‘Black Mirror’ Season 6: Annie Murphy & Salma Hayek Team Up for a Mind-Bending Reality Check

Joan Is Awful tells the story of an unlucky woman named Joan (Murphy), who’s stuck in a rut at home and at work. As she tells her therapist, “I feel like I’m not the main character in my own life story.”

Everything changes one night when she opens a fictional streaming service called Streamberry and realizes there’s a brand-new show modeled after her life. On-screen, Joan is played by Salma Hayek. But the first episode features everything that happened to Joan that day—word for word. The series is fittingly titled Joan Is Awful.

Understandably, Joan freaks out. But when she seeks legal help, she learns that she gave Streamberry the rights to her personal story when she accepted its terms and conditions. Joan tries to seek revenge by performing a series of stunts that will embarrass Hayek (her on-screen doppelgänger). We won’t go into detail, but we’ll give you a hint: laxatives.

This is where things get trippy. When Hayek complains to Streamberry, she learns that she, too, signed her life away when she accepted the terms and conditions. And since AI is generating her image for the show, there’s nothing she can do.

As it turns out, Hayek is just one key player in an infinite web that is Joan Is Awful. There are multiple “fictive levels” of the show—in fact, Murphy isn’t even the real Joan. The 36-year-old actress is portraying a version of Joan on the first level of this fictive universe.

So, when the real Joan opens Streamberry, the on-screen Joan is played by Murphy. And in Murphy’s version of Joan Is Awful, the on-screen Joan is played by Hayek. And in Hayek’s version of Joan Is Awful, the on-screen Joan is played by Cate Blanchett (and so on and so on). Confused yet?