In the press for Netflix’s new season of Black Mirror — a show that hasn’t dropped new episodes since 2019 — creator Charlie Brooker recently mentioned his desire to include more comedy. It’s not a bad idea, in theory; in a famously bleak anthology series, a little comic relief can go a long way. Since the move to Netflix in season three, Brooker’s increasing tonal flexibility has been responsible for some of the best episodes. Yet overall, this is a show that has a spotty record with comedy. For every unexpectedly delightful episode like “San Junipero†or “Hang the DJ,†we tend to get an overly wacky misfire (“The Waldo Moment,†“Rachel, Jack and Ashley Tooâ€).
Season six begins somewhere in between with an episode centered on Annie Murphy, whose comedic performance as Alexis Rose on Schitt’s Creek was one of the best of the last decade. It makes for an entertaining watch and, like many a Black Mirror episode, one that hits a little close to home, given the conversations taking place right now around AI in art. But it’s also not quite at the level of previous season openers like “Nosedive†or “Striking Vipers†— perhaps not in spite of the comedy, but because of it.
“Joan Is Awful†begins by presenting us with a day in the life of Joan Tait (Annie Murphy), a woman with a cushy job at a music streamer called Sonicle. It lets her live a comfortable life, but she has long since lost any real passion for the job. She’s unfulfilled by a career spent handing down edicts from the board; deep down, she’d rather live out her original dream of owning her own coffee shop. And Joan feels about her career the same way she feels about her fiancé, Krish (Avi Nash), whose stifling blandness extends to his cooking.
Joan explains all this to her therapist, comparing her current reliable-but-unsexy relationship with Krish to the chaos and passion of her relationship with her ex-boyfriend Mac (Rob Delaney). Mac is in town and has been texting her, so after her session she caves and meets up with him. But this is bigger than just missing the one who got away: In both Joan’s personal and professional life, she feels totally out of control, guided along by some imaginary script. (Hint: It’s not imaginary.) As she puts it to her therapist, she doesn’t feel like the main character in her own life story.
But if being the main character is what Joan seeks, she’s about to get exactly what she asked for. When she arrives home that night, she and Krish fire up Streamberry, this episode’s obvious Netflix equivalent, complete with a bold red S logo and the signature “ta-dum†sound on launch — and here’s where we start to understand what this episode is really about. There’s a new series on Streamberry called Joan Is Awful, starring Salma Hayek as a character much like Joan: same job, same streaks in her hair, and the same personality, broadly speaking. If anything, the TV Joan is just slightly heightened, leaning harder into her occasional unlikability and professional coldness.
Everyone in Joan’s life has a TV equivalent: Himesh Patel plays Krish, and Jaboukie Young-White plays her assistant, Eric (Jared Goldstein). And quickly, everyone Joan knows tunes into the same show, watching Joan’s entire day play out on their screens. This leads to the obvious: Krish learns about her conversations and meet-up with Mac (played on TV by the younger, more CW-attractive actor Ben Barnes) and leaves her. The night ends with the Joan Is Awful episode coming full circle, revealing Cate Blanchett as the actress playing Joan in the show-within-the-show-within-the-show.
Joan’s life only continues to unravel the next day when she loses her job because her onscreen persona leaked confidential company information. And a meeting with her lawyer (Lolly Adefope in Joan’s reality, Wunmi Mosaku onscreen) clarifies just how fucked she is: When she originally signed up for Streamberry and agreed to the terms and conditions, she unknowingly signed away her life rights and okayed the algorithm to tweak and fill in dialogue for dramatic purposes. (It’s one of several info dumps in the episode.) In fact, it’s not actually Salma Hayek playing Joan; it’s a digital likeness. The entire show is CGI, combining AI-generated scripts and advanced deep-fake technology to churn out new episodes each night using images licensed from actors like Salma.
Following a disastrous meet-up where Mac can’t perform sexually because he’s thinking too much about how he’ll appear on the show, Joan comes up with an idea: She’ll force the real Salma Hayek’s hand by making her digital likeness act out a truly unflattering scene. She accomplishes that by binge-eating burgers, taking laxatives, and interrupting a church wedding in a cheerleading uniform and dick-tattooed forehead to shit herself right in the middle of the aisle. Sure enough, Salma complains to her lawyer and gets the same basic answer Joan got from hers: She technically agreed to all this, so she’ll just have to ignore this “deep-fake heretic abomination.â€
This is around the time Salma Hayek really starts to take over the narrative, a pivot that I think ultimately hurts the story. It’s not just that her increasingly central role distracts from Joan, a character with whom we already get limited time; such a big and self-referential celebrity role is also just an odd fit for this show, which rarely (if ever) makes direct pop-cultural references. (The industry satire feels like territory better suited for Barry or The Other Two, including the joke of George Clooney licensing his image for a Thomas the Tank Engine reboot.) And while Hayek is a naturally funny and charming actress, many of her individual one-liners are groaners. (Take “I am a dyslexic, talented actress with questionable English†or her repeated use of “quam-puta.â€)
Joan and Salma’s partnership at least allows for an exciting heist vibe as they sneak into the office of Streamberry CEO Mona Javadi (Leila Farzad) to sabotage the quantum computer that houses the algorithm. But the climax itself fails to live up to its potential for a variety of reasons. Part of it is just that there isn’t enough time; this episode should have the scope and thrills of season four’s opener, “USS Callister,†but that episode allotted 76 minutes to let each reveal land naturally, building momentum over time. In “Joan Is Afraid,†the exposition dumps continue through the final ten minutes, with too much telling and not enough showing.
