Black Mirror: Joan Is Awful

June 15, 2023 10:27 AM - Season 6, Episode 1

An average woman is stunned to discover a global streaming platform has launched a prestige TV drama adaptation of her life - in which she is portrayed by Hollywood A-lister Salma Hayek.
posted by ellieBOA (47 comments total)

Salma Hayek seems like a pretty good sport to me, taking this role.

The Twilight Zone-ish start becomes very topical with the "very deep fake" AI technology posited by this episode. Some credit is due to Netflix for poking fun at its own business model. ("We keep our viewers anxious. Which is to say, engaged.")
posted by SPrintF at 2:11 PM on June 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

The subterranean thing that the show can't let itself imagine is that there might be anyone in the world who doesn't subscribe to Netflix.

(But, stepping back, I guess any of those would have been erased from the story before reaching us -- they never signed the terms of service, so they can't even be peripheral characters -- making the world we're watching literally one in which there are neither Netflix pirates nor abstainers. Nor password sharers.)
posted by nobody at 2:25 PM on June 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Holy crap I needed this. I had a very emotionally tense week and I needed a good laugh.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:36 PM on June 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

This was not a good Black Mirror episode but it was an absolutely brilliant parody of a Black Mirror episode and I mean that in the best way. When Michael Cera "explained things" at the climax I was laughing my head off.

If I was Joan I would have just camped out in my living room for a week doing nothing but watching copyrighted Disney programming, though. That would have solved the problem.

"You know I don’t read this crap! I am a dyslexic, talented actress with questionable English!"
posted by mmoncur at 9:57 PM on June 15, 2023 [16 favorites]

I wish the show just go ahead and use the "Netflix" name, instead of "Streamberry."
posted by applesurf at 11:49 PM on June 15, 2023

Damnit, that summary is almost identical to a story I was writing. Now either I watch the episode and go "huh, that's better than my idea" or "my idea was better" but either way I doubt I'll finish writing it.
posted by Molesome at 2:32 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Molesome - are you sure you maybe shouldn't be heading to the Netflix headquarters to track down a computer?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:07 AM on June 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

What if Terms & Conditions, but too much?

I liked a lot of the little touches in this one - the parallel meetings with lawyers complete with difficulty with the doors, Ben Barnes showing up for maybe 5 seconds, the pronouncements on the laxative bottle label...
posted by LionIndex at 5:43 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I wish the show just go ahead and use the "Netflix" name, instead of "Streamberry."

I don't know - they've already gone there with using "Netflix" as a plot device in Bandersnatch, so I think taking it a bit further in a later iteration works. I don't know if my reading of it is what they intended, but the chosen name reminds of "Blackberry", a once ubiquitous tech thing that's now in the dustbin of history. So with the graphics included in the episode plus the new name, you maybe get a commentary that you wouldn't just playing it completely straight. It's obvious enough what streaming company they're referring to without making it totally explicit.
posted by LionIndex at 6:45 AM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

I enjoyed the end of it, it was overall an enjoyable ride, but I was very nearly taken out of it by how incredibly terrible her lawyer was. Contracts require mutual understanding; you can't sign away rights to your likeness in a usage contract for a streaming service. Contracts require consideration; presumably Streamberry is a *paid* service, so what's the consideration she's receiving? It's not even "this service was free*, oh sorry you didn't read the asterisk, too bad."

Now, if the attorney had said something about how it'd take a while for her to file an injunction, and yeah this is probably illegal but Streamberry has way more lawyers and time and money...yeah, that tracks. It would be a totally believable story for Joan to get antsy and impatient and go off the rails even if she were legally in the right. A cautionary tale for how corporations can and will break the law and get only a slap on the wrist for ruining people's lives.

Dunno, I feel like I'm nitpicking, but it also feels like low-hanging fruit.
posted by explosion at 7:57 AM on June 16, 2023 [16 favorites]

I wish the show just go ahead and use the "Netflix" name, instead of "Streamberry."

Yeah, I was disappointed when Source Joan was being arrested there's still a screen with an S logo animation in the background. It would have been a nice easter egg to have her world have an animating N.

This was a slow episode to get going but quite entertaining once the "real" Salma Hayek got involved.
posted by Gary at 12:37 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

This was a funny episode that really doesn't bear any thinking about at all. The legal nonsense is already covered, but the very notion of tailored shows to every individual doesn't seem to make sense. It doesn't seem like Joan enjoyed her show at all! It seems rather obvious that even if they could get away with it, Streamberry would lose most of its subscribers overnight
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:53 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

It doesn't seem like Joan enjoyed her show at all!

