Rashida Jones has always been a vocal fan of Netflix’s dystopian anthology series “Black Mirror,” but she never expected it to secure her an Emmy nomination.
“I’m still pretty shocked,” Jones says of her lead actress in a limited series or TV movie nod for the Season 7 episode “Common People.” “I’ve never really been in the award conversation as an actress.”
Jones and I are speaking on the phone on a Friday in late July during her trip to Japan. We discuss how in its seventh season, “Black Mirror” secured the most Emmy nominations in the series’ history.
“I just love this universe so much,” says Jones, who co-wrote the show’s Season 3 episode “Nosedive” after going on a mission to meet creator Charlie Brooker. “There’s something dark and ominous and cautionary about the whole thing, but there’s so much humor in it. The greatest art does that, it reflects back to us where we are and isn’t afraid to make us laugh.”
“Common People” is a particularly bleak episode about a teacher named Amanda (Jones) whose husband, Mike (Chris O’Dowd), saves her from a coma by signing her up for a brain subscription service. Brooker co-wrote the episode with Bisha K. Ali, and it was directed by Ally Pankiw. The episode starts out as a love story but soon morphs into a parable about capitalism, corporate greed and healthcare: Once a persuasive Tracee Ellis Ross convinces O’Dowd’s character to save his wife for a few hundred dollars a month, the couple is stuck trying to make financial ends meet as the subscription service keeps building additional premium levels.
“The whole story is about a lack of agency, the intractable nature of capitalism and healthcare and the things you cannot control,” says Jones. “It’s survival. There are some ‘Black Mirror’ episodes where it’s like, ‘Oh, they missed that turn or made that decision.’ This was not that. This was intended to be two people who are victims of a system.”
“Capitalism is supposed to be this promise of, ‘If you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you too can have all of the money,’” Jones continues. “But the truth is, we just created a new class system. We obviously are having a giant wealth disparity problem, and the worst place we see it is in healthcare. It’s so criminal.”
On a Zoom call, Brooker tells me “Common People” started out as a lighter, more comedic episode. He thought of the idea while listening to a true-crime podcast when the host segued effortlessly from a gruesome description of finding a body in a canal to talking about a food delivery service.
“My one-line pitch to Netflix was, ‘It’s going to be a comedy story about this guy whose wife dies and he can get her back, but he has to get her back with ads,” says Brooker. “Originally they had kids and she’d start coming out with adverts while tucking them into bed.”
But when Brooker and Ali were talking about where the story ends, they discussed the consequences of how services have to expand infinitely and cause a degradation of everything. “I thought, ‘Oh, there would be a point where your life almost wasn’t worth living,’ and the thought of euthanizing someone who’s spouting adverts at you was darkly comic, but tragic, obviously.”
Brooker said he sees “Common People” as a companion piece to the second “Black Mirror” episode, “Fifteen Million Merits,” which he describes as a “nightmarish cartoon version of capitalism.” He wanted to channel a sense of people “feeling squeezed by everything,” but said he wasn’t initially trying to send a message about healthcare, partially because Brooker is British and doesn’t have the same experience as Americans.
“To use a phrase, it ‘hits different’ in the States, where it’s more overtly aligned with people’s experiences of how the healthcare industry works,” he says. “The fact that there’s a monetary value attached to our basic human survival feels ugly and unpleasant and inevitable.”
“We try to hit you in the gut,” he adds. “At a time when the world is getting more dystopian, I’m delighted that people will still turn up and watch us.”
Jones and I have a similar conversation, and she brings up how Brooker always says the series is not the future. It’s an alternate version of now.
“We have all of these tiny things that make our life more efficient, and we don’t read the fine print,” says Jones. “They’re collecting our data and reading our faces, and we are fully being used for tech to win. The truth is we’re slowly chipping away at our privacy and agency.”
I ask Jones about her relationship with technology and she laughs. “I do really like TikTok, and I know exactly what it’s doing, how it’s gathering data on me, how it’s keeping me there, and I still do it because I’m fallible that way.
“I can convince myself like — look how much I’ve learned about gut health! And the galaxy! Then every month I’ll take it off my phone. It’s an extremely sharp, thoughtful industry that is designed to capture me, and I’m absolutely not above that.”
To unwind, Jones goes back to the basics — spending time with her kid, for instance, or dancing. Jones, who has lost both parents in the last six years, says she’s also been reading books about Celtic mysticism, sorrow and connecting to nature.
“It makes me feel like it’s just all part of a bigger process,” says Jones. “The kids say you gotta touch grass and that’s a real thing. I just came from the forest in Japan, and I’m in awe, like, ‘What are the birds doing? What is the little bug doing on the grass?’ It’s something that was here before us and will be here when we go away.”
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