Recap
Do you have those friends who hate social media so much that they have to make an announcement every time they “leave” whatever platform? Smithereens turns one of them into its protagonist.
The story we could have got
Hayley Blackwood is a mother grieving over the death of her 20-year-old daughter who committed suicide. She’s painstakingly trying to brute force into her daughter’s Facebook equivalent to see if there are any clues in her DMs because the company refuses to violate their privacy policy. One day the account is permanently locked out. She snaps.
The story we got
Chris Gillhaney kidnaps an intern from the social media company he blames for his wife’s death and demands to speak with its CEO but is rather quickly stopped by police. He sits in a field in a Mean Girls-like 4-way call, until the CEO relents, then delivers his soliloquy.
Granted, the episode did touch on some interesting topics like publicity being most effective for reigning in police violence and “Big Tech” analysts (with no regard for user data) being more efficient investigators than police, but the ultimate message was “get off your phones.”
Okay, boomer.
My thoughts
I neither drive nor enable mobile notifications, so I couldn’t find much common ground with Chris. Maybe I’m wishing for a Searching-type thriller instead of this meandering sermon (thank God for Netflix’s 1.5x playback), but I could immediately empathize with Hayley. The pain of losing a loved one. Trying to make sense of their death. Navigating an unfeeling corporate bureaucracy. Hayley just felt like a real person. Chris was an unhinged character because the plot dictated so.
From children’s suicides from Fortnite and PUBG to TikTok bans and Instagram polls, the insidious effects of social media goes much deeper than distracted driving, but this episode did nothing to explore that beyond a “you made it this way” line and a reference to crack.
Our actual identities (78-79) and intrinsic self worth are becoming increasingly tied to our digital identities and extrinsic vanity statistics, be it K/D/As or likes, and not measuring up or losing access can be devastating—topics both Nosedive S3E1 and White Christmas S2E4 also touch on but much better. This episode exists, but it doesn’t add much, if anything, new.
