Joan is Awful.

Okay I’ll start by confessing that I only watch the non-scary episodes of Black Mirror. I tend to get scared easily, to spook myself without any strange plot lines necessary. I’ve started doing this thing where I think of my favorite part of the day before I go to sleep so that I’m not stressed, because if I go to sleep stressed, I usually end up having stress nightmares. 

(Lately I’ve been spending more time in elevators, and I’ve had so many dreams where the elevator is going up, up, and then flies – somehow unattached to anything – down to the ground again. The elevator walls are glass all of a sudden, and I can see – Willy Wonka style – my whole way down. But anyway—)

All that to say I don’t like watching scary things, and therefore I probably won’t watch all the episodes of Black Mirror, but I do really like how imaginative the show is. I like how far they take their ideas and how they’re usually just within the perimeter of what our own minds consider possible, especially when it comes to technology and the lengths, as a culture, we’ve decided to go with it. 

In the past, I loved the San Junipero episode, where two queer people looked and found each other in a world parallel to our own. I loved the Hang the DJ episode for this same reason (two people finding love) and the Striking Vipers episode for exploring what it means to relate differently in a video game than you do in real life. 

For me, Joan is Awful was great because while it’s not about love and relation in quite the same way as the episodes above, it is about the anxiety with which our relationships can be tinged in a society where it feels like everyone is watching everything we do. 

I love the premise of this episode, which is essentially: What if the way we monitor our own and each other’s lives via social media was stretched so far as to cover everything, our personal lives wholly public and accessible for entertainment on a streaming platform like Netflix? What if the anxiety that you are coming off as “awful” when you’re doing your best is a fact—what if people can see you and what if they agree that yes, it’s true, you’re the worst? 

What I especially loved about this episode is that they made this nightmare feel both funny and true. They tease the fear in a way that makes it a little ridiculous. You are not awful, the show seems to be saying. You are trying your best, and even if you’re not, you really think you come off like this? *cue the protagonist throwing an e-cigarette on an employee she just fired*

I think Annie Murphy (from Schitt’s Creek) is perfect as the main character because she can both carry the seriousness of our collective fear and make it hilarious. The overall silliness of the episode makes me respect Black Mirror more because yes, our anxieties are often negative, dark, scary, but they can also be funny, right? They can also show us that we’re taking things too far, that we’re being ridiculous, that you may think you’re awful, but you’re not alone.