Last week, Netflix and Hulu debuted the new seasons of Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale on the same day. It’s fitting since both shows serve as the all-too-real dystopian portraits for their respective streaming platforms. They’re also franchises that help ensure a certain subscriber base that, in turn, allows Netflix and Hulu to invest in increasingly niche content in order to discover new shows that can do the same.

Describing either Black Mirror or The Handmaid’s Tale as a franchise may leave some with a bad taste in their mouth. These aren’t superheroes or Minions chasing each other around effects-heavy worlds evoking basic emotionality by reminding us of things like, “Friends are important,” and “We all have to grow up sometime.” These are real stories that you don’t need to pay $15 a month to experience, you can just go outside. It’s hard to argue, but after 8 combined seasons of these two shows, I can’t help but wonder what and whom they’re serving.

First and foremost, I’m a huge fan of both. I got very excited when I learned that both were debuting on June 5—but why? Why am I so excited to return to these worlds? After weeks of watching the militaristic legislative assault on women’s health and abortion rights, why was I ready to return to Gilead? Living in a country inundated with mass shootings, post-modern ennui, and hot-take culture, why did I find Black Mirror’s second episode, Smithereens, so fascinating?

Like June, I went back to watch Gilead burn.

Like Chris, the disgruntled cab driver in Smithereens, I wanted to watch big tech weep at its own sins.

These shows give their characters agency that those, whose plights they’re meant to embody, don’t enjoy. The creators have to in order to balance their series’ central conflict and keep it from becoming static, even though the miasma of actual human suffering and discontent they co-opt for their backdrop is often is borderless and irresolute. In Handmaid’s season premiere, Night, Aunt Lydia berates June, telling her she should be “on the wall” for smuggling her child into Canada. If the show was 100% faithful to its rendition of a barbaric authoritarian nation-state, she would be and that would be that, but that’s not satisfying artistically or commercially.

The incels call it plot armor; they bitched about it incessantly throughout the final season of Game of Thrones, either because not enough people died or too many women survived. Plot armor, as a storytelling concept, has been imbued with red-pill toxicity lately but it undeniably something you can often see in June’s arc. This season will be about her steadily fomenting and leading the Gilead revolution, but to make her journey feel authentically perilous, Handmaid’s  has to use its supporting characters to reinforce the grisly consequences of June’s mission. The third episode, Useful, opens with June and other handmaids trying to identify women with bags over their heads hanging from street lamps—a grave visual allusion to where she could end up if she fails—but the previous episode, Mary and Martha, begins with June conspicuously on a street corner giving clearly dissenting nods to other passing handmaids. Yet, none of the guards within eyeshot deem it necessary to follow up.

In these moments, June seems detached from the story and setting, and appears more like our avatar. We’re experiencing this real-ish world through her, specifically in that we are fundamentally exempt from its most terminal consequences.

Smithereens is about an everyman with a common name, Chris. He’s an Uber driver, a person that some interact with every day. Chris sits in his car outside the Google-adjacent tech giant, Smithereens, accepting fares. Chris lures Jaden, a young Smithereens suit, into his car. Chris kidnaps Jaden, drives him somewhere rural and sparse, and demands that he put him in contact with Smithereens founder, Billy Bauer (a.k.a. Elon Zuckerberg). Chris faces some authentic challenges throughout the episode, like the mischaracterizing, instant-reaction Twitter culture that can be dangerous during active shootings, but for the most part, he’s implausibly ushered to his end goal.

Prior to that, show creator Charlie Brooker gives everyone watching a vent space to bitch about the new world when Chris finds out Jaden is an intern and goes into a “You kids and your phones” monologue. His tirade is disjointed; one minute it’s about Smithereens perpetuating our global tech addiction, the next it’s about the tech industry filling the workforce with compliant youths by letting them put on suits, like the one currently wearing Jaden, and pretend to adult. There’s no through-line; Chris is just airing grievances maniacally for our cathartic benefit.

Later in the episode, Chris’s standoff with the police and a sniper is tense but ultimately contrived. The only thing keeping Chris alive is the fact that Jaden is seated directly behind him for the entire hostage negotiation. Instead of the tactical team just repositioning and neutralizing the threat, Chris gets his phone call with Elon Zuckerberg, currently on a vision quest in the Utah mountains as moguls do. EZ’s assistant and the Smithereens PR team warn him against speaking with Chris directly, but EZ says to hell with that, hacks into Chris’s profile to procure his phone number (creating an entirely separate, unaddressed shitstorm), and gives him a ring.

It’s essentially like Jack Dorsey rolling up his sleeves, turning to his assistant, and exclaiming, “Fuel the PJ! I’m going to have a few words with this so-called Internet Research Agency!” It just doesn’t happen. The people on the lower rungs on the executive totem eat the shit so the figureheads can claim ignorance and absolve themselves of any responsibility, but that reality doesn’t align with the mission at Black Mirror, Inc.

