'Black Mirror,' Netflix, and Corporate Self-Deprecation

By Chris Revelle | TV | June 23, 2023 |

By Chris Revelle | TV | June 23, 2023 |

Black Mirror is a show I come and go from depending entirely on the guest stars and the premise. The show can be brilliant, as seen with “San Junipero” or “Hated in the Nation,” balancing wild premises with a critique of How We Live Now. Black Mirror can also be messy and frustrating, like with “Men Against Fire” or “Striking Vipers” where the kernel of their idea is intriguing, but the execution is badly fumbled. The show has an intoxicating amount of flexibility and directions to go, and season 6 (dropped on Netflix in its entirety last week) shows a new willingness to experiment with genres, even at times stepping away from tech-horror to tell new stories.

The season is lightly framed by Streamberry, a streaming app in the world of the show that’s a dead ringer for their parent platform Netflix. They’ve borrowed heavily from the distinctive branding with the recognizable red font, the “tudum,” and even the streaky color fade. Black Mirror uses this framework to bite the hand that feeds them, primarily in its first two episodes. Beware, on the other side of this gif of my queen Kelly Macdonald are spoilers for the current season of Black Mirror.

Season 6 starter “Joan is Awful” is a departure for Black Mirror in how it approaches its tech nightmare as a comedic caper. Annie Murphy’s Joan is a miserable middle manager at a corporation where it’s her thankless task to fire people the board deems unfit. She’s bored by her fiance, she’s meeting an ex for a drink when she probably shouldn’t, and while she’s not out-and-out villainous, she seems like a bit of an asshole. When she and her fiance sit down to an evening of Streamberry, they select a new drama starring Salma Hayek called Joan is Awful. Every moment of Joan’s day plays out in a heightened form, exposing her less-great side. Her life unravels: her fiance leaves her, she’s fired from her job, and worst of all there’s nothing she can do about it. Joan is Awful is an entirely AI-created program that uses licensed celebrity likenesses (like Hayek) to “star” in it. Streamberry plans to make tailored content for every viewer. This is presented as a critique of Netflix and the ethics of AI, how our devices surveil us, and whether a disposable streaming show is worth all this agita. It also shows streaming media to be a mindless parade of IP products with very little care put into them as long as they’re making money. These are rather salient points to be made during the ongoing Writer’s Guild strike.

The second episode, “Loch Henry,” is a pointed critique of the true crime genre, specifically the flavor of true crime “documentaries” that Netflix churns out regularly. Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold star as Davis and Pia, a pair of documentarians who have stopped in Davis’ hometown of Loch Henry, Scotland on their way to Rùm to film a man who guards birds’ nests of rare and precious eggs from poachers. This noble mission is thrown aside once Pia hears the mysterious tale of Iain Adair. Adair was a local weirdo who shot Davis’ policeman father while he was doing a wellness check on Adair’s home. Adair then killed his family followed by himself. Davis’ father survived but contracted MRSA and died. Local authorities found several corpses buried in the Adairs’ yard. Iain became national news as a serial killer and the once-hopping tourist spot of Loch Henry became a ghost town. Our leads decide to make a documentary about the incident to bring visitors back to town. Pia eventually discovers the horrifying truth: that Davis’ parents were the masterminds. Davis’ mother hangs herself leaving behind a wealth of evidence for the documentary. It’s a smash on Streamberry with everyone praising Davis for this “incredible story,” but the parting shot shows Davis alone and bereft, worse off for his success and knowing the truth. While this episode is generally critical of true crime, it calls out Netflix specifically as a purveyor of “men who kill women” docs. Further, it interrogates the supposed goal of true crime (to find “the truth”) as a pretense for repackaging tragedy as entertainment and needles the audience for enjoying it.

So does this mean Netflix is anti-AI? Or maybe this means Netflix is scuttling its ghoul-fascination true crime docs? Of course not. Netflix already uses AI for creative work like editing and here’s the next docket of atrocities to consume for fun as if these are not real lives marred under the sensationalized presentation. Those machines aren’t stopping, so why would Netflix pretend to criticize itself like this? Allow me to introduce you to the concept of corporate self-deprecation.

Remember this scene from Wreck-It Ralph 2? Was that followed by even the slightest change to Disney’s princess-with-a-dead-mom formula? That is corporate self-deprecation: a knowing joke that pays lip service to popular criticism but goes no further than that. It endears the corporation and allays concerns a potential viewer might have about their uses of AI or deadening approach to true crime without requiring them to do anything at all. They’re not like other corpos, no, they get it. Current culture values reflection or at least the aesthetics thereof, so corporations engage in lampshading because it makes them more money. The second it’s no longer profitable to dunk on themselves, they’ll move on to the next gimmick. They will do whatever they need to do to make more money and for now, that includes this game of pretend.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with watching and enjoying Black Mirror. I liked “Loch Henry” for its willingness to depart from the usual “what if phones, but too much” bit and for looking at the dehumanizing lens of true crime. It’s just that none of their self-critiques result in improvement, so the critiques they raise, as salient as they may be, fall entirely flat which makes the entire exercise feel tiresome. And isn’t Netflix tiresome enough already?