From dubious social algorithms to killer surveillance systems, the dystopian anthology series Black Mirror is not afraid to shine a black light on the complex relationship between humans and technology. The decade-old series, created by Charlie Brooker, straddles the line between bleak and thought-provoking technological and psychological horrors brought to life through carrying degrees of mortality in each episode. “Joan is Awful,” the standout episode of the latest Season 6, follows the ordinary goings-on of a smarmy woman named Joan (Annie Murphy), who finds out that through the powers of AI-generated content, her life life has turned into a glossy TV show starring Salma Hayek on Streamberry, a Netflix surrogate streaming platform. Here, Brooker discusses veering into absurdist humor while maintaining the process of creating a permanent state of mesmerizing horror.
DEADLINE: Where did the concept of “Joan is Awful” come from?
CHARLIE BROOKER: Ideas were spinning around in my head for a while. One, I wanted to do a story about a news network that pumped out constant deep fake footage of things and political candidates doing ridiculous things to humiliate or make them look heroic. But it was about them claiming it was satire while also doing deep fake disinformation. But I couldn’t work out how to get into that story. The other thing was that the phrase “Joan is Awful” wouldn’t leave my head for some reason. What if one day your name was Joan, and you wake up to an exclusive story running on the front of the newspaper that says, “Joan is Awful?” And it’s just interviews with everyone you know saying you’re awful for minor things. But I couldn’t work it out beyond that.
Then, I started watching The Dropout with my wife, which I really enjoyed. And we were commenting on how close to present day it was in dramatizing things that just happened. And so, I imagined what would happen if Elizabeth Holmes switched on the TV and there was The Dropout. So, all those ideas I had came together, and that’s what “Joan is Awful” is. It’s a story about an average person who switches on the TV, and there’s a deep fake show dramatizing her life and making her look awful.
DEADLINE: What are some of your favorite TV shows and films that are baked into your DNA? I also know you’re a video game guy too, so if you want to shout out what you’re playing I won’t stop you.
BROOKER: This is going to sound so tragic, but right now there’s a game called Balatro. It’s like poker, and it’s possibly the most addictive thing ever created. It’s currently on Nintendo Switch and Steam deck, but it’s going to be released on phones, and at that point I think humankind’s activity is going to drop about 25%. I play that in short bursts when I’m writing to reward myself. I do like Ghost of Tsushima and Dave the Diver too, but there’s loads more.
In terms of being inspired by movies, it’s interesting. I recently re-watched The Truman Show because I’d shown it to my kids who are 10 and 12 and they loved it. And I’d almost forgotten how influential that had been on me as a writer. I think in terms of Black Mirror, the most influential films probably are The Twilight Zone, RoboCop and Se7en. The vibe of the end of Se7en is often something I’m aiming at. And then more recently, I tend to watch a lot of documentaries. I don’t tend to watch other shows if people tell me they’re a bit like Black Mirror, because I’ll get crushing professional jealousy. The Bear, I’ve watched, but not Season 3 yet because I’ve been busy in production. Lots of things I’ve seen though.
DEADLINE: The release timing for “Joan is Awful” amid the historic WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes couldn’t have been more appropriate since this episode deals with the problems of Artificial Intelligence in the filmmaking industry. What’s it like being a soothsayer?
BROOKER: The soothsaying aspect comes up quite often. Unfortunately, I seem to have an early alert system for people sending me things like, “Have you seen this news story? This is quite Black Mirror.” And all I can say is, “Well, I’m just exaggerating something I’ve seen.” And it’s just the way that, unfortunately, the world works. It seems that things get worse, so reality did catch up. But the timing of the episode was crazy. Sometimes, with a story, you’re like, I have to write this before someone else does this. At the time of writing, ChatGPT hadn’t blown up yet. But, you know, you type something into it and get an immediate first reaction: fear. Because it’s doing a convincing impersonation of coming up with thoughts, the more you play with it, the more you see how limited it is.
However, the timing of this massively spiked public interest in AI as a threat to the creative industries and the creative arts. And so, it was nuts because we were in post-production on the episode at that time, and the timeliness of that as it came out around the strike, I couldn’t have foreseen, but gratifying to have done something about it. If the episode was helping to — in its own comically grotesque way — articulate some of the dangers and some of the problems and fears, then that’s especially satisfying.
What was interesting was both Salma Hayek and Annie Murphy, when they had the script…any woman in the public eye, any celebrity in the public eye, they’re bound to deep fake imagery and things like that. They’re already disturbed, and they’re already thinking about what control do they have over their literal image. So, it was interesting to explore all of that, and the episode is probably the most overtly comedic one we’ve ever done.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk about the casting of Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek in the role of Joan. I imagine you didn’t have them in mind while writing this script. How did you go about building the script to fit them in? And what was it like working with both actors as they played off each other?