I buy it--how many "innovations" have HBO (oh, excuse me, Max), Netflix, Facebook, et al made that no one asked for while ignoring what their consumers really wanted?
posted by carrienation at 2:31 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

On the other hand, Joan hated the show, but she kept watching it.
posted by abraxasaxarba at 2:33 PM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Apparently there are several callbacks to previous Black Mirror episodes, but the only one that I caught was the song from “15 Million Merits” playing as Muzak during the restaurant rendezvous with Joan’s ex.
posted by FallibleHuman at 3:10 PM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

The algorithmic negging thing is already happening, at least in some places - a lot of YouTube tutorials are relentlessly negative: "What you're doing wrong", "Why you suck", "Ten worst [whatever] mistakes", stuff like that. There are so many tropes that get repeated from one video to the next ("So, let's get started!", pointing at camera, or the thumbnail with the ludicrous gurning expression), that I'm convinced these are things YouTube is telling the creators to do because, supposedly, it works.

Personally, I hate it, but I'm nobody's target audience.
posted by Grangousier at 4:28 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Apparently there are several callbacks to previous Black Mirror episodes, but the only one that I caught was the song from “15 Million Merits” playing as Muzak during the restaurant rendezvous with Joan’s ex.

When Joan and Krish settle in to watch Streamberry, the first show they consider is Sea of Tranquility* — to one side of it is a show called Finding Ritman, the thumbnail of which is a closeup of Will Poulter as Colin Ritman in Bandersnatch; to the other is Loch Henry, which is the following episode of Season 6 of Black Mirror.

*I hear it blows.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:14 PM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

“This was a funny episode that really doesn't bear any thinking about at all. The legal nonsense is already covered, but the very notion of tailored shows to every individual doesn't seem to make sense.”

I think the best way to interpret this episode is that it knows it's a show.

The awesome irony is that Source Joan isn't, even in the end, the main character of her life. She was a minor character with only a few scenes in a show called "Black Mirror" on Netflix.

At each level of fiction, the absurdity increases — but it started out absurd. Source Joan's life doesn't make much more sense than Fictive-1 Joan's does. Her company and job make no sense. The legal details make no sense. The diarrhea scene is a hilariously uncomfortable scene. It couldn't be real.

Now consider: this show, the one we're watching, got Actual Annie Murphey to portray the (almost) exact same character doing the exact same things that Fictive-1 Salma Hayek so bitterly complained about. And this show, the one we're watching, paid Actual Salma Hayek to describe in detail that scene, as well as referring to her asshole repeatedly.

Also, that explosion of feces, that plethora of diarrhea, was absolutely riveting television.

Hmm.

*

The beginning was really, really good. I must have rewatched portions of the initial discovery of "Joan" four or five times.

Then in the middle, pretty much starting at the lawyer scene, I began to feel the writing had lost its way and the episode was turning into just another TV farce. But at the computer reveal with its lampshading "levels" of unreality, it suddenly seemed to me that everything I hadn't liked about the middle was purposeful.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:08 PM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

The diarrhea scene is a hilariously uncomfortable scene. It couldn't be real.

There's a mid/post-credits scene that Netflix will skip if you don't force it to show you the credits, btw.
posted by LionIndex at 6:26 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

No, that's the one I was talking about. (I meant both.)
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:29 PM on June 16, 2023

I loved this and thought it was great. There was a point in Black Mirror where it seemed like they got fixated on “what if you could create a digital copy of a person and torture it,” and while I did like those episodes, I’m glad they seem to have moved on (even though this episode still had an element of that).

I also appreciated how this covered so many aspects/indignities of modern life at once. Online algorithms exploiting negativity to boost engagement, deepfakes and celebrity holograms, generative AI and scraping of copyrighted or personal data, obscure terms of service, corporations flexing asymmetric legal capabilities, surveillance culture, “cancel culture” (aka accountability for one’s bad behavior), and especially Netflix’s trend toward serving its viewers worse and worse crap. It’s easy to mock Black Mirror as “what if phones but too much” but that ignores just how fertile our real-life dystopia is for cultivating relatable horror stories.

