Joan is an abnormal lady with abnormal complaints. She needs the espresso at her workplace tasted higher. She thinks her new coiffure is perhaps a bit a lot. She loves her fiancé, however worries their intercourse life isn’t as thrilling correctly. “I feel like I’m not the main character in my own life story,” she explains at a remedy session. When her therapist asks her if she would love that to vary, she nods.
Because Joan (performed by Annie Murphy) is a protagonist on the most recent season of Black Mirror, the Netflix anthology collection in regards to the tenuous relationship between people and expertise, she will get her want—after which some. She turns into the unwitting lead character of Joan Is Awful, a TV collection on a Netflix-like streaming platform referred to as Streamberry, through which the actress Salma Hayek (taking part in herself) performs Joan. But whereas this premise might sound like the kind of meta, kooky idea that Black Mirror as soon as had scrumptious enjoyable with, the ensuing story is inert. “Joan Is Awful”—the Black Mirror episode, not the Streamberry present—is a large number of thinly drawn characters, with a plot that finally quantities to a lazy parody of Netflix. The story rapidly spirals right into a litany of exposition dumps about how Streamberry can exploit Joan so simply, culminating with a bunch of drained jokes about how folks ought to learn their terms-and-conditions paperwork extra fastidiously.
Season 6, the primary since 2019, is characterised by this unfulfilled potential. Other episodes are equally bold—and equally disappointing, regardless of how considerably totally different the season feels from earlier ones. The new assortment of tales consists of a number of set prior to now versus the close to future, and dabbles in farcical comedy and supernatural horror. This season can also be preoccupied with content material—our overconsumption of it, our incapacity to disregard it, and our obsession with making extra of it. But very similar to “Joan Is Awful,” these contemporary setups solely produce stale storytelling.
Again and once more, Black Mirror appears poised to ship a pointy message solely to go for superficial conclusions. In “Loch Henry,” a filmmaking couple engaged on a true-crime documentary a couple of native assassin develop into personally concerned with the case. But the central thriller is so predictable and tedious—much less The Jinx, and extra a forgettable TLC particular—that the episode morphs right into a uninteresting thriller, providing trite commentary in regards to the public’s insatiable want for true-crime tales. “Mazey Day,” the shortest installment, follows Bo (Zazie Beetz), a paparazzo who goes to excessive lengths to seize a shot of a film star in rehab through the early 2000s. After Bo’s dogged work results in tragedy within the opening minutes, the story seems prepared to offer crucial observations about public figures and their proper to privateness—however even with a stunning, un–Black Mirror–esque twist, the episode shifts tonal gears so rapidly, it turns a starlet’s plight right into a punny, episode-ending punch line. Both episodes are missed alternatives: They frustrate not just for their failure to pinpoint fashionable anxieties—one thing Black Mirror has executed so nicely prior to now—but in addition for dealing with their potent topics so lazily.
“Beyond the Sea,” the season’s feature-length third episode, would be the most undercooked. On paper, the story is a giant swing: Set in an alternate 1969, it tells the story of two astronauts, David (Josh Hartnett) and Cliff (Aaron Paul), who can switch their minds into robotic replicas of themselves on Earth, permitting them to spend time with their family members. When David’s household is killed by a cult and his duplicate destroyed, Cliff lets David borrow his duplicate, which signifies that David’s consciousness will get to enter Cliff’s machine physique. But the tantalizing framework yields a surprisingly torpid story. The cult, which was focusing on “unnatural” households, isn’t talked about once more. The psychological results of spending time in one other particular person’s physique go unexplored. “Beyond the Sea” as a substitute spends an inordinate period of time on David’s affection for Cliff’s spouse, which ends up in an unearned love triangle. The present has tackled infidelity and unconventional attraction earlier than—within the first season’s “The Entire History of You” and the fifth’s “Striking Vipers”—however in way more shrewd and considerate methods. Those earlier episodes explored how expertise usually encourages robust feelings within the type of lust and jealousy; this one merely seems like a by-product drama with a bloated price range.
At its greatest, Black Mirror used unfamiliar worlds and excessive hypotheticals to reframe acquainted considerations about society’s ills. A deceased particular person’s social-media accounts grew to become an artificial-intelligence-assisted service within the touching “Be Right Back.” The darkish attract of reaching stardom by actuality TV was represented by a dystopia of stationary bikes and infinite expertise reveals within the dazzling “Fifteen Million Merits.” The brutality of the justice system—and our compulsion to file footage—grew to become an amusement park constructed to torture a convict within the terrifying “White Bear.”
That ingenuity is essentially lacking from Season 6. There are glimmers of originality—the final episode provides its protagonist, a quiet salesgirl who pockets a harmful talisman, a really impressed scene companion—however the present is seemingly disinterested in what has been one in every of its principal topics: how carelessly people deal with the improvements meant to raised their lives. In an interview, the collection’s creator, Charlie Brooker, defined that he “approached this season thinking, ‘Whatever my assumptions are about Black Mirror, I’m going to throw them out and do something different.’” Season 6 actually succeeds in being distinct, however at a value. Black Mirror’s new tales are extra involved with altering the present’s fame as a speculative science-fiction collection than with really critiquing expertise. And as a lot because the season brings up related improvements, its mentions of synthetic intelligence and deepfakes are perfunctory at greatest. Like Joan, the present needed to be the principle character—and, like Joan Is Awful, ended up making nothing new.