‘It was grotesque’: Netflix dragged for the ‘irony’ of Black Mirror’s Common People

There’s no denying that Black Mirror season seven came back with a devastating bang with its heartbreaking opening episode, Common People. This episode in particular sees married couple Amanda and Mike have to deal with a big corporation who offer them a chance to help Amanda survive her brain tumour, with a monthly subscription model. But as the months go by, the prices begin to change – and what people get included starts to shift for the price they pay including a horrible scenario where Amanda starts spouting adverts that she can’t even remember saying. It’s scary, it’s dystopian – but Netflix is getting dragged for the ‘irony’ of airing Common People in Black Mirror when the platform offers subscription tiers. Yikes.

Some viewers will be enduring that episode with adverts

In a very damning post on Reddit that set off a lot of discussion, one viewer posted that they’d watched the episode on the lowest Netflix subscription tier – which has adverts. “Just watched Common People and I can’t stop thinking about how grotesque it was to experience it on the lowest tier Netflix plan .It literally felt like the Netflix is either biting the hand that feeds it or licking it clean, hard to tell to be honest. But either way sitting through Common People while adverts chopped it up felt like the most honest portrayal of platform capitalism I’ve seen. The line between fiction and reality is completely gone and now we just live inside the monster while it parodies itself.”

Brutal.

Most Read

Everything the cast of Young Sheldon have been up to one year after that emotional finale

Lily Phillips reveals the one thing men at her events are banned from doing with her

Dave reveals the sad reason his feelings for Jamie suddenly changed on MAFS Australia

Charlie Brooker actually got asked directly in an interview with Variety about whether he was intentionally taking a swipe at Netflix in this episode. This would be the second time, as the platform was parodied in the season six episode Joan is Awful. Was the ‘irony’ in Common People from Black Mirror season seven intentional?

Brooker said: “Almost disappointingly, no. I’d like to be able to say we’re such rebels and we snuck this on. But no, it actually came about genuinely from various different angles. One was just listening to podcasts, observing how the posts naturally drift into sort of sales pitches. They have to do a sponsored bit and they almost do it without breaking their speech patterns. So there was a comic idea at the heart of that.

“Also I was thinking about this phrase from writer, Corey Doctorow, who coined this phrase ‘Inshitification,’ which is what happens to pretty much any service over time. It comes in, disrupts and then, over time as it has turn a profit, the experience gets worse for the users. But you can apply that to Facebook, to Uber … you name it.

“And even more broadly beyond that, I think there’s a general sense of everyone feeling kind of squeezed and having to take on side hustles all the time and just scrambling to survive. So I was kind of trying to channel all of that.”

Currently, the Netflix subscription model has three tiers in the UK. The lowest is Standard with Ads at £5.99. Standard is £12.99 and contains no ads and is in HD. Ultra HD costs £18.99 at the time of publication.

The Tab approached a Netflix spokesperson about this, who declined to comment.

Black Mirror season seven is available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook.