SPOILER WARNING: This story discusses major plot developments within the “Black Mirror” episode “Common People,” currently streaming on Netflix.
Rashida Jones is an acting pro. But there’s a line in her “Black Mirror” episode “Common People” that she struggled to say on camera without laughing: “Ride smooth with Thirst Trap Lube.” That was hard enough — but then try saying that while face-to-face with a semi-naked Chris O’Dowd.
That line is just one in all several comical moments in “Common People.” Others involve Tracee Ellis Ross, who plays a perma-upbeat yet increasingly sinister sales agent — a personality she describes because the “representation of corporate greed.”
Laughs aside, “Common People” is some of the depressing episodes within the not-exactly-uplifting “Black Mirror” repertoire, and it ends on a note almost as bleak as they arrive.
The episode follows Jones as a teacher who suffers from what would normally be a fatal brain tumor. But in walks Ellis Ross, who’s a beaming rep for medical tech outfit Rivermind. The corporate has developed a life-saving experimental procedure that may back up the impacted a part of Jones’ brain onto its server — and for a monthly fee, beam it back down and enable her to operate as normal. Magic!
In fact, as that is “Black Mirror,” there’s a dark catch. Jones and her husband (O’Dowd) soon find that their already exorbitant subscription is definitely the bottom rung of Rivermind’s “exciting” latest tiered-pricing system. Much costlier upgrades at the moment are required to maintain up with what Ellis Ross’ rep cheeringly describes because the “evolution of our service.”
Amongst those latest Rivermind additions, for those not forking out for the following band: Advertisements, which Jones’ character unknowingly starts spouting at random intervals throughout the day. She promotes cereal over breakfast, tells students at her school in regards to the latest offers on Nike sneakers and, while mid-coitus with O’Dowd, extolls the virtues of the aforementioned Thirst Trap Lube (“Available in six flavors, none of them vanilla”). Things get much, much worse from there.
Ellis Ross’ character is confronted with an increasingly frustrated Jones and O’Dowd (who has resorted to humiliating himself online in exchange for much-needed funds to pay for the upgrades), and she or he responds with more corporate marketing jargon. While her character is best described as “comically awful…. disturbingly awful,” Ellis Ross says she played it straight.
“I actually was not playing anyone sinister, but it surely comes across as that,” she says. “I used to be playing the honesty of it, which is anyone who was caught in the identical system that I’m selling.”
Jones describes “Common People” as a “larger treatise on corporate greed,” and “corporation manipulation.” But additionally notes that it highlights the “compromise of living in the fashionable world,” where almost every element of our existence is open to profit-making exploitation.
“We do type of slowly give away ourselves, whether it’s like signing away your life on a user agreement that you just’re not because you simply can’t wait for the update, or spending just hours of your time facing the screen,” Jones adds. “I mean, that’s the whole type of premise of ‘Black Mirror.’”
For anyone who remembers the Season 6 episode “Joan is Awful,” that story followed a lady who discovers her life has been adapted right into a TV show on a really Netflix-like platform. Given the tiered-pricing element of “Common People,” could this be creator Charlie Brooker having one other go at his Netflix paymasters over their latest subscription arrangement?
“I don’t think that was not not his intention,” says Jones. “There absolutely is this sort of backwards and forwards with Charlie and his overlords. But listen, they permit it, and I actually have to offer mad respect.”
Ellis Ross, nevertheless, says she didn’t even make the connection between the storyline and the streamer.
“It didn’t even dawn on me,” she says. “I used to be too busy being heart-wrenched and appalled by what was happening.”
