‘Black Mirror’ fans are praising ‘Common People’ for satirising Netflix’s subscription tiers

10 April, 2025

Chris O'Dowd and Rashida Jones in the 'Black Mirror' episode 'Common People'

**WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD**

The seventh season of Black Mirror was released on Netflix today (April 10), and fans have been enjoying the way the opening episode, ‘Common People’, pokes fun at the streaming platform’s subscription tiers.

The episode revolves around teacher Amanda, played by Rashida Jones, and welder Mike (Chris O’Dowd), as they struggle to conceive a child in a world in which a new experimental medical treatment from tech start-up Rivermind works like a subscription service.

When Amanda gets a brain tumour that leaves her in a coma, Mike’s told by Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross), a Rivermind representative, that the company can make a backup of the part of her brain with the tumour, remove it, and replace the original part of her brain with it.

However, this synthetic part is connected to the cloud and this means that the couple need to pay a monthly subscription to access it – and have to stay in range of Rivermind’s towers. With the basic package, they have to stay within the county, while Rivermind starts to air adverts through Amanda without her realising.

This becomes an issue when she sells products to her young students, but the only way to stop the ads is by upgrading to a more expensive package, culminating in the couple resorting to ever-more desperate measures.

The subscription tiers offered by platforms like Netflix have frequently been criticised by users, and many Black Mirror fans have praised the show, and creator Charlie Brooker, for satirising them. One wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “The ‘Common People’ episode of Black Mirror is cheeky considering Netflix’s subscription tiers.”

One fan said, “The ‘Common People’ of Black Mirror is actually good. It’s just sooooo ironic that Netflix made it lol,” while another joked, “The call is coming from inside the house.”

One more said, “New Black Mirror episode ‘Common People’ is fantastic… and having it interrupted by adverts for gambling featuring parents giving birth because I only have a basic Netflix subscription is a little too… something…”

Another said that the episode is a “reminder on how corporations deliberately got everyone in the subscription labyrinth. ‘Yeah sorry you need to subscribe to the ++ package in order to use the full service’ or ‘pay to use w/o ads’ despite making full payment initially.”

NME’s James Mottram described the episode as a “very neat satire” as part of a glowing five-star review of the season. He added: “Brooker’s sharp-eyed intelligence and eerily prophetic lens on society is also very much in tune. It’s not all about the twists either. These news episodes, especially the cine-literate ‘Hotel Reverie’, merit a second viewing – but that is par for the course in the Brooker-verse. As they say in the final episode, “a tiger cannot change its stripes.”

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