Real Life Inspires Black Mirror? Joan Is Awful Might Be Based on One Man's Real Story

As all of its previous chapters, the new season of Black Mirror left fans with much to think about. One of the most provocative episodes was, of course, the very first one — 'Joan Is Awful.' It is the story of an ordinary woman, Joan, who works for a huge corporation and one day sees a show based on her life on Streamberry, the fictional analog of Netflix.

Joan is horrified as she discovers that her every move is being documented, given a dramatic flair, and turned into an AI-created show in which she is played by Salma Hayek. But what's more, while Joan watches the show about herself, the same project appears in Hayek's fictional universe, and the story becomes a meta-commentary, with each new episode adapting the protagonist's efforts to break the sinister loop.

While many viewers felt slightly uncomfortable watching 'Joan Is Awful' and thinking about all the terms and conditions they'd signed without actually reading them, there was one person who watched the episode and felt like it was repeating his own story.

'It seemed weirdly similar, right?' Caveh Zahedi, the creator and star of The Show About the Show, told Mashable.

2015's The Show About the Show is a unique project in which each new episode focuses on the making of the previous one. Caveh Zahedi is painfully honest with viewers, recording his every move and thought, be it about his crush on an ex-colleague or the fact that he thinks of another woman while having sex with his wife. His honesty inevitably causes a reaction in the protagonist's family and social circles, which Zahedi continues to thoroughly document for future episodes.

Remarkably, Zahedi's project even had an episode about trying to land on Netflix, whose executives refused to air it for fear of being made fun of later in the series.

Sounds a lot like 'Joan Is Awful,' right? Although the circumstances are different, the protagonists of both shows suffer the consequences of their personal secrets becoming public, and each emotional explosion creates new content that leads to another explosion, looping into an endless chain.

The Show About the Show certainly bears an uncanny resemblance to 'Joan Is Awful.' But was the Black Mirror episode really inspired by Zahedi's project, or was it just picking up on its intertextual nature, which is becoming increasingly apparent in the modern era of reality shows and AI-generated content? So far, the creators of Black Mirror haven't commented.

Source: Mashable.