Seemingly the biggest reveal comes when Joan and Salma eavesdrop on a convenient conversation between Javadi and a journalist. Javadi explains that the “quamputer†shoots, packages, and edits its own programs for immediate consumption; Joan was chosen to test the system because of her sheer averageness. Eventually, everyone in the Streamberry database will have content tailored to them — content that plays into viewers’ negative self-beliefs to put them “in a state of mesmerized horror.â€
But once Joan and Salma meet the man guarding the quamputer (Michael Cera), they learn something even bigger and more world-shattering: Everything they’ve been experiencing is part of a simulation based on whatever the true “Source Joan†(Kayla Lorette) experienced that day. Our Joan is only an adaptation, played by the licensed digital likeness of Annie Murphy; like everyone else we see, she’s part of “fictive level one,†while Joan Is Awful takes place on fictive level two. In fact, this man only looks like Michael Cera because the real Cera licensed his image, just like Annie and Salma did (Salma for multiple levels of fiction). We’re in a nesting doll of narratives, and we haven’t glimpsed the outermost shell until now.
Does this series of reveals make sense? I think it mostly works if you squint, but it all feels less elegant than it should; you still get the feeling that this is a premise that would work better in feature-length form. Besides Javadi’s mention of “mesmerized horror,†there’s no real explanation of why these curated shows would appeal to subscribers; quick AI-generated TV has an obvious appeal for money-minded streaming execs, sure, but programs that basically just broadcast 90 percent of your real life, every day? It seems like it would wear out its appeal, even to self-hating bingers who want to see their worst qualities emphasized onscreen.
And I’m even less sure about the simulation reveal. We’ve seen these subjects explored before on Black Mirror; this is a show that loves forcing us to identify with clones, digital or otherwise, from “White Christmas†to “USS Callister,†and loves making us question the ethics of killing someone created by an algorithm. Here, though, the logic of free will is wobblier, with Joan eventually just allowing herself to smash the quamputer, following the script determined by the original Source Joan and massacring billions of “simulated souls†like herself. (But then how does this reality still exist in the first place when Source Joan destroyed it that very day? Are all the realities synced up that rigidly?)
In the closing moments of the episode, we meet the real Joan and the “real†Annie Murphy, both of whom are on house arrest but remain friends. Now Joan owns a coffee shop, the humble but fulfilling job she always wanted; she has taken back control of her life, becoming the “main character†by refusing the studio’s right to turn her into a literal main character. It’s a fitting, mercifully happy ending, but it still doesn’t feel as cathartic as it should.
Maybe “Joan Is Awful†just wants to be about too much at once, touching lightly on big issues like privacy breaches and Hollywood sexism while sometimes forgetting about investing us in its title character. This is a horror story about AI screenwriting, dropping during a historic writer’s strike partly meant to increase regulation of AI screenwriting, but the basic message gets flattened a bit. At Black Mirror’s best, the twists and obfuscations reveal something new about not just the dangers of technology but the people who use it. But when nothing is real, does it really mean anything at all?
Easter Eggs
• One of the other titles that appear on Streamberry is “Loch Henry,†which shares a name with the next episode. Joan calls it “the Scottish murder thing,†so we have that to look forward to! (There’s also an image of Will Poulter’s Bandersnatch character, Colin Ritman, with the title Finding Ritman.)
• I enjoy the cheesiness of “They’re right about you, Joan. You’re awful.â€
• “Sayonara, queen!†Jaboukie Young-White has a lot of fun in his few appearances, playing a more stereotypically gay version of Eric.
• “They have taken 100 years of cinema and diminished it to an app.†Brooker said he had no problem sneaking his Netflix references into this season, but I definitely watched much of this with an eyebrow raised, especially because the real Netflix continues to dip its toes in the water of machine learning and AI assistance.
• I’m Ben, your new recapper! While I’ve mostly had a good idea in the past of how the fan base would react to a given Black Mirror episode, I could see an episode like this one going either way. So I’m looking forward to seeing which episodes you all take to.