‘Common People’ Is a Sobering Return to Form for Black Mirror

The anthology show’s season 7 premiere proves that there are still dystopias left to portray

Netflix

By the time Black Mirror had reached its fourth season, I started to wonder where its writers had left to go. How many technological hellscapes can be conceived of before the edges begin to blur?

It’s a show that suffers from very unique constraints. It’s also one whose value is hard to communicate without a few light spoilers.

With few exceptions, each episode throughout Black Mirror’s first five seasons centers around new technologies and the dystopian consequences that come paired with them. But continually conjuring up new and abusable innovations is no easy task. There’s limited territory that its writers can foray without rehashing old tropes or revisiting concepts that have already been touched upon.

Making matters more challenging still is the fact that our world invents faster than any show could ever feasibly keep up with. As a result, the prophetic brilliance of Black Mirror’s earliest seasons has been difficult for writers to maintain.

Working within those restrictive parameters makes the show feel like a candle burning at both ends. It’s caught in a pincer between prophecy and plagiarism. I have a tough time believing that there aren’t would-be Black Mirror episodes that never emerged because society beat them to the punch.

“Companies use AI to imitate the voices of loved ones and carry out scams” was a concept Black Mirror likely had loaded in its chamber before criminals arrived at the same idea and fired the shot first.

Inversely, there are already episodes that have become realities in one form or another, from the Social Credit System in China to companies offering AI-powered resurrections of loved ones.

It’s true that innovation often draws inspiration from sci-fi. But likely no show offers a greater reservoir for today’s innovators and tomorrow’s tech titans to draw from than Black Mirror.

The territory that season 7’s premiere, “Common People,” explores isn’t wholly new for the series. It exists somewhere in the Venn diagram between the anthology show’s most hard-hitting subject matter — touching on everything from life, death, capitalism, and the narrowing gap between brains and computers.

The plot of the story falls into place when one of the lead protagonists, played by Rashida Jones, falls into a coma. Struggling to process the sudden turn of fates, her husband, played by Chris O’Dowd, takes doctors up on an experimental new treatment. She’ll walk free from her hospital bed and fully regain consciousness — but on a subscription-based model.

The episode’s most poignant commentary is on “enshittification,” a concept that Wikipedia defines as, “a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.”

If you’re alive in the world today, there’s a fair chance you’re familiar with the trend. The principle underlies everything from healthcare to capitalism as a whole. When the internet was unveiled, it brought with it the promise of a boundless knowledge haven. Now, there’s no learning about transpiring conflicts across the planet without being bombarded by unskippable ads for Pizza Hut. Nearly every social media app and streaming service has undergone a similar degradation.

“Common People” explores where this type of corporate greed ultimately leads. And it does so with a scabrous nihilism that makes Don’t Look Up feel almost optimistic.

Just as Netflix seemed to democratize a vast world of content before splintering off into competitors and introducing price tiers, the season 7 premiere of Black Mirror plunges us into a world where consciousness itself can be gated off by paywalls.

At first, the service, affectionately named “Rivermind,” seems to be devoid of drawbacks. But as “Rivermind Plus” and “Rivermind Luxe” tiers are released, users’ quality of consciousness is systematically downgraded and diluted. People with the basic Rivermind plan installed are pigeonholed into becoming mouthpieces for corporate interests. They deliver “contextually relevant” advertisements to bystanders and return to their normal selves seconds later, unaware of what they’ve just said or promoted.

Eventually, the protagonist’s “Rivermind Common” plan is reduced to the point where travel to even neighboring towns becomes impossible without an upgrade, and the husband is forced to increasingly desperate extremes to pay increasingly onerous monthly fees. The bureaucratic evil is so familiar that it’s hard to know whether to laugh at the sheer believability or throw your remote at the smirking, pocket-lining sadists perpetrating it.

So much of Black Mirror’s keen sting owes to the fact that the show never devolves into the realm of hokey sci-fi. The episodes that have impacted me the most deeply take place in a world almost indistinguishable from the one that I know today. No flying cars or robot butlers doing our bidding, just people confronting the realization that the future is here and they’re a part of it. We experience the vicarious pain and vertigo in seeing protagonists try to keep on their feet in a world spinning faster than we’re built to make sense of.

Black Mirror isn’t a show that makes for breezy watching. At its most valuable, it’s not exactly fun. But to leave people entertained isn’t its main mission. Sometimes it feels more like it’s consumed for clarity than it is watched for entertainment. So much of its value is in the discordant therapy it can provide for those of us coming of age in a world that often feels like it’s unraveling at the seams. It helps us to sit with the implications of this future we’re barreling toward. And in that confrontation is a sort of catharsis.

It’s safe to say Black Mirror is a show that’s best consumed in small doses. When so many series benefit from continuity, it’s the rare exception where binge-watching might actually detract from the overall experience. It could leave viewers facing off against something heavier than they can bear in one night; even lone episodes are known to spur existential crises from time to time.

Yet it’s that philosophical power that defines the show for me. It’s as grounded and disconcerting as it is prescient. It’s bleak and sinister, yet hauntingly human at every turn.

The impressive tightrope walk that Black Mirror has held throughout this past decade elevates it to a place where I consider watching the show not just helpful or worthwhile, but necessary.

---

This project only works if enough people believe it’s worth backing. If that includes you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Payment plans start at under $2 a month.

---