Television is ultimately entertainment and people typically prefer stories with some circularity and resolution—or at least a profound thematic reason for not having those things. I’m not saying a show is bad the second you see the writer’s hand, and it annoys me when people maintain a strictly plot-centric viewing of any story. However, these shows distinguish themselves from the crushing avalanche of new content by assuming a larger cultural significance. They promise unbridled honesty about our world but are actually more concerned with giving each of us the sensation of fixing it.

The climactic exchange between Chris and Elon Zuckerberg is intentionally uneven. Chris immediately forces EZ into remorseful submission and we’re all treated to a fictional depiction of what a contrite Mark Zuckerberg would look like. It’s way more enjoyable than the blithe, unrepentant doofus we got in Congress. EZ, unlike every billionaire ever, can’t justify his creation, even though there was a glaring space for it. Chris tells him he accidentally killed his wife by momentarily checking his Smithereen likes and getting in a car crash. It’s a tragic revelation, but EZ could’ve said, “Look, I’m sorry but put your phone away, you child.”

Whether you agree or not, it would’ve at least complicated the discourse by addressing our inherent complicity building our own tech enslavement. They made their platforms addicting and convenient, but the machine is nonetheless fueled by our compulsion to document our lives and compete with one another. There’s no gratification in that reality, though, so it was omitted. Cultural hagiography isn’t new in entertainment; in fact, you could argue it’s the reason it became an industry in the first place. It must be asked though: is it empowering to languish in the fictional conquest of the world’s most despicable injustices, or is it deluding? Are the creators of these shows galvanizing us by giving us characters we feel akin to, or just feeding us our own bile as part of some larger penance for our inability to be like June or Chris?

The media conglomerates understand that we don’t have much hope for this world, and they market to us accordingly. They give us reality-adjacent playgrounds to act out our power fantasies, and the most authentic ones are awarded and lauded as brave and revolutionary. At the same time, I do love these shows and appreciate the massive physical and mental burden each production constitutes; but if these many resources are being put into emulating this world of all things, it’s fair to ask to what end.

For Black Mirror, I think the answer lies at the end of Striking Vipers, arguably the series’ most resonant episode since the highly decorated, heart-wrenching San Junipero. I’ll refrain from spoiling this one since I think it’s the season’s most surprising and refreshing episode, but it’s essentially about people finding their own form of happiness within their own reality, and the artificial worlds they create. Black Mirror seems to be making the case that we should acknowledge the shittiness of our tech dystopia but still recognize the bandwidth that still exists for pockets of love and human kindness.

The Handmaid’s Tale has just started its third season, so its larger ideas and direction have yet to fully take shape, but based on its marketing, it seems the expectation is revolution. June Guevara. It’s exciting and comforting for me to watch June fight, but am I more of an ally for appreciating depictions of female autonomy or recognizing the stark contrast of the outside world?

I think we, and the shows we watch, can do both, but it’ll require us to rethink what good entertainment is. If we want media that submerges us in the perils and atrocities of the real world to bring awareness to them, then they have to be authentically portrayed even when it means seeing a beloved character die or fail rebelling against them. Otherwise, we’re just building amusement parks from the pain of others and showering praise on a person’s ability to make someone like a Commander seem emphatic because of “nuanced writing”.

The 24-hour cable news cycle is reviled and crucified for its Pavlovian process of presenting hyperbolized tragedy and outrage then selling you products that may make you feel better. As socially conscious shows like Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale have grown more popular and become more institutionalized, they’ve begun to operate similarly. Every episode of Handmaid’s this season begins with incredulous laughter in my apartment as we’re informed that it’s brought to us by Lexus. Considering the kid gloves the showrunners are increasingly handling their premise with, the pre-show Lexus stings are often the most audacious things about each episode.

The best way to contextualize the dangers of shows like these becoming franchises is to consider a completely separate character in a vastly different show, I promise. Consider Sally Reed in Barry, largely underdeveloped in the first season but grew significantly during the second. We learn she is a survivor of domestic abuse, but her emotional scars are deeper and more complicated, like Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of an abused wife in Big Little Lies. Sally’s shame comes from her self-loathing.

She hates herself for comforting her husband when his rage subsided, and he realized how awful he truly was. She resents her own cowardice, realizing she could’ve actually died before defending herself. Instead of reconciling that ugly truth, she decides to change her history to something more palatable by writing a dramatic reenactment where she can be the hero and tell her husband to fuck off. She struggles with each read in a variety of ways, in the same way a lie never comes out the same way twice, and when she gives the final reading to a room of network executives, she’s applauded for her brave performance. Sally skyrockets her profile and, in that moment, is considered the next intrepid female voice. A champion of an experience she never had, but one that so many desperately want.

Sally ends the season in an ideological tomb, encased by her mandate to inspire and unable to responsibly confront her audience with the horrible, important truth that she co-opted a tragic fate suffered by many and reaped rewards they never will. June and Chris do the same, just like those recording their lives for all of us. So long as the first estate can monetize a burning world they will, but if we want to continue seeing it reenacted for us, we should allow socially salient shows the space to be brutally honest with us, and set them aside when they decide it’s not profitable to do so.

 This article is brought to you by Lexus. Revolutionize your drive.