Hollywood’s Slo-Mo Self-Sabotage

“Black Mirror,” the anthology series best known for dreaming up dystopian uses for near-future technology, took aim at its own network in the timeliest episode of its most recent season. Settling on her couch after a difficult stretch at work, a woman named Joan (Annie Murphy) logs on to Streamberry, a barely veiled stand-in for Netflix, and stumbles upon a TV show based on the events of her day: “Joan Is Awful,” starring Salma Hayek. The program proceeds to ruin her life, but it’s nothing personal; Streamberry, which runs on cutting-edge algorithms, made “Joan Is Awful” with no human input. Not a single writer or actor is involved in the production: the scripts are churned out by artificial intelligence, and the performances are elaborate deepfakes. The “Black Mirror” episode, which débuted in the midst of the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, struck an immediate chord—unsurprisingly so, given that concerns about A.I. have become a flash point in the union’s negotiations with the studios. One member of the Screen Actors Guild, which has joined the writers on the picket line, called the episode “a documentary of the future.” But Joan’s travails left me wondering whether Streamberry was too rosy a portrait of where Hollywood is headed. Even in this bleakly automated vision of entertainment as Hell, there’s still some semblance of risk and innovation.