One of the standout episodes from season 6 of Netflix’s Black Mirror "Joan is Awful" is about as outlandish as satirical sci-fi gets. It involves (spoiler) an AI parallel universe inside a supercomputer, which allows TV executives to transform one person’s lived reality into a heightened, semi-fictional universe. A streaming service then broadcasts reenactments of that "source" person’s life — foibles, flaws, and all — to the world in the form of a sensational TV show.
Such a conceit can’t be directly inspired by real events...can it?
SEE ALSO: 'Black Mirror' Season 6 is Charlie Brooker versus Netflix"It seemed weirdly similar, right?" Caveh Zahedi, filmmaker and star of The Show About the Show, told Mashable in a phone call on Friday. He saw extensive similarities between "Joan Is Awful" and The Show About the Show, from the story and themes, to what he perceived to be an echo of his own name in the name of Mona Javadi the puppetmaster character in "Joan Is Awful."
"The only question is, have they seen the show?" Zahedi said.
2015’s The Show About the Show is not sci-fi. It’s a part-documentary-part-indie-comedy about Zahedi’s actual life. It has an ostensibly simple premise: each episode is about the making of the previous episode, using interviews, documentary footage, and reenactments. However, because of Zahedi’s compulsively self-revealing eye for relevance, and his commitment to honesty, each episode is an emotional bomb that explodes in the lives of the people in his professional and social circles.
Consequently, when the next episode is a "making of" about that prior episode, it’s only a "making of," in the sense that it explores the fallout from the previous episode’s explosion, but this exploration is inevitably just as explosive. And this cascade of explosions just repeats and repeats. It’s the same basic pattern as the fictional Joan Is Awful show, in which each episode is a reenactment of events from Joan’s recent life (starring Salma Hayek instead of herself), and the following episode shows the consequences of those events being made public — a similar cascade of explosions.
But what makes The Show About the Show and "Joan is Awful," so astonishingly similar is not just their premises, but their emotional content. For starters: both main characters have their romantic lives thrown into disarray. Joan’s fiancee almost immediately breaks up with her when he sees the first episode of the fictional Joan Is Awful TV show. In The Show About the Show, Zahedi’s wife holds out much longer amid the strain, but the deterioration of their marriage becomes the show’s main storyline. Moreover, intimacy in both stories is affected by the destabilizing knowledge that any act will have to be reenacted later.
In terms of their themes, both shows wade in the same waters as well, posing questions about truth in media, and the meaning and significance of reenactment. Zahedi plays himself in The Show About the Show, but often, his acquaintances don’t want to — or simply can’t — play themselves, and he has to hire actors. In both, this leads to collisions between the actor and the real-life character, as well as between reality and the representation of reality, and the way one feeds into the other.
Or, as Joan says to Salma Hayek, "You signed up to be the face of it. You’re a fucking enabler!"
"Any actor’s representation involves some kind of distortion. If you try to imitate someone, there’s going to be some kind of distortion," Zahedi said. In people’s real lives, he explained, "there’s some truth to who they are, but it’s a performance, or a public relations maneuver on some level."
To the Joan character, and eventually the Salma Hayek character as well, Joan Is Awful must be destroyed. The Show About the Show evokes a similar reaction from one of its participants, Zahedi’s now ex-wife Amanda Field, who threatened to sue to stop it from continuing. The Show About the Show, and Zahedi’s work in general frequently come under fire for their ethics, with a New York Times critic writing in a review of The Show About the Show that there’s "something sinister" about Zahedi.
Zahedi told Mashable that his current girlfriend, Kathy, read "Joan Is Awful" as — at least potentially — one more piece of criticism aimed at Zahedi. He says her reaction was, "'If it is inspired by the show, it seems like it’s against the show.'" If that were the case, it may even become a canonical part of The Show About the Show, which already includes clips of its own critics voicing their displeasure about it.
To make matters even more intertextual, in one episode of The Show About the Show, Zahedi butts heads with Netflix itself. Actor-director Joe Swanberg (playing himself in a re-enactment) tries to get Netflix to distribute Zahedi's show, but finally tells Zahedi its hopeless, and that if a company like Netflix picks it up, "then you’re gonna make fun of them in the show, and they don’t want that."
In that sense, "Joan Is Awful," is a refutation of Swanberg, in that the fictional platform it features, Streamberry, is an obvious parody of Netflix. Netflix evidently doesn’t mind its creators making fun of it — at least under certain circumstances.
But was The Show About the Show an influence on "Joan Is Awful" in the first place? Mashable’s request for a comment from Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker was still unanswered as of this writing.
It’s worth keeping in mind that Brooker is famous not just for echoing the past, but for predicting the future. Again and again, Black Mirror’s storylines have seemed to foreshadow some of the darker developments in the tech world, like an Amazon Alexa feature that mimics dead relatives — notably similar to what happened in the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back." Black Mirror has also predicted events in the ever coarsening farce of British politics, as when a revelation of the rather revolting alleged past sexual exploits of a UK prime minister echoed what happened in "The National Anthem," a particularly revolting episode of Black Mirror.
Echoes of The Show About the Show in Black Mirror might just be yet another coincidence that more or less fits this pattern.
Nonetheless, according to Zahedi, "It was uncanny."
Black Mirror season 6 is now available on Netflix.
The Show About the Show is on YouTube.
