If that’s the case, it’s admirable that Brooker isn’t simply resting on his laurels and trying to stretch the definition of what Black Mirror can be. Myha’la Herrold and Samuel Blenkin in Black Mirror Season Six Netflix But these later seasons have been more uneven, in part because they’re longer than the three-episode runs produced for Channel 4. It’s given Brooker and company access to bigger stars, and to a much broader and more expensive canvas. But the series’ 2016 move from the U.K.’s Channel 4 to Netflix has been a mixed bag. And the specific Netflix-oriented jokes in both “Joan Is Awful” and “Loch Henry” - including ones about the dangers of not reading the terms and agreements for any online service you use, and about how easily real people’s lives can be commodified in the never-ending search for streaming content - could apply to a host of other tech companies just as easily as they do to Netflix. The former seems more likely, if only because Netflix has become such a huge digital part of our lives that it would almost feel disingenuous if Black Mirror didn’t take it on at some point. But the totality of them is enough to make a viewer wonder if Charlie Brooker is growing tired of the show and/or his partnership with Netflix. There’s still tech in all the others, but it’s all vintage: VHS tapes in “Loch Henry,” digital cameras in “Mazey Day,” and TV sets in “Demon 79.” And toward the end of “Loch Henry,” aspiring filmmaker Davis (Samuel Blenkin) becomes a celebrity when his story is turned into a popular Streamberry miniseries that looks and feels like every Netflix true-crime show you’ve watched since the start of the pandemic.Īll of the episodes are interesting in different ways, even if “Joan Is Awful” is the only one that feels fully baked. “Mazey Day,” with Zazie Beetz as a paparazzo looking to make a big score involving a troubled movie star, is set in 2006, while “Demon 79” is set at the end of the Seventies. The remaining episodes are in the pre-smartphone era, though “Beyond the Sea” takes place in an alternate version of 1969, where a pair of astronauts played by Josh Hartnett and Aaron Paul can kill time during their long voyage by uploading their consciousness into artificial duplicates that are back home with their families. The second episode, the dread-soaked “Loch Henry,” is the only other one to be set in the present, and it’s set in such a remote part of Scotland that no one can get cell reception. Perhaps most important, it’s the only one of these five new installments to really play around with the series’ chief areas of interest about our overreliance on new (or upcoming) tech. Third, it is very much biting the hand that feeds it, since Streamberry is modeled in every way - including the logo font and the “ tu-dum” sound that plays when people launch the app - on Netflix. Second, it’s been a while since a Black Mirror comedy episode actually worked as a comedy, thanks to both its conceit - Streamberry has a supercomputer that can instantly adapt the events of Joan’s day into a TV show, using deepfakes of Salma Hayek and Himesh Patel - and the committed performances by Murphy and Hayek. First, it’s the best - or, at least, the best-structured - episode of the new batch. “Joan Is Awful” is notable for several reasons. “Joan Is Awful,” the first episode of the new season of Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi satire anthology series Black Mirror, stars Annie Murphy as the title character, a tech-company executive horrified to discover that her life has, without her permission, been turned into a drama series on a streaming service called Streamberry. This post contains spoilers for the sixth season of Black Mirror, which is streaming now on Netflix.
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