In a move that feels apropos for a celebrity that has dominated multiple mediums in various stages of her career, Miley Cyrus and Netflix are taking their collaboration on one of the newest episodes of “Black Mirror” beyond the streaming platform’s borders.
Cyrus plays a major role in one of the new season’s episodes, “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too,” as Ashely O, a pop superstar not too far removed from the reality we associate with Cyrus until she introduces a doll capturing her likeness with the technologically-rooted uneasiness that we’ve come to expect from the show.
Now Netflix has released an official version of “On a Roll,” one of Ashley O’s bubblegum-pop tunes that serves as a motif for the episode to return, one that playfully riffs on Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole” (the episode eventually gets to a point of ensuring viewers it’s fully aware where the inspiration comes from). A full music video accompanying the song’s release already has 5.3 million views on YouTube, proving that a fictional riff on the stardom of Cyrus is as enticing to a mainstream audience as the real thing.
Heck, if you hadn’t even heard of “Black Mirror” before and weren’t thrown too off-guard by the pink wig Cyrus sports in the music video, its production levels are polished enough to the point of seeming like it came from a slightly different timeline from our own, one where Cyrus has embodied an alternate persona.
Coming just a few months after the show gave its take on the still-new medium of interactive television with “Bandersnatch,” the music video and song’s release is more evidence of Netflix expanding its content into whatever spaces it possibly can. “Riding so high, achieving my goals,” Ashley O sings in the music video; Netflix continues to take that to heart as the Great Streaming Wars are only just beginning to heat up.