Joan Is Awful is by a long reach the best of season six. Which is like saying that The Last Jedi is the best Disney Wars film. Or saying that Smithereens is the best episode of season five. You could not find fainter praise to damn with. And in anticipation of someone out there saying you have to not think of it as a Black Mirror episode, well, first off, that is the name it is promoted with, and secondly, the execution is poor anyway.
Oh, the basic premise and beginning is very good. Joan is some sort of middle management in a corporation. She is called upon to fire an employee. But this is the first problem. Joan gives the employee the reasons given unto her by the head of the company, but the responses from said employee all suggest plot threads that turn out to be better than what we get to see. Joan is awful because she could have saved an environmental initiative that would have eventually saved the world, for example. Instead, we get to see Joan unloading about her bland boyfriend, who is thankfully disposed of soon enough in the story, and we get to see Joan watch a dramatisation of her day, a dramatisation that makes everything out to be a step worse than it was.
Joan seeks the advice of a lawyer, who tells her that she signed a contract allowing "Streamberry" to do this simply by accepting the terms of using their app. An EULA that violates laws or is contrary to public policy will not stand up in court. Wait, this is where I have to tell you that I am not a lawyer and am not giving legal advice. But an EULA giving permission to broadcast the unpleasant moments of your life to make you look "awful" would expose you to people being motivated to do harm to you. A streaming service with an audience of tens of millions is going to have some neurochemically imbalanced individuals who would feel motivated to punish a person for being "awful" in its audience. So... illegal? Likely not. But contrary to public policy? Oh, you bet. Broadcasting where a person lives, or doxxing, is also illegal. And can we say "unconscionable contract", boys and girls? Because those get struck down pretty regularly.
Then there is the in universe justification for the show. That people respond better to negative content about a person. Joan Is Awful gets better results than Joan Is Awesome, goes the logic. Well, I feel like I am speaking to an infant when I try to tell the writers of this episode this, but people respond better to good stories. This is why the ratings for Westworld season four killed the show. I was all geared up to see what kind of society Delores would build in place of Rehobham's abomination and instead I got an eight-hour snoozefest that ends in a reset button.
So what we have driving the plot is an artificial intelligence program that takes the events of peoples' lives and remixes them into tunes that make them seem like devils. Only, suddenly, without any setup, we are expected to believe that there are different levels of simulation. The Joan we have been watching for an hour is a TV simulation of the real Joan, the Salma Hayek Joan is a simulation of the TV Joan, Cate Blanchett is a simulation...
I hate Shakespeare, blah blah, but his quote "brevity is the soul of wit" applies here. Another saying that applies here is from the engineering community. If you have two designs that accomplish exactly the same things, the simpler one is the better choice. And whilst this saying from the writing community is not completely on point, it still relates. The length of your story should be the exact length you need to tell it well. Joan Is Awful does not feel padded, but this malarkey about there being this wannabe Rehobham that turns peoples' lives into hideos parodies, and that it uses multiple layers of realities to accomplish this, is overelaboration at its worst. There is literally no need for any reality above Salma Hayek's. And the ending feels like a cop-out. Okay, Charlie, I get it, you do not want to have bleak endings all of the time. But forced happy endings are worse. Do you seriously mean to tell me that when word got out about Netflix's... sorry, *Streamberry*'s show, that an army of affected people would not storm their offices and commit arson?
Every creative artist goes through a rough patch where nothing seems to work and the output feels terrible. That is why a good writer will show a draft of their work to someone they can trust to give them good feedback during the writing process. I guess I have just figured out what Charlie Brooker is not doing, and badly needs to do. Because credulity ends up utterly destroyed here, and that makes for bad science fiction.
I also want to ask, Charlie, are you upset at the people who gave season five the well-deserved thumbs down? Because carry on like this, and you are going to end up not having an audience at all.
Oh, the basic premise and beginning is very good. Joan is some sort of middle management in a corporation. She is called upon to fire an employee. But this is the first problem. Joan gives the employee the reasons given unto her by the head of the company, but the responses from said employee all suggest plot threads that turn out to be better than what we get to see. Joan is awful because she could have saved an environmental initiative that would have eventually saved the world, for example. Instead, we get to see Joan unloading about her bland boyfriend, who is thankfully disposed of soon enough in the story, and we get to see Joan watch a dramatisation of her day, a dramatisation that makes everything out to be a step worse than it was.
Joan seeks the advice of a lawyer, who tells her that she signed a contract allowing "Streamberry" to do this simply by accepting the terms of using their app. An EULA that violates laws or is contrary to public policy will not stand up in court. Wait, this is where I have to tell you that I am not a lawyer and am not giving legal advice. But an EULA giving permission to broadcast the unpleasant moments of your life to make you look "awful" would expose you to people being motivated to do harm to you. A streaming service with an audience of tens of millions is going to have some neurochemically imbalanced individuals who would feel motivated to punish a person for being "awful" in its audience. So... illegal? Likely not. But contrary to public policy? Oh, you bet. Broadcasting where a person lives, or doxxing, is also illegal. And can we say "unconscionable contract", boys and girls? Because those get struck down pretty regularly.
Then there is the in universe justification for the show. That people respond better to negative content about a person. Joan Is Awful gets better results than Joan Is Awesome, goes the logic. Well, I feel like I am speaking to an infant when I try to tell the writers of this episode this, but people respond better to good stories. This is why the ratings for Westworld season four killed the show. I was all geared up to see what kind of society Delores would build in place of Rehobham's abomination and instead I got an eight-hour snoozefest that ends in a reset button.
So what we have driving the plot is an artificial intelligence program that takes the events of peoples' lives and remixes them into tunes that make them seem like devils. Only, suddenly, without any setup, we are expected to believe that there are different levels of simulation. The Joan we have been watching for an hour is a TV simulation of the real Joan, the Salma Hayek Joan is a simulation of the TV Joan, Cate Blanchett is a simulation...
I hate Shakespeare, blah blah, but his quote "brevity is the soul of wit" applies here. Another saying that applies here is from the engineering community. If you have two designs that accomplish exactly the same things, the simpler one is the better choice. And whilst this saying from the writing community is not completely on point, it still relates. The length of your story should be the exact length you need to tell it well. Joan Is Awful does not feel padded, but this malarkey about there being this wannabe Rehobham that turns peoples' lives into hideos parodies, and that it uses multiple layers of realities to accomplish this, is overelaboration at its worst. There is literally no need for any reality above Salma Hayek's. And the ending feels like a cop-out. Okay, Charlie, I get it, you do not want to have bleak endings all of the time. But forced happy endings are worse. Do you seriously mean to tell me that when word got out about Netflix's... sorry, *Streamberry*'s show, that an army of affected people would not storm their offices and commit arson?
Every creative artist goes through a rough patch where nothing seems to work and the output feels terrible. That is why a good writer will show a draft of their work to someone they can trust to give them good feedback during the writing process. I guess I have just figured out what Charlie Brooker is not doing, and badly needs to do. Because credulity ends up utterly destroyed here, and that makes for bad science fiction.
I also want to ask, Charlie, are you upset at the people who gave season five the well-deserved thumbs down? Because carry on like this, and you are going to end up not having an audience at all.