When a Show About the Future Is Stuck in Place
Joan is an ordinary woman with ordinary complaints. She wishes the coffee at her office tasted better. She thinks her new hairstyle might be a bit much. She loves her fiancé, but worries their sex life isn’t as exciting as it should be. “I feel like I’m not the main character in my own life story,” she explains at a therapy session. When her therapist asks her if she would like that to change, she nods.
Because Joan (played by Annie Murphy) is a protagonist on the newest season of , the Netflix anthology series about the, a TV series on a Netflix-like streaming platform called Streamberry, in which the actress Salma Hayek (playing herself) plays Joan. But while this premise may sound like the type of meta, kooky concept that once had delicious fun with, the resulting story is inert. “Joan Is Awful”—the episode, not the Streamberry show—is a mess of thinly drawn characters, with a plot that ultimately amounts to a lazy parody of Netflix. The story quickly spirals into a litany of exposition dumps about how Streamberry can exploit Joan so easily, culminating with a bunch of tired jokes about how people should read their terms-and-conditions documents more carefully.