BROOKER: The earliest version of the script just said, Hollywood A-lister. We thought Salma Hayek would be perfect, but there would be no way she should do this. I believe we had Annie at that point, and then we spoke to Salma and got her on board. She was immediately hilarious, and her major note was that the character Salma Hayek could be more outrageous. Because obviously, what I didn’t have in the first version I sent to her was have the character sh*t in a church. It was written so blandly because I wouldn’t have had the balls to write in some of the stuff she says in the final version of the draft. She was a more strait-laced character. Salma was a really good sport and was like, “Well, can you mention … Can we say that I’m…” Some of the lines in the episode that she says about herself, like, “I am a dyslexic, talented actress with questionable English,” I think that might have been an ad-lib of Salma’s that we left in because I would not have dared write that in the original draft. So, she encouraged me to parody her, making the character more outrageous and scary.
DEADLINE: Quam-puta was just as cheesy as it was a brilliant play on words.
BROOKER: Yes. She would throw in loads of stuff to jot down. She was gutsy and gung-ho, just a very funny person. And Annie Murphy, for me, like a lot of people, ended up watching Schitt’s Creek during the pandemic. I became a huge fan, so getting her as well was nuts. There was a point where we sat down and had time to workshop a couple of scenes just to give them more outrageous things to say. Our director, Ally Pankiw, did a really good job. She’s a writer as well. She worked on Schitt’s Creek and directed a show called Feel Good in the UK, so she’s really funny. And good Christ, we also have some bloody cameos in that episode. It’s crazy. We’ve got Michael Cera showing up, the fact that he shows up? He wasn’t in the original script. Ayo Edebiri, too. I don’t think I’d seen The Bear when Ayo came on board. We had an absolutely stacked cast, but it was great.
DEADLINE: Considering how meta the episode is regarding its own Netflix-esque streaming service, Streamberry, along with quips that dig into cinema being diminished into a streaming app, did Netflix have any feedback for you?
BROOKER: It slightly happened in a stealthy way. In the original draft, I referred to Streamberry as a Netflix/HBO/Disney+ style streaming service. And then, during pre-production, we looked at the graphics and said, “If we’re going to make it look a bit like the Netflix homepage, why don’t we make it look exactly like the Netflix homepage?” So, we asked permission to do that and even to use the noise at the start. It just struck us as a funny idea. Netflix was good sports about it.
DEADLINE: You’ve said in the past you never wanted Black Mirror just to be this thesis statement of “Tech is bad,” but more about people being the destructive force. “Joan is Awful” seems like a little bit of both. What do you think people are responding to overall about the show?
BROOKER: Getting recognition has been amazing because when I first started, I had no conception that this was a show that would ever travel beyond the shores of the UK. I get frustrated about people going, “Oh, it’s the phones are evil and tech is bad” show. It’s because I think I’m impressed by the technological tools that we create because they’re f*cking amazing, and phones are amazing. Just like any powerful tool, it’s what you do with it. AI-generated imagery, for example, is impressive and incredible. You could use it completely f*cking destabilize our society by pumping out terrifying misinformation, or just use it as a tool in Photoshop that fils things in, or use it to bounce ideas back and forth, or something innocuous as a list of names for coal miners in the 1930s that I can pick. However, if you were using it to generate a pitch and then try to turn it into a show, I think that’s not good. And you’ll end up with dog sh*t, and you’ll be putting people out of work. So, with any of these things, it’s how you use it. So, if anything, it’s not “the tech is bad” show. It’s “the tech is impressive but neutral and the humans, it’s not that we are f*ck-ups, because we’ve invented this stuff, we’re amazing” show.
I often liken it to suddenly growing a new limb. Something like social media, it’s incredible. It’s like having an extra limb, but we can’t quite control it. We are clumsy. We’re still knocking things over. Similar to the printing press, no one would say that the printing press was a terrible invention. It revolutionized the way knowledge is disseminated throughout the world. As a result, it did have people publishing really ugly propaganda to disseminate horrible ideas. So, all of these things come at a cost. If anything, I’m a natural neurotic worrier generally, and I worry all the time about how these things are impressive. And as a former video games journalist and current dweeb, I love all of this stuff. I couldn’t write Black Mirror if I hated technology. Because half the time, I’m looking at images of phones and saying, “Oh, can we change the design of it?” It would be an awful job if I hated technology. But I worry about our propensity to be clumsy.
This is partially why we don’t tend to write stories on Black Mirror about an android that learns to cry or something like that. In the episode “Be Right Back,” the problem was that the android didn’t feel emotions. The problem was that the android wasn’t a good substitute for the person that someone’s grieving over. And I think that’s an interesting space, and hopefully, I think maybe that’s a thing people respond to. There’s a creepiness to be mined in the slight disconnect we feel sometimes when our human emotions are butting up against the cold, hard screen. Technology has been a universal wave that’s transformed all our lives in many ways.
DEADLINE: What thematic elements can fans expect from Season 7?
BROOKER: We’re doing some things we’ve not done before. People can expect quite a lot of emotion and, hopefully, a good mix of chills. We did a couple of horror stories in Season 6, which we label as Red Mirror. But this time around, the episodes are all, in a way, like OG Black Mirror. I wrote one script, and the general consensus was that it was one of the bleakest, heaviest gut punches yet. There’s also techy episodes and ones that are making people cry. So, hopefully, it’s a full emotional workout, but we shall see. The viewers will be the judge.
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