And props to Charlie Brooker for having it wind up to a happy ending! That’s always a relief when watching Black Mirror. (I do not feel bad for the supposed destruction of millions of virtual beings conjured by the quam-puta just to suffer to entertain Streamberry subscribers, but feel free to change my mind.)
posted by ejs at 10:28 PM on June 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

I tried to get my wife to watch this new episode with me, but she's still scarred from the premise of the series premiere with the pig.
posted by emelenjr at 5:02 AM on June 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

“I do not feel bad for the supposed destruction of millions of virtual beings conjured by the quam-puta just to suffer to entertain Streamberry subscribers, but feel free to change my mind.”

Well, firstly, I find it odd — and very relevant — that anyone would accept the suspension of disbelief that Source Joan (and the other characters in Source World) was an actual person while refusing to do so about all the Fictive-X people, even though a) to us in reality, they're all not real, and b) within the experience of watching the show the realness of the fictive characters is more strongly established than the source characters are — and I don't think many in the audience suddenly lost their sense that the Joan we've been mostly watching was a real person despite the revelations.

So I don't see — within the context of the episode — how any of those innumerable fictive people were any less real than the source characters we see. I grant that "our" Joan at the end explains that she doesn't have free will and has to destroy the computer because Source Joan does — but that just leads me to question how much Source Joan's choices were "free".

Also, the show explicitly calls the tech "magic" and implies (based upon popular conceptions of quantum computing) that these universes are actually created in some sense by the workings of the machine. So the show does make some effort to justify the audience's sense that Joan and the other fictive characters are real people even though they're nominally fictional.

Incidentally, as is often the case with MeFi in general about various ideas, my participation on FanFare since it began has caused me to think much more deeply about the phenomenon of suspension of disbelief than I already had (which was itself quite a bit). I find the internal psychological negotiations and the socially-constructed conventions, and of course any inherent cognitive processes involved, regarding the suspension of disbelief to be extremely interesting and rich for exploration.

Charlie Booker isn't interested in writing so-called "hard" science-fiction — which is fine because its conceits are misguided — and he justifiably doesn't worry about plausibility in general given that these tales are all pretty much thought experiments with some key premise that's granted regardless of its plausibility just to find out what they imply. People, including me, do complain about implausible stuff on this show, but I find that it's usually because Booker has been too cavalier about inconsistencies within a particular context, which is how I tend to see most failures of suspension of disbelief these days. ("Beyond the Sea" is particularly egregious in this way.)

I find this episode much more satisfying if I see it as strongly influenced by Charlie Kaufman in that it's intensely interested in — as is also the case with "USS Callister" and "San Janipero" — our notions of what's real and what our propensity for fictional narratives implies about that. "Fiction is already deep-faked", so to speak. The social forces he's examining with his fantastical premises are ones that already exist, he's just magnifying them so we notice them and take heed.

Obviously — well, I think it's obvious — Booker isn't calling into question our fondness for fiction. What he's doing is showing how this propensity can be manipulated and exploited in socially destructive ways.

I've always believed that narrative fiction is extremely influential and results in a lot of good, as is true of art in general. But this has always inescapably implied to me that it also can be harmful. Social media giving us what we want all the way down to the individual mental microcosm is proving to be problematic, and I think that this is also true with very narrowcasted entertainment. In this episode it's no accident that Booker ties individually-tailored programming to the notion of the unreal.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:36 AM on June 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

The funny detail that, to me, makes the Fictive Level characters qualitatively different from the Source characters is that Fictive-1 Joan was able to destroy the computer. Since she was destroyed along with the computer, that implies that she was acting contemporaneously with Source Joan. And therefore all Fictive Level Joans are acting simultaneously! That makes the Fictive Joans seem (to me) more like real-time, degraded echoes of Source Joan, not so much persons in themselves. (And we know it’s degraded because Fictive-2 Joan is actively more dickish than Fictive-1 Joan. Imagine how monstrous Fictive Level 50 Joan must have been!)
posted by ejs at 1:02 PM on June 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I took the line about all the potential AI lives and souls in the quam-puta (subtitle rendering of Salma Hayek's lines - possible extra bilingual joke there) as Black Mirror poking fun at itself, in the middle of an episode where it pokes fun at its viewers and host company. Just off the top of my head, BM episodes that deal with whether AI simulations of real humans have souls/emotions and can be "killed" or tortured: San Junipero, 2/3 of White Christmas, Hang the DJ, I'll Be Right Back, Black Museum, and the Miley Cyrus episode (Someone and Somebody and Maybe Somebody Else and Ashley Too)
posted by LionIndex at 1:29 PM on June 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

On Twitter qntm (best known for There is No Antimemetics Division) briefly discussed the startling similarities between this episode and his story I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:32 PM on June 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

“That makes the Fictive Joans seem (to me) more like real-time, degraded echoes of Source Joan, not so much persons in themselves.”

