Warning: This review contains spoilers for the Black Mirror season 6 premiere, “Joan is Awful.”
Black Mirror season 6 kicks off with “Joan is Awful,” a relatively lighthearted lampoon of the ruthlessness of streamers and their obsession with creating content that will get viewers hooked. “Joan is Awful” revolves around an ordinary woman who discovers that her life has been turned into a prestige TV drama starring Salma Hayek. Before too long, the bombshells delivered by the series start to destroy her life. Her fiancé leaves her when the show reveals she’s been meeting up with her ex, she’s fired from her job when the show reveals company secrets, and everyone she knows hates her because they’ve seen the real Joan.
The notion of an everywoman browsing a streaming library and stumbling across a dramatization of her own life is an intriguing what-if premise with the potential to have a ton of fun. In justifying the creation of the in-universe TV show, “Joan is Awful” touches on a lot of interesting ideas: A.I.-generated content, deepfake technology, data collection from personal devices. But it just mentions those issues; they don’t have much real bearing on the plot, especially as it reaches its climax. The unexpected consequences of mindlessly agreeing to a tech giant’s terms and conditions were explored with much more bite in the South Park episode “HUMANCENTiPAD.”
Comedically, “Joan is Awful” is one of the broadest episodes of Black Mirror: Joan diarrheas in a church in the middle of a wedding ceremony. For a show that has tackled such dark, twisted plot points as pedophiles fighting to the death and a convicted murderer becoming a tourist attraction, “Joan is Awful” falls on the lighter end of the spectrum. It’s a perfectly palatable premiere episode to settle viewers back into this ominous tech-savvy world ahead of the grimmer turns that the season will take later down the line.
Annie Murphy Delights As Usual
Annie Murphy, best known as Alexis Rose from Schitt’s Creek, gives a typically delightful turn as Joan. Much like in Schitt’s Creek, she handles the wacky comedic moments and the more nuanced dramatic moments with equal aplomb. Since Joan’s perspective is the key to the story, the entire episode rests on Murphy’s star power, and she doesn’t disappoint. Whether she’s yelling at the TV to correct its depiction of her mundane everyday activities or having a panic attack when it sets in that the entire world has access to her deepest secrets, Murphy gives a phenomenal performance.
Some great supporting actors are squandered with glorified cameos, like Himesh Patel and Rob Delaney, but Salma Hayek’s turn as an exaggerated, Curb-ified version of herself gets plenty of laughs. She casually brings up “my movie Frida” in conversation, she tells Joan she’s “lucky I’m a humanitarian” while threatening her, and when she’s plotting to break into the offices of Streamberry and she has a brief flash of insecurity, she reassures herself by saying, “I am Salma f***ing Hayek!” Even as the episode becomes a little too self-aware, Hayek is consistently hilarious.
Going Down The Meta Rabbit Hole
As with any Black Mirror episode, the success of the curious premise hinges on the explanation. The initial twist that the CEO of Streamberry is working on turning every single user’s life into a ____ is Awful show, simply because self-doubt, neurosis, and introspection are all big sellers, sticks the landing with the episode’s message about the streaming market’s callous, inhuman approach to audience engagement. But then it goes one step further with the revelation that Joan isn’t really Joan, but rather the version of Joan that the real Joan watches on TV.
An underutilized Michael Cera, playing the architect of Streamberry’s content, tries to explain to Joan that she’s really the digital likeness of Schitt’s Creek star Annie Murphy. The whole thing plays like the end of Sausage Party when the characters find out they’re voiced by Seth Rogen and Edward Norton. The quirky, mysterious what-if scenario of an average woman watching her life play out in a streaming series is much more compelling than the revelation that she was already in a streaming series all along.
“Joan is Awful” starts off as a promising satire of the fakeness of TV. The details of Joan’s life are embellished and the show purposefully focuses on her worst qualities, and the audience laps it up like juicy gossip. But it ends up getting way too meta to be truly meaningful. The satire of streaming falls apart when the episode drops its larger themes and gets into the nitty-gritty of fictive levels and quantum computing. “Joan is Awful” might not be as profound or mind-blowing as some classic Black Mirror installments, but Murphy is a joy to watch as always and the unique premise of art imitating life makes this a solid return for the iconic anthology series.