This peaceful status quo is soon interrupted when a tumor fuses itself to Amanda’s parietal lobe, sending her into a coma she’ll likely never wake up from. Thankfully though, there’s an app for that! Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross), a representative of tech startup Rivermind, visits Mike in the hospital with an offer. Rivermind’s technology can get Amanda’s brain back online thanks to some sci-fi mumbo jumbo involving digital backups and synthetic tissue. What’s more is that the surgery to do so will be free. All Mike has to do is lock in to a $300 monthly subscription model for his wife’s brain, and make sure she stays within Rivermind’s cell tower network. Mike agrees and Amanda wakes up into a brave new world.
Surely even the Black Mirror neophytes can see where this is all going but that doesn’t make “Common People’s” execution of it any less terrifying. Amanda’s streaming gray matter runs into the same buffering issues that any streaming service does (including the Black Mirror universe’s own Netflix analog Streamberry). The Rivermind network is routinely taken down for updates and repairs, rendering Amanda unconscious as the company installs the wiring for its $800 a month Rivermind+ model. But then, of course, Rivermind+ becomes “standard” as Rivermind Lux ($1800 a month) gets rolled out and Amanda’s baseline model is rendered so obsolete it doesn’t even get a name on the Rivermind product offering sheet.
Soon Amanda is sleeping up to 16 hours a day as her puny cranial hardware struggles with the latest Rivermind update and her waking hours are mostly spent parroting hyper-localized advertising to anyone unlucky enough to enter her orbit. With Amanda soon fired from her job, Mike has to resort to humiliating gig work and literal teeth-pulling on the “Dum Dummies” app to keep his wife online. Due to their unfortunate addiction to being alive, Mike and Amanda are utterly crushed financially.
The episode’s satirical approach is clever and its hatred for the subscription model era of late capitalism is palpable. As a series of unfortunate working class events to be cringed at and emphasized with, “Common People” is a delight. It falls flat, however, in cobbling it all together into a timeless fable like the best Black Mirror episodes are capable of doing.
A lot of that can be attributed to some unfortunate casting. Jones and O’Dowd are both talented and charismatic performers but they’re also not quite “common people.” One has to wonder why no one on Mike’s blue collar construction site points out “Wait, why is the British guy from Bridesmaids here?” or why no one in Amanda’s school calls her a beautiful, tropical fish. Finding older, less conspicuous actors for the roles would have made “Common People” more effective. Finding actual workers a la Nomadland would have made it one of the most gut-churningly horrifying hours to ever stream on Netflix.
There’s also the matter of “Common People’s” ending. Given how poorly things go for Mike and Amanda, euthanasia ends up being a pretty sensical option for them. But it didn’t need to be the only option for the episode itself. After all, most episodes of Black Mirror could conclude with a character opting for self-deletion, it’s up to the show to come up with something more clever.