I don't disagree with this, taken in isolation. The problem, though, is that the episode very explicitly and pointedly wants to remind us that we're watching a show, too. The show is about people watching a show and how, being a show, it's not reality. But the show goes to great lengths to get us to identify with the main character who, as it turns out, was a character on a show.

I don't think there's any way the audience avoids being forced to be aware that Source Joan was only moderately less necessarily fictional than the Joan we've identified with, which, in turn, calls into question what's going on psychologically with fictional narratives. Is reality much less contrived? Yes, but at every opportunity we'll come up with explanations for the vagaries of real life that are no less contrived and designed to satisfy our biases — and the narrowcasting trend strongly enables this. Even if we're "real" in the way that these Joans are not — and of course we all take that for granted — we nevertheless may be living very unreal lives, partly because we prefer the neatness of fiction, but also because it serves the interests of the powerful.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:41 PM on June 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I loved how Selma Hayek, when she was playing Joan, was pretending to be a terrible actor. Maybe that was some meta-commentary on how acting for smaller and smaller screens forces actors to overact, or maybe, when it comes to the arts, computer generated anything is going to be bad -- I dunno which, but it was noticeable how schlocky she was as Joan. But seeing Selma Hayek, as played by Selma Hayek, shout, "You take your paragraph 8 and shove it up your ass and I hope you get paper cuts in your hemorrhoids and die!" was really the best line ever.

Also, it was nice how this episode kept with the general Black Mirror theme of how technology robs us of our humanity yet was able to provide a warm-fuzzy ending. She got out of a shit job to make genuine human connections with her employees and customers. Joan is not awful, not anymore; perhaps Joan was never the real problem.
posted by peeedro at 6:59 PM on June 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't think many in the audience suddenly lost their sense that the Joan we've been mostly watching was a real person

I absolutely did.

But the show goes to great lengths to get us to identify with the main character who, as it turns out, was a character on a show.

It may be a cliche to say so, but different people are going to see that character, and this story, in different ways, some contrary to what the creator may have intended. I may be coming up with reasons after the fact, but level 1 Joan didn't come off as very human, perhaps because the pacing of the show threw us from one crisis situation to another. It seems like the show-within-a-show we watched for most of the run time was purposefully surface-level, driven exclusively by plot rather than a deep, interesting character for whom we should have real feelings. Level 2 showed us the same show, only worse. When we finally saw reality Joan, I felt more deeply for her, even though we barely saw her, because it was no longer so - over-the-top? And because her choices were the kinds of choices free people make, showing her as truly being the driver of her own story. Even taking away the AI/quantum computer aspect, Level 1 Joan didn't act like someone making her own choices; she was buffeted by forces around her.
posted by mistersix at 9:16 PM on June 17, 2023

I really liked the fact that I struggled all episode to see the main actor as Joan and not the actor from Schitz Creek, and then the show said "That's because it *is* the actor from Schitz Creek!" I'm not sure that worked for everyone, but it worked for me.

Also original Joan would not have had the same conversation about fictive levels as the other Joan's, so there must be some independence of reality in fictive universes.
posted by grog at 8:22 AM on June 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

“When we finally saw reality Joan, I felt more deeply for her, even though we barely saw her, because it was no longer so - over-the-top?”

In the mid-credits scene, which you might have missed, it shows Source Joan doing exactly the same things at the wedding in the same way with the same costume as Joan. And none of this works if Joan doesn't have the same weird job where it's plausible that the board of directors are micromanagers and no one ever acts like she's a CEO, nor if the absurd legal stuff wasn't the case, nor, in fact, if magical quantum computers can't do this amazing tech and real Annie Murphy and Source Joan didn't team to comically sneak into the most important room at the streaming service and destroy the computer.

