Netflix Was Surprisingly Cool About Black Mirror's Meta Streamberry
"Black Mirror" is about to get majorly meta. The Netflix hit returns for its sixth season this week after four years off the air, and it turns out the time away gave series creator Charlie Brooker the chance to come up with some uniquely bonkers stuff. The new season seems to have plenty of tricks up its sleeve, from a retro space-age saga to an episode that may or may not be a full-blown foray into horror. The episode that seems most certain to get audiences talking, though, is "Joan Is Awful," a bizarre meta-story starring "Schitt's Creek" actor Annie Murphy — and Salma Hayek Pinault, who plays Murphy's character in what basically amounts to a Netflix Original about her life.
The show's version of Netflix is called Streamberry, and though the product title seems different enough to nip any comparisons in the bud, the visual design of the streamer is distinctly Netflix-esque, too. The trailer for the new season opens with Murphy's Joan and her partner scrolling through a Netflix-like interface, trying to decide what to watch. Instead of the red "N" logo we all know, the trailer also kicks off with an "S" logo instead. It's a level of self-reference so obvious that it's hard to believe the streamer signed off on it, but according to Brooker, the company was actually pretty chill about the whole thing.
Netflix said okay 'weirdly quickly'
"We just said, 'We've got this streaming platform called 'Streamberry' in this episode ... can we make it look like Netflix?' Brooker explained in an interview for the most recent issue of Empire. According to the filmmaker, "They went away and came back quite quickly — weirdly quickly — and said, 'Yeah, okay.'" This actually tracks with things we've heard about Netflix before, like that the streamer didn't mind when the short-lived comedy "Blockbuster" made jokes about streaming empires, or when Netflix gave a platform to the true crime spoof "American Vandal" despite the fact that it was clearly parodying docs like "Making A Murderer." Netflix certainly has its problems, but the team there clearly has a sense of humor about themselves.
In fact, Brooker said he had low-key hoped for more pushback from Netflix, just to make the episode more interesting. "There wasn't any resistance to it, that I could tell. Which is a bit disappointing, because it would be good to be able to say 'I just did it anyway because I'm an anarchist!' But no." Perhaps the content of the episode — in which Joan randomly discovers a prestige series made about her life, and eventually meets Hayek Pinault in person — will be plenty anarchic on its own.
Get ready for a bonkers season
Though the filmmaker didn't have to (or get to) deal with the type of classic network interference that would've made any criticism of Netflix in the show all the more prescient, Brooker notes that it'll still be a trip to watch the "quite meta and weird" episode on Netflix now that it's completed. "It's one thing me watching it in the edit, but the thought that people are going to be watching it on the Netflix platform itself? That's quite bonkers," he said.
"Black Mirror" is nothing if not bonkers, and the new season will feature five episodes to stretch the limits of our imagination — or, in the case of "Joan Is Awful," perhaps turn the familiar unsettlingly strange. Other guest stars this season include Aaron Paul, Zazie Beetz, Michael Cera, Josh Hartnett, Rob Delaney, Ben Barnes, and Himesh Patel, among others. Curiously, "Joan is Awful" is by far the most star-studded of the bunch, so I'm eager to see which of the above performers might end up playing a version of themselves.
We'll find out when "Black Mirror" returns to Netflix on June 15, 2023.