Netflix is Awful: Storytelling in the Technocracy

Can Black Mirror be a reliable narrator of the technocratic forces that create it?

This post contains some recapping and analysis of Black Mirror, Season 6 Episode 1, “Joan is Awful,” which first aired on June 15, 2023. If you haven’t watched it yet, you might want to. If you don’t care and in fact clicked this because you hate Netflix, then you’ll have to suffice with a secondhand knowledge of this very powerful episode of television.

And isn’t that the problem? It seems today that the most powerful stories about the technocracy are being told from inside the machine. 

Now, my disclaimer here is that I am not Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone magazine, so I have not seen every episode of Black Mirror (though I’ve been a fan since the beginning), nor do I have direct knowledge of the intentions of Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker––our modern-day Rod Serling––when he writes and executive produces an episode like “Joan is Awful.” I like Sepinwall’s articles about Black Mirror for RS, in which he names the prescience of this particular episode while also suggesting that the overall quality of the series has diminished. His point is that the tropes and situations in the show have gotten repetitive: that for instance, there are too many episodes involving the uploading of one’s consciousness. I get it. He might be right. (Though let’s be honest, it’s a cultural preoccupation––one reason why The Candy House by Jennifer Egan is so darn good.)

But, OK, all of that being said: I am here to argue that Black Mirror still matters. 

I could tell you it’s because anytime I’ve introduced students to a science fiction text in my classroom — say, Ted Chiang’s story collection Exhalation — they inevitably compare it to Black Mirror. They know the show. Its wide appeal comes in part from its “anthology” structure, complete with cameo writing, directing, and acting opportunities. It tends to reach lots and lots of eyeballs. It’s a reference that signals more a taste for dark dystopia than any political orientation. It’s not the Twilight Zone, which competed with absolutely nothing else for viewers’ attention in the 1960s (and certainly held my father’s undivided interest when he was a child). But it holds a similarly iconic status as a platform for a particular kind of mind-bending storytelling experience, an invitation into “another dimension; a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.” 

People really, really like to enter this dimension, the dimension “of mind,” where we can think about society by imagining how it would change if some taken-for-granted law of the universe were suddenly to shift. If an alien species were to arrive, wielding a book written in their alien language, and generously offering to fly humans on a touristic visit to their planet. If during your lunch hour at the bank — a time when you like to hide out in the bank’s vault reading your newspaper so no one can bother you — the H-bomb happened to go off, ending the world and killing all living beings, except you, because you were in the vault. If your adorable seven-year-old starts being able to banish people “to the cornfield” if he doesn’t like them. If there’s a fuzzy teddy bear-shaped terrorist on the wing of your airplane, right out your window, sabotaging the aircraft, taunting you.

Twilight Zone matters a lot for understanding Cold War era anxieties, preoccupations, imaginaries. It opened up space to allegorize Orwellian pre- and post-war power structures, including totalitarianism, globalization, occupation and invasion, propaganda, the family, the suburban or rural town, and other culturally resonant concepts with clear touchstones in real life: areas shot through with enough fear and horror that we might crave a simulation of a slightly different arrangement of things. Near-future, realist plots in particular (not every TZ falls into that narrow definition of sci-fi) offer this effect of an ever-so-slightly distorted reality.

Likewise, Black Mirror matters a great deal as a reflection (GET IT) of the burning questions and troubling thematics of our era. The difference here is that Black Mirror lives inside of a kind of postmodern frame narrative that is its actual medium: streamed television, on a juggernaut streaming service, the OG, the disruptor who transformed how we consume television: Monsieur Netflix himself.

Nevermind that it’s near impossible to cancel a Netflix subscription these days because a) they probably own at least one or two shows that you love and refuse to lose access to; b) they keep putting out occasional primo shit — reminds me of when I learned about intermittent operant conditioning in Psych class in high school; and c) we all share accounts with friends and family and so canceling would set off a chain reaction of complicated social relations. (This last one might just be me, but I somehow don’t think it is.)

But there’s also a kind of respect that I think I am enacting for our good ol’ pal, the ‘flix, the guy who started it all. I remember when “Netflix and chill” entered my students’ (and therefore my) lexicon a handful of years ago. (The students had to let me know that it was a euphemism for hooking up in front of a movie. It’s the “let’s go to the drive-in” of their time.) “Hulu and chill” just doesn’t sound right. Netflix is a sensibility, the air we breathe, the third party in our hookups.

Episode 1 of the new series of Black Mirror is certainly not the first or only meta-episode of television. Nevertheless, “Joan is Awful” feels emblematic of a strange moment in the history of the Television Industrial Complex, one in which, amidst actual political struggle on the part of writers and actors in the WGA/SAG-AFTRA union, a production company like Netflix can proudly promote an episode of television that satirizes itself. 

“Joan is Awful” feels emblematic of a strange moment in the history of the Television Industrial Complex, one in which a production company like Netflix can proudly promote an episode of television that satirizes itself. 

