Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Black Mirror’ Season 6 On Netflix, Where More A-List Stars Are In More Tales Of Technology Run Amok

Black Mirror is back after a four-year absence, with Charlie Brooker and his writers giving audiences creepy stories about technology run amok — but not so amok that they don’t seem plausible. As usual, the episodes are stuffed with A-listers.

BLACK MIRROR SEASON 6: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman wakes up to her phone alarm, and drags herself out of bed.

The Gist: In the first episode, “Joan Is Awful,” Joan Tait (Annie Murphy) is an executive at a high-tech startup. She wakes up, gets served a somewhat tasty breakfast by her fiance Krish (Avi Nash). She goes to work and has to fire a developer named Sandy (Ayo Edebiri), who feels betrayed by the fact that Joan is hiding behind “the board.” Joan goes to her therapist, calls being with Krish “safe” and that she doesn’t feel that she’s the main character of her own story. She decides to meet her more dynamic ex, Mac (Rob Delaney), who wants her back.

That night, she sits down with Krish to watch a show on the massive streaming service Streamberry, and they come across a show called Joan Is Awful, with a picture of Salma Hayek looking very much like Joan, complete with white streaks in her hair. The first episode looks like a carbon copy of the day Joan just had, with Hayek playing her, and other well-known actors playing everyone else. Everyone else in her life sees the episode, too, and it goes viral.

Krish, who is played in the show by Himesh Patel, sees the therapy session and the meeting with Mac, and takes off. The next day, a shaken Joan goes to work and finds out she’s been fired for “technically” violating her NDA, even though it was Salma Hayek speaking the words.

She goes to a lawyer (Lolly Adefope), who tells her that she agreed that her life could be used when she signed off on Streamberry’s terms and conditions. And Salma Hayek isn’t Salma Hayek but a deepfake AI version of her; the entire show is CGI. All the details of her life are provided by what her phone and her computer records.

Joan decides to do something truly profane to draw out Hayek, and when she does, the two find out that the world they’re in isn’t exactly what they think it is, thanks to an IT dude who looks like Michael Cera.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Black Mirror Seasons 1-5. The show is in an anthology format a la The Twilight Zone, but its topics are more technology-oriented.

Our Take: There are very few showrunners working for Netflix that can openly mock Netflix, but Brooker is one of them. Streamberry’s logo looks like Netflix’s, it goes “dudum” like Netflix does, and the interface looks exactly the same. The way showrunners have been sniping about the service’s algorithm-driven programming decisions, you don’t think they’ve tried to at least float the idea of tailoring shows based on the massive amount of information its gathered about its users?

Without spoiling anything, the episode gets very meta, even beyond Joan seeing Salma Hayek playing her — and Salma’s version of Joan seeing Cate Blanchett playing her. There are lots of funny moments, especially when Hayek herself appears, looking to extract blood from Streamberry’s executives for using her image this way. When the f-bombs fly. Hayek is at her funniest.

Brooker wrote this episode, and Ally Pankiw directed; as is Brooker’s habit, sometimes things get a little too in the weeds as far as strangeness is concerned, like when Cera’s techie character tells Joan and Hayek about the world they’re living in. The super-meta conclusion is less than satisfying, but it’s par for the course when it comes to most episodes of Black Mirror.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in this episode.

Parting Shot: Joan has a sweet reunion with the woman who played her on Joan Is Awful.

Sleeper Star: We wish Delaney was given more to do as Mac, though we were happy to see him watching Joan Is Awful while sitting on the toilet.

Most Pilot-y Line: Hayek calls Streamberry “Strawberry” because, ha ha, English is her second language. Oy.

Our Call: STREAM IT. As with every anthology series, Black Mirror‘s episodes will vary in quality, but they’re always entertaining, and the first episode gives the new season a good start.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.