As the first episode of the new season, Common People hits you in the head with its mixture of humor and dystopian horror. The story follows Amanda (Rashida Jones), a primary school teacher, and her husband’s husband’s husband Mike (Chris O’Dowd), who is doing everything possible to get to the end of the month while dreaming of starting a family one day. After a medical emergency that leaves Amanda’s health in danger, Mike is presented with a solution, but at a cost. Enter Rivermind, a technology company that offers a service to bring Amanda back from Brink. Soon, the evils of corporate greed and medical negligence come to light through the company’s nozzle and the sales representative, Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross), and the couple finds their comfortable lives uprooted by Amanda’s monetization of the health of Amanda. If you expected an easy story that would gently return you to the Black Mirror universe, this is not so. Common People is a slow motion tragedy that escapes as an unbelie -discovered brain tumor and quickly puts itself under its skin, leaving it wondering if technology in this episode will continue to be so simple fiction and will not be revealed as a social prediction.