A Flattering Enough Dystopia

“Joan is Awful” (henceforth “Joan”) operates the way all Black Mirror episodes I’ve seen do: that is, the writers play with your anticipation of the weird. Dystopia and comedy have this in common, this ability to subvert expectations, to generate irony, out of the simple fact that the genre in which they’re inscribed carries its own affective set of expectations. 

Take the opening scene of “Joan.” A woman is in bed. Her phone alarm goes off. She’s groggy. Warm neon sunlight from outside her window emblazons itself on her forehead, an intrusion on sleep that prefigures the other intrusions and discomforts that await Joan that day. 

Joan has a funky hairdo, with two strips in the front dyed a striking grey-blond in contrast to her otherwise dark shoulder-length bob. I definitely got Cruella DeVille vibes, which I’m guessing was intentional. After all, we’ve been told: Joan is awful. She’s witchy.

She’s got a fiancé who apparently cooks her breakfast. “Yum,” she says, depressively, as he spoons eggs on her plate. In the car on her way to work, she sings along to explicit hip-hop lyrics. Is she awful, or is she kind of cute? (She’s Annie Murphy, so she’s very cute.)

Characterization here is teetering on the cliché, which is fine for a sci-fi story, one we know will be contained to this episode. Like the short story, which requires various narrative acts of compression, the stand-alone episode must be efficient. 

These opening moves, the writer’s gambit, set us up for what is to come. What proceeds over the next five or so minutes is a quick series of events in which, indeed, Joan is not on her best behavior: from her glass-walled manager’s office at a tech company, she fires an engineer (played by our favorite blowing-up, neurotic-comedic genius, Ayo Edebiri) who is working on a compression algorithm to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. Ick. Joan is already complicit in climate change, and in destroying the career of a successful black woman in tech who “just put a downpayment on an apartment.” Ethically compromised back to front, Joan is. That’s all before she gets the text from her ex that will precipitate even more blatantly awful awfulness.

Are we all in agreement, then?, the show seems to be asking at this point. We told you she’s awful — she is!

That night, Joan is back home with the fiancé, on the couch. They pull up their Streamberry account. Streamberry’s logo and intro music are Netflix’s, but with an S instead of an N. We’ve just met a key character in the episode, though this is not the final character to join the cast.

Because it appears that the newest show on Streamberry is a show called “Joan is Awful,” starring an actress with the same exact grey-blond streaks in her dark shoulder-length bob. It’s… yes. It’s Salma Hayek. Salma Hayek is playing Joan on television.

Shot for shot, meta-“Joan is Awful” shows us exactly what has happened in the past eight hours of Joan’s day. Chaos, of course, breaks loose. Every secondary character we’ve met so far is watching it, incredulous. Ayo Edebiri’s character is at a bar with a friend, drowning her laid-off sorrows, when she hears about the new most popular show on Streamberry and decides that “we are watching TV at a bar.”

Forget verisimilitude: everyone who knows Joan knows that this has to be her real life. When Joan’s fiancé hears the words coming out of Salma Hayek’s mouth, the words she spoke to her therapist earlier that day about their relationship, he gets in the car and drives away. By the time Joan gets back in the house, meta-“Joan is Awful” has caught up to present. Fade to black on a distraught and confused Salma Hayek. 

So if it’s not magic, and if it’s not a dream, what is it?

It’s AI, of course.

Netflix hopes that, in seeing its awful protagonist as human, we will see it, too, as human. 

Artificially Reliable

The rest of the episode turns into my absolute favorite kind of story: a heist, in which Joan will try to reclaim her autonomy from a mega-corporation, Streamberry, whose new AI practices have enabled this totalizing uncanniness. And because the meta-ness has only just begun, Salma Hayek will eventually show up at Joan’s door demanding an explanation. The hijinks are beyond satisfying.

A woman whose business is now in the street: this isn’t a new story. What’s new, of course, is that instead of a predatory troll doxing her, it’s a quantum computer using Salma Hayek’s likeness. In what could maybe be an allusion to Zoolander, Joan and Salma will work together to try to destroy the computer. Isn’t that what you would do in their shoes?

I’m unsettled. I’m unsettled the way I was unsettled when Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live. I’m unsettled in the way I was unsettled when Facebook renamed itself Meta. 

Satire, the “meta,” the critique, the dystopia. These are tools storytellers use to subvert power dynamics, to complicate the narrative, to undermine the status quo. Instead of the earnest Hero’s Journey, the tragedy, the drama, the tools of situational irony call everything into question. Up is down. Right? 

The distortions in “Joan” speak with two voices: the voice of the writer and actors, asserting a critique of capitalism run amok in the industry; and the voice of Netflix, cool enough to let us make that critique on its own platform because it is somehow aware that the best story about it is one that deconstructs it. Thanks to Netflix’s capital — not only financial but cultural and social — it gets to tell the best story about itself.

