Joan, an ordinary woman with typical grievances, longs for better-tasting coffee at her office, questions the appropriateness of her new hairstyle, and worries about the lack of excitement in her sex life with her fiancé. Dissatisfied with feeling like a secondary character in her own life, she expresses her desire for a change during a therapy session.
As the protagonist in the latest season of the popular Netflix anthology series, Black Mirror, Joan, portrayed by Annie Murphy, gets more than she bargained for. She becomes the unwitting lead in a TV show called Joan Is Awful on a streaming platform called Streamberry. In this show, actress Salma Hayek plays the role of Joan. However, despite the initially intriguing and meta concept, the resulting storyline falls flat. “Joan Is Awful,” the Black Mirror episode, fails to deliver with thinly developed characters and a lazy parody of Netflix. The episode relies heavily on exposition about how Streamberry exploits Joan, topped with tired jokes about reading terms-and-conditions documents.
Season 6, the first since 2019, holds promise but ultimately disappoints. While it ventures into different genres and time periods, exploring themes of overconsumption and obsession with content, the execution falls short. Other episodic setups follow a similar pattern—teasing a sharp message only to fall into superficial conclusions. For example, in “Loch Henry,” a couple making a true-crime documentary gets entangled in the case, but the predictable and tedious mystery turns the episode into a lackluster thriller with trite commentary. Similarly, “Mazey Day” misses the mark by turning a potentially critical exploration of privacy rights into a pun-filled punchline, despite an unexpected twist.
Black Mirror had previously excelled at reframing societal concerns through unfamiliar worlds. However, this season fails to deliver the same ingenuity. While there are sparks of originality, the show seems disinterested in exploring how humans carelessly handle technological advancements, a core theme of the series. Creator Charlie Brooker’s approach to this season was to deviate from assumptions and do something different, but the result feels disconnected. The new episodes are more focused on changing the show’s reputation as speculative science fiction rather than providing meaningful critiques of technology. References to artificial intelligence and deepfakes feel obligatory at best.
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