Television Review | Netflix

Black Mirror, 7x1: ‘Common People’ — furious yet superficial subscription service satire

When a medical emergency leaves schoolteacher Amanda fighting for her life, her desperate husband Mike signs her up for Rivermind, a high-tech system that will keep her alive.

Black Mirror currently sits at a very interesting existential crossroads: what value does a show like this hold in the wake of our modern techno-capitalist dystopia? The Netflix-produced techno-horror anthology show has undergone significant change in the fourteen years total it has been running. In 2011, it emerged on our screens as an omen of what happens when technology gets pushed to its limit; in 2025, it’s taken more the form of an ominous reflection of how things have become now. Billionaires like Elon Musk sit at the head of our alt-right governmental institutions. Generative A.I. technologies have irreversibly devoured the ways we consume information and are threatening to cannibalise artistic industries left and right. The show’s science fiction scenarios have…