I mean, Source Joan is barely, if at all, less unreal than the fictional Joans ... because, of course, she's also a fictional Joan who also doesn't have to be plausible by real-world standards. Sure, the fictional levels seemed to progressively more "fictional" but Source Joan fits neatly into the progression as just a little bit more plausible but still clearly fictional. She was a long, long way from realistic.

I get that we're conditioned to ignore this kind of thing — fiction is contrived with all sorts of conventions that we accept without question. But, like, this show's and especially — I can't stress how much this is the case — this episode's whole thing is being meta and putting our viewing into the same fictional context. The episode goes to great effort to place us within its context. I'm certain Booker would have used "Netflix" instead of "Streamberry" if he could have. The episode practically beats us over the head saying "you're like these people, you're watching a show with the same name made by a network with a barely disguised name with all the exact same signifiers of the real network, what about that, huh?"

We're intended to be aware that we're the ones who are real and Source Joan isn't, then start to wonder how, that being the case, we might not be so different from her as we might think.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:48 AM on June 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

quam-puta (subtitle rendering of Salma Hayek's lines - possible extra bilingual joke there)

The bilingual joke is definitely intentional (although I'm not sure how funny it is); the "puta" is italicized and Hayek emphasizes it each time she says it.
posted by mediareport at 10:40 AM on June 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Joan hated the show, but she kept watching it.

I liked when the CEO noted the point of the show is to "put them in a state of mesmerized horror. Which really drives engagement."

Best line of the episode.

Now, if the attorney had said something about how it'd take a while for her to file an injunction, and yeah this is probably illegal but Streamberry has way more lawyers and time and money...yeah, that tracks. It would be a totally believable story...

Agreed. I still don't see why they didn't go that route; the ridiculousness of the explainium in Level One Joan's lawyer's office half an hour into the show felt lazy and tonally off with what I hope for from the best Black Mirror episodes, and when it became obvious grossout, goofy farce was the main place they were headed, I kind of just went "eh" until the cute ending, chuckling along as the stupidity ramped up and Michael Cera got punched in the head (I like Cera, but that was pretty darn funny).

Overall, not such a great start to the series. It was slow and overly long, and while I see above that other folks got more out of it, it didn't deliver that much for me to chew on, aside from some fun performances.
posted by mediareport at 10:45 AM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

“I still don't see why they didn't go that route; the ridiculousness of the explainium in Level One Joan's lawyer's office half an hour into the show felt lazy and tonally off with what I hope for from the best Black Mirror episodes, and when it became obvious grossout, goofy farce was the main place they were headed, I kind of just went "eh" until the cute ending, chuckling along as the stupidity ramped up and Michael Cera got punched in the head (I like Cera, but that was pretty darn funny).”

The question of "why they didn't go that route" is a good one that is answered, I think, by the fact that (as I laboriously explain above, sorry) they don't go to the trouble of making anything about Source Joan and her world plausible — the most likely explanation is that it's by design.

I felt exactly as you did 2/3 of the way in, but the reveal of stacked fictions caused me to reevaluate what I'd previously thought. I really do think that we're intended to see Source Joan through the lens of that stack, and furthermore subsequently place ourselves in that stack (in some sense).

See my comment in the Mazey Day episode thread where I compare Booker to Lars von Trier (in a good and bad way) — I think that your criticism is warranted because Booker too often does what you're saying but I think this is one of the cases where he hits it out of the park and what seemed like bad decisions were intentional.

To expand on that a bit, both writers get carried away with their ability to manipulate the audience into wallowing in the muck, unfortunately to the detriment of their material (and our trust). But along with that often are, frustratingly, some very good insights.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:23 AM on June 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

The question of "why they didn't go that route" is a good one that is answered, I think, by the fact that (as I laboriously explain above, sorry) they don't go to the trouble of making anything about Source Joan and her world plausible — the most likely explanation is that it's by design.

I saw your interesting and very generous take above (haven't seen the Mazey Day episode yet so I'll wait to read your comment on that), and can only say, I guess, that I didn't experience the revelatory moment that you did during the last part of the episode that convinced me the clumsiness, illogic and hilariously outright shrug of "it's magic don't think about it" counts as evidence that there was a grand plan to get us all thinking on a meta level about suspension of disbelief and our own fictive realities.

