin. Pretty idealistic for a show that\'s generally seen as a downer.

As Georgina Campbell, who played the lead female role of Amy in season four\'s \'Hang the DJ\', said on the

podcast: "There was no specific race for Amy, or for Frank. It was open casting."

This is an aspect of the show that was important to the casting director on

seasons one and two, Shaheen Baig. She recently said: "I want to go into drama schools and feel like they are representing the country I live in. They should be socially diverse and reflect the country as a whole." Talking about

specifically, she told Digital Spy: "As far am I\'m concerned, ethnically the roles were always open."

role has been subject to change, too. John Hillcoat, who directed season four\'s \'Crocodile\', says in the upcoming official book of the series,

: "Charlie [Brooker] and Annabel [Jones, who created the show with Brooker] seemed open to exploring the pros and cons of turning our male lead into a strong professional woman. Andrea Riseborough [who eventually played Mia] helped convince Charlie and Annabel, as she independently came to the same conclusion."

Open casting, colour-blind casting, non-traditional casting: all of these terms have been passionately debated in recent years. They differ subtly in meaning. Open casting means anyone can attend and is in with a chance. Colour-blind or non-traditional casting actively ignores ethnicity: an example being Dev Patel playing Charles\' Dickens\' character David Copperfield in Armando Iannucci\'s new film adaptation, or a BAME actor cast in a Shakespeare role.

The assumption being that Shakespeare, a white man living in 16th-century London, would have envisioned these roles as being played by other white men only.

These types of casting widen the field for underrepresented actors, and their effect is to change who we see on stage and screen. Netflix comedy

(all that philosophy), with the most visually immediate being the colour-blind casting.

, where there\'s more of an emphasis on diversity in sexuality too, compared to

Why does this effort matter? There\'s a recent episode of

where Detective Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) comes out as bisexual. She tells her coworkers, who are very positive – as expected, really. Then she tells her openly gay boss, Captain Holt.

He replies: "Every time someone steps up and says who they are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place." Holt has spoken up several times before about his decades-long fight to be accepted within the NYPD, and how that\'s shaped him. In a quietly tear-jerking moment, he adds: "So, thank you."

This effort matters, because everyone deserves some reflection of themselves on screen.

that Schur is involved in – he\'s a co-writer on season three\'s \'Nosedive\' alongside Rashida Jones and Brooker – touches on racism in a subtle way that hadn\'t been seen in

until then. As writer Isha Aran says, "it seems too egregious an oversight to give almost all the subservient roles to people of color," – especially given that\'s not how

Season three episode \'Men Against Fire\' looks, in part, at the lives of migrants, but the multi-ethnic nature of the military involved suggests that the issues are more complex than just race. So then, it\'s really just season four\'s finale, the last episode of

cast with race very firmly in mind.

\'Black Museum\'s lead actor, Douglas Hodge, gives some insight into the casting decisions behind the episode in

. He says: "Just after \'Black Museum\', I played Nixon and I\'m currently playing a Guantanamo Bay torturer, but none of them come close to Rolo Haynes\' unempathetic glee. Playing him was like swallowing a small thimble of poison each morning. Every day, the whole thing felt more toxic – especially as it was essentially a black cast and Rolo was a white supremacist."

usually avoids plots this explicitly charged with social injustice, preferring to hit the audience in the emotions, in the intimacy of universally experienced everyday moments. \'Black Museum\', however, is ultimately about racial tension and the structural injustice of American society. Clue\'s in the title.

We are forced to watch a black man executed for a murder he most likely didn\'t commit, and then his digital ghost – forever in prison uniform – is relentlessly tortured to make money for Rolo Haynes. Seeing Clayton Leigh (Babs Olusanmokun) trapped in this nightmare, it\'s impossible to forget that, according to the NAACP, African Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites.

Seeing Nish and her mother suffer in front of the increasingly catatonic holographic remains of their beloved father and husband is devastating. It\'s made all the worse by the fact that they\'re at a higher risk of suffering similar fates.

Again, as the NAACP notes, the imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women. As a result, \'Black Museum\'s emotional punch is in forcing us to see what we usually ignore.

Open casting has allowed the black and mixed-race protagonists of episodes such as \'Fifteen Million Merits\', \'White Bear\', or \'Men Against Fire\' a role that is not often given to minority actors: everyman/everywoman.

Each viewer will find her or himself staring forlornly out of the hard-won window with Bing (Daniel Kaluuya), or running alongside Victoria Skillane (Lenora Crichlow) with blood thundering inside the temples (well, we say everywoman – we don\'t know the truth till later), or watching the video of his own carefree younger self with the same uncomprehending shock as Stripe (Malachi Kirby).

It\'s no different to how we feel as we watch Liam (Toby Kebbell) at the end of \'The Entire History of You\', or Bella (Maxine Peake) at the close of \'Metalhead\'.

\'Black Museum\', on the other hand, doesn\'t let us identify quite so closely with the characters. They\'re cast specifically to represent the racial divide. The portmanteau episode keeps moving forward in time.

We can\'t tell if the episode starts in our present, as the technology available is far ahead of ours but the social attitudes aren\'t. It\'s an alternate universe, with the civil rights movement playing out in the background, while the development of futuristic technology takes centre stage.

The episode covers decades of Rolo\'s life. He continues to dress and act like a Victorian carnival barker because he\'s stuck in the ignorant past, out of step with the world of Nish\'s generation. The busloads of misery tourists who drop by the museum to cruelly pull the lever on Clayton\'s digital copy (or \'cookie\') taper off in time, not keen to run the gauntlet of protestors outside.

Eventually, even the neo-Nazis stop showing up. Rolo\'s got this exhibit for eternity, but the world has changed around him, and nobody wants to see it anymore, or even admit that it exists.

"It\'s about punishment and racism. It\'s a bit \'White Bear\'. There\'s a lot of thematic stuff going on, but at heart it\'s… a ghost story with a nasty twist," Charlie Brooker says of \'Black Museum\' in

. "Absolutely terrifying too, with a political thrust," adds Douglas Hodge.

It\'s a story that couldn\'t work with open casting, because it takes the whole running time of the episode to arrive in the more utopian

futures of the other episodes, where everyone has much bigger concerns than race.

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