A viral episode of television that may have been making its own point about the thing it was criticizing.
Multiple people in my life told me to watch "Joan Is Awful," the first episode of Black Mirror's newest season. The premise was immediately relevant: a streaming platform uses AI to generate a real-time TV show about an ordinary woman's life, starring Salma Hayek, rendering her entire day's worth of decisions and missteps back to her — and the world — within twenty-four hours.
The episode that didn't move me
I watched it. And I found myself strangely detached from Joan as a character. She didn't feel real. Her choices felt random rather than human. The plot pivots — including a memorable scene involving a cheerleader costume and a church — felt less like dramatic escalation and more like a prompt-generated list of "outrageous acts a character could commit." The supporting characters felt like archetypes selected from a database rather than people who'd developed through experience.
About halfway through, I realized this might be intentional. The episode depicting a show produced entirely by AI was itself written to feel like something produced entirely by AI.
The point was the experience of watching it
The writers' warning isn't subtle once you see it: when you remove the human from the storytelling process, you lose the thing that makes stories worth watching. Structure can be generated. Plot points can be generated. A sequence of plausible events can be generated. What cannot be generated — at least not yet, and perhaps not ever in the way that matters — is genuine understanding of what it means to be a person navigating a complicated life.
The writer's strike happening in parallel to this episode's release gave the subtext additional weight. Not everything needs to be optimized for efficiency, particularly art. Writing is a craft that requires imagination, technique, and the kind of hard-won insight into human experience that AI cannot synthesize from pattern-matching on existing text.
I found "Joan Is Awful" entertaining without being moved by it. That's probably the most honest possible review of a show designed to demonstrate what entertainment without humanity looks like.
