Charlie Brooker is back with a bang in a heartbreaking tirade against private healthcare. Here’s our Black Mirror: Common People review.
“Here is how platforms die”, Cory Doctorow began his now infamous 2023 article – the first recorded use of the increasingly useful term, “enshittification.”
“First,” he continued, “they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
In Common People, the opening episode to Black Mirror season 7, private healthcare finds itself in the middle of this cycle. A tech startup has developed a miracle cure for damaged brains – a cloud-based system allows a patient’s neural processes to run from a wireless power grid. “Netflix for your brain” is a phrase the show, for obvious reasons, never says out loud. It doesn’t have to.
Mike (Chris O’Dowd) signs up to the programme when his wife Amanda (Rashida Jones) collapses in the middle of her elementary school class. Rivermind – the friendly corporate agency fronted by a smiling Tracee Ellis Ross – is indeed good to them at first. $300 each month buys the couple access to their entire home county, with more to come when the service expands state and nation-wide. Sure, Amanda sleeps more often (to reduce the strain on the servers), but what do you expect from someone recovering from a traumatic brain injury? Mike takes extra shifts at his blue-collar job to pay the bills, and between them, they just about make it work.
Then the abuse starts. Amanda is forced into longer and longer periods of sleep. She starts spouting adverts mid-conversation. The solution, she’s told, is to upgrade to Rivermind Plus, an $800/month service which will finally deliver on the company’s promise to let her leave the county. The current plan will cost her job, her wages and her life; she can’t afford the new one. You can see where this is going.
Black Mirror has been here before. 2013 episode Be Right Back saw a woman using AI technology to revive her lost partner; 2016 favourite San Junipero struck a similar tone, a vibrant love story fighting against the slow march of time. For creator Charlie Brooker, tales of romantic love so often find themselves unfolding in the shadow of death.
It’s a love which Common People is desperate to make us understand. Over a tightly controlled hour, Mike and Amanda’s relationship weathers emotional storms that feel devastatingly familiar. Lazy weekends turn to early mornings, forgotten anniversaries and resentful bickering – undercut by a palpable mutual adoration between two people who are nonetheless very, very tired. It’s a love all the more powerful seen within its context.
Similarly, and despite its tech-based premise, Common People rages more against its scenario’s economics than its technological fantasies. Like Hated In The Nation and Men Against Fire, it’s the society around progress that clearly keeps Brooker up at night, here enmeshing a subscription-based economy into the moral vacuum already underlying insurance-based healthcare in the US.
Certain scenes here, parodical as they are, might feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone with experience of the latter – or anyone anywhere suffering from a chronic health condition. Ellis Ross’s smiling corporate drone borders on the pantomime just as Jones and O’Dowd commit wholeheartedly to the reality of their situation – scrimping and saving to make ends meet, trying to justify their modest anniversary trip to a crappy local motel.
Meanwhile, without spoiling the ending, we’re not even given the satisfaction of watching Rivermind die. It simply fades away, oblivious to the heartbreak left in its wake. It’s this relentless rutting of devastating human drama against wipe-clean corporate psychopathy that bristles with the sort of exasperated fury Black Mirror does so well when firing on all cylinders.
After a sixth season Brooker himself has described as a more horror-inspired “Red Mirror” than a Black one, Common People sees its famously irate creator angrier than he’s seemed to be for some time. This is Black Mirror taken back to its roots – mad as hell, and subtle as a fire engine with the water cut off. Welcome back, Charlie – the world’s gone to shit while you were gone.
Black Mirror is streaming on Netflix now. Check out reviews of the rest of series 7 here.
