SAG Strike: How ‘Black Mirror’ Predicted the Future (Again)

Black Mirror is going to have to stick around for many more decades before it even gets within spitting distance of The Simpsons for eerily predicting future events. But the speed with which Holywood life imitated Black Mirror art was lightning quick this time.

Think back to the bygone days of [checks notes] mid-June 2023. Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi satire anthology was back with its sixth season, which opened with an episode titled “Joan Is Awful.” Annie Murphy played the title character, a tech company middle manager dismayed when Streamberry, a barely-disguised parody of Netflix, turns her life into a nightly soap opera, starring a deepfake version of Salma Hayek to play her. Hayek, it turns out, is just as dismayed when she realizes that her image will have to do whatever the actual Joan does — like, say, interrupt a wedding ceremony with some explosive diarrhea — because her contract allows Netflix Streamberry to do whatever it wants with her likeness.

There are more layers to the story than that, including quantum computers, lack of privacy in a smartphone world, multiversal theory, the dangers of not thoroughly reading user agreements, and, somehow, Michael Cera. But Hayek’s specific dilemma suddenly felt a whole lot less far-fetched in the press conference following SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher’s incendiary monologue about the reasons why the actors union is going on strike.

After Drescher was finished verbally dismantling the Igers and Zaslavs of the world, she and the guild’s chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, took questions from reporters and expanded a bit more on some of the more unreasonable stances taken by their counterparts at the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). This one, recited by Crabtree-Ireland, felt both chilling and familiar:

It’s pure coincidence that, around the time, Drescher and Crabtree-Ireland were talking, the Hollywood trades began publishing stories about how Black Mirror had risen to the top of the streaming charts, since those charts were reflecting, again, the way, way before times of mid-June. But it seemed appropriate to have the amusing spoof and the ugly reality collide in yet another way just then.

From Rolling Stone US.