Could be! Don't get me wrong, and I appreciate that it worked for you and your interest in that kind of meta-level playfulness, but there've been enough underwritten or just plain flat moments in Black Mirror for me that I'm a bit cynical about that here. If I do a rewatch and that changes I'll let you know.
posted by mediareport at 1:29 PM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Totally valid opinion. Regardless of my generous interpretation, I don't at all like how Booker straddles that line and often crosses it. I'm genuinely confused at his flashes of brilliance and wonder if maybe they're more serendipitous than not.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:05 PM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Agreed. Sometimes I wonder if the inconsistency is a product of a mostly one-person writing room. I know Brooker has said he gives his scripts to others, and the actors and filming process all add their own changes, but (and I'm happy to be corrected if this is wrong) with a few exceptions it's almost always his name as the sole writing credit and I suspect it's more of a one-man project than a group effort.

I had the same suspicion after finishing the first season of White Lotus (so much so that I didn't bother with the 2nd), when the relatively limited race and class scope of the story became clear, and Mike White's relatively ineffectual responses to that critique, along with his acknowledgement that he was the only person in the writer's room, alerted me to the perils of that kind of single-author approach to a complex series. This may be unfair to Brooker (I don't know enough about how exactly the show is made), but I do wonder if there's not a similar issue at work in Black Mirror.
posted by mediareport at 2:46 PM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

“ that he was the only person in the writer's room”

This is a weird critique to me - is there not space for both collaborative “writers room” and also space for singular authors? I don’t criticize a novel written by 1 person.

Film/TV doesn’t necessarily have to have more than one writer. Because it doesn’t need to encompass all possible narratives or perspectives.

Myself, I thought S1 of White Lotus was excellent, it made it’s points very well and was executed nearly perfectly.
posted by rozcakj at 7:09 PM on June 18, 2023

Given a few days to think about it, what sticks most in my mind about the episode is Semi-Source Salma Hayek's lines about having a shaky grasp on English, etc. -- things that sound more like politically incorrect jokes from an old sitcom than anything the real Salma Hayek would say. This is obviously intentional (I can't believe Brooker would write stuff this problematic without knowing how problematic it was, and I definitely don't believe Salma Hayek would say it if she didn't feel in on the joke), but I don't exactly get it, because this part of the episode is so clearly abstracted from real-reality that it must be wholly scripted, which would seem to defeat the ostensible premise of the in-story show. Is the joke that "reality" TV is scripted, at least in part? Is my problem with it just that I don't think making Salma Hayek say "quam-puta" is really that funny?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:19 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is a weird critique to me - is there not space for both collaborative “writers room” and also space for singular authors? I don’t criticize a novel written by 1 person.

Well, I think there may be singular writers out there capable of producing television of consistently high quality all on their own, but the evidence of Black Mirror seems to be that Brooker really isn't one of them. That's not to say a writers room would necessarily fix the issues being identified, but it might.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 5:42 AM on June 19, 2023

I saw something that said the script was much more tame before Hayek got involved because they didn't want to offend her, and she had them push it further.
posted by LionIndex at 5:58 AM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Turns out it was Wikipedia:

On playing herself in the episode, Hayek said that it gave her opportunity to "explore the concepts and clichés people have about me and be self-deprecating" and have "permission" to do "the most disgusting, grotesque things", though one such thing in the script made her question, "Do I really want to do this?"[7] Brooker said that Hayek wanted her dialogue to be "more outrageous" than the "more tame" lines they had written so as not to "scare her off".[4] Murphy said of the scene where her character defecates in a church: "I couldn't be more excited about it and I could picture it".
posted by LionIndex at 6:17 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

but the evidence of Black Mirror seems to be that Brooker really isn't one of them.

After having seen the remainder of this season, I am going to agree with you.
posted by rozcakj at 6:11 AM on June 20, 2023

Netflix has made a fake Streamberry site at youareawful.com where you can make your own ____ is Awful meme, but only after you agree to the terms and conditions.
posted by miss-lapin at 11:05 AM on June 20, 2023

Youareawful also can be reached from streamberry.tv
posted by larrybob at 7:04 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

This felt to me something Brooker would have made up for “TV Go Home” back in the day. I enjoyed it, just lots of little enjoyable details how each level was more “TV” than the last etc.
posted by tomp at 8:27 AM on June 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

The parallels between this and Devs stood out for me. The computer, obviously, but also a protagonist’s life spinning out of control and her taking extraordinary measures to try to claim it back.
posted by jeoc at 5:38 AM on July 1, 2023