And just like Joan, Netflix makes itself a character who is both despicable and somehow also redeemable, forgivable. Just as Joan’s hairdo and problematic private rap sessions invite a pleasurable kind of judgment, a deliciously 21st-century unlikability that is so very likable, so Netflix hopes we will see it, and its stylish executives making presentations about quantum computing and “relatable content,” as a necessary evil. Netflix hopes that, in seeing its awful protagonist as human, we will see it, too, as human. 

But capital is not human. No matter how robotic your spokesperson sounds, we haven’t forgotten that there are human beings at the top of Netflix and the other mega-streamers, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars and refusing to negotiate* with the creators who make compelling stories like this one possible.

If you haven’t watched “Joan is Awful,” I hope you will. Maybe you’ll ask your cousin to borrow their Netflix account instead of resubscribing. Maybe you’ll illegally download it. Maybe you’ll decide not to watch and instead read articles about the strike.* Maybe, like me, you’ll start questioning why you’re always the one feeling so awful: why your human awfulness, and seeing it reflected on TV, feels so pleasurable. In the age of technocratic storytelling, there is no outside of the medium. There is no smashing the computer. 

There’s an optimistic read of “Joan,” though. Couldn’t we argue that Netflix is, ironically, making the case for its human creatives? Could the episode’s message be a celebration of human-made stories — written by human beings like Black Mirror creator Corey Brooker and acted by human beings like Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek?  Look how clever we can be when we let humans comment on our own condition! 

We want to know Salma Hayek is behind the performance because we value the physical work of acting. We value the physical and emotional labor it requires to inhabit a character. We respect the time and energy she invests in the projects she chooses.

But even with this read, we have to acknowledge that Netflix is outsourcing most of the villainy in the story to the quantum computer. It places the blame for intelligent design on “The Algo,” as if that algo weren’t built and implemented by people seeking wider profit margins. Mystifying, deifying algorithms and quantum computers — making them all-powerful and imagining them exceeding the human hand — is untruthful; it is manipulative. It is the very slipperiness on which a technocratic, self-referential satire must rely in order to win over its human viewers.

I knew that a digital likeness of Salma Hayek wasn’t playing Hayek — Hayek was, the flesh and blood human woman who also played Frida in Frida. Salma freaking Hayek — who is both real and fictive. 

What I mean is she’s a real person, but I only know what she and her team of publicists want me to know. That’s a good thing. Women need their names protected in this misogynistic world. The distinction is important, however, because the defenders of AI digital likeness actors populating our visual media will tell you that soon, you won’t know the difference between real and fake Salma.

But let’s remember why we want to know the difference. We want to know Salma’s behind the performance because we value the physical work of acting. We value the physical and emotional labor it requires to inhabit a character. We respect the time and energy she invests in the projects she chooses. With her human ability to choose — what some call free will, though here, free and human collapse into one.

Alas, we may never be privy to the truth about Netflix’s machinations — though please, Corey Brooker, give an unpaywalled interview about writing “Joan is Awful” as an excuse to stand up for writers and actors! (Or are you a producer now?) But I’m writing to remind us that just because computers use “neural” networks, just because we call it artificial “intelligence,” does not mean the analogy is correct. It is dishonest to imbue a computer with the ethical status of a human being — that is, the ability to take responsibility for harm, abuse, and other outcomes of its computer actions. It is a storytelling shortcut that sidesteps a conversation about corporate responsibility, regulation, guardrails — the very things being requested in the union negotiations as I write this.*

Mystifying, deifying algorithms and quantum computers — making them all-powerful and imagining them exceeding the human hand — is untruthful; it is manipulative. It is the very slipperiness on which a technocratic, self-referential satire must rely in order to win over its human viewers.

Maybe Joan is Brooker. Maybe this is the executive producer fantasizing about smashing the computer and breaking out of the fictive bubble of corporate streaming. 

If the dystopian allegory, or the satire, or the parody, or the meta-meta-reference, is spacious enough to contain both an ideological critique AND its opposite, it will sell. And in the process of selling, it sells itself. 

“Joan” ends with two Joans, chatting over coffee and wearing house-arrest ankle bracelets. They are bathed in beautiful California sunlight. Hollywood’s a prison. It might feel like freedom to play yourself playing yourself; I wouldn’t know. An actor is always already playing herself: Susan Sarandon on the picket line; Fran Drescher excoriating the production executives. Ironically, the only way to put a stop to the endless Meta-meta bullshit is to stop working. Just stop, and pray that in the meantime, the executives don’t decide to turn your likeness into the scab that replaces you. 

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*Note: I wrote this piece during the WGA/SAG-AFTRA joint strike, which ended on November 9, 2024. A couple of months later, the teaching faculty where I’d been substitute teaching courageously struck for 11 days, the longest teacher’s strike in our state for 100 years. I’m publishing this a little late, but I believe the concerns here will continue to be relevant as media production outlets become increasingly savvy about how they use irony and knowingness to convince us that they are self-critical enough to be considered reliable narrators.