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‘Black Mirror’ Study Guide: Joan Is Awful
The first episode of Season 6 starring Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek is a timely critique of deepfakes and AI-generated entertainment.
Created by Charlie Brooker, ‘Black Mirror’ is a speculative sci-fi anthology series that examines the dark aspects of modern society, particularly as it relates to our relationship with technology. These study guides examine the themes each episode explores.
After a full four years, Black Mirror is back with its sixth season, and at perhaps the most opportune time.
The first episode of the new season, “Joan Is Awful”, stars Annie Murphy of Schitt’s Creek fame as the titular Joan, a mid-level manager at a tech company called Sonicle who’s quite the coffee snob.
On a particularly eventful day, Joan fires one of her employees, Sandy (Ayo Edebiri), then — after some trepidation — meets up with an ex-boyfriend, Mac (Rob Delaney) who broke up with her some time ago and has texted her out of the blue. The two end up meeting up and kissing, but leave it at that, and Joan returns to her husband, Krish (Avi Nash).
After a nice meal and some wine, the young couple curl up on the coach and sees what’s new on Streamberry, the fictional world’s Netflix. To their surprise, they come across a new show called Joan Is Awful, starring Salma Hayek as Joan, with skunk-streaks just like Joan.
The first episode of the show-within-the-show begins exactly as this episode of Black Mirror begins, following Joan as she raps in her car, icily fires Sandy, tells her therapist about her nice-but-dull husband, and receives texts from Mac.
Protagonist Joan finds this all to be awful, as she knows its all mostly accurate, and knows how the day plays out, and — worst of all — knows her husband is going to believe it to be true.
Her husband storms out, Joan is distraught, and proceeds to go on a mission to figure out how this happened, including speaking to her lawyer, trying to get the attention of Salma Hayek, and — eventually — defecating in a house of God.
