The episode was written by series creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker and directed by Anne Sewitsky; it was released on Netflix on 5 June 2019, alongside "Striking Vipers" and "Smithereens".

It follows Ashley O (Miley Cyrus), a pop singer whose creativity is restricted by her controlling aunt, and Rachel (Angourie Rice) and Jack Goggins (Madison Davenport), teenage sisters who have recently lost their mother.

Brooker based the episode on a sitcom script he had written years prior, about a punk band who are hanged and return to life to find their manager profiting off their deaths.

Most critics found the episode lacking in structure, writing quality, exploration of themes and characterisation of Rachel, but Cyrus's acting received acclaim.

After the death of their mother, Rachel Goggins (Angourie Rice) and her bass-playing older sister Jack (Madison Davenport) live with their father Kevin (Marc Menchaca), who spends most of his time attempting to invent and promote mouse-control devices.

Rachel dances to Ashley O's song "On a Roll" at a school talent contest, but fumbles the end of her routine and leaves the stage embarrassed.

When she writes broody music and does not take the medication given to subdue her, her controlling aunt and manager Catherine Ortiz (Susan Pourfar) laces her food with drugs to render her comatose.

Pursued by the police after Jack runs a red light, the group drive through the back entrance of the venue, dismaying Catherine and astonishing the crowd as Ashley O emerges on stage.

It was based on a comedy sitcom script from years prior about a 1977 punk band whose members are hanged by a Conservative minister and return to life to see their manager exploiting their deaths for profit.

It also took inspiration from real life holographic performances of dead artists such as Prince, Whitney Houston, and Amy Winehouse; Brooker found the holograms "ghoulish" and noted that the subjects "often pass away in extremely tragic circumstances".

[7][8] She found the script's portrayal of the music industry realistic, in terms of its "overt exploitation of artists" and the way in which decisions are driven by performance metrics rather than creativity.

She auditioned without knowing that the episode was part of Black Mirror, and was only told about the scene where Jack distracts a bodyguard from investigating Ashley O's IV drip removal.

[9] The final scene was filmed in a Cape Town bar over the course of a few hours, on Cyrus's last day of shooting, with Davenport saying that it "felt like ... a small punk venue".

[19] During the writing process, Brooker contacted Trent Reznor, the lead vocalist and songwriter for Nine Inch Nails, with a synopsis outline and an explanation that he wanted to adapt their music into pop songs.

[21] Adi Robertson of The Verge wrote that "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" is an "uncharacteristically upbeat story about subverting sinister tech toward good ends and combining a critique of celebrity fandom with a thought experiment about brain uploading".

[23] Dan Stubbs of NME suggested that the title is a pun on Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986), a film about two teenage girls who have a sexual relationship with a married man.

[24] Some critics noted a change in tone around halfway through the episode, with The Independent's Alexandra Pollard calling the latter half a "fun, high-concept heist film" and Stubbs describing it as "an adult take on the 1980s, kids' adventure caper, complete with gags [and] a goofy chase".

[24][25] "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" explores a number of themes that other Black Mirror episodes focus on, such as AI, storage of human memories, and drugs.

[28] Ashley O sings "Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)" by Irma Thomas, a song which appeared in four previous Black Mirror episodes, first in "Fifteen Million Merits".

Rachel's high school is named after Colin Ritman, a Bandersnatch character, and Ashley O is treated at St. Juniper's hospital, which appears in "Black Museum", where it was in turn a reference to "San Junipero".

[30] Brinkhof found the episode a "sharp critique on the ethics of stardom" that "eerily mirrors" Cyrus's "escape from her confining role" on Hannah Montana.

[32] The similarities drew renewed media interest in June 2021 after Spears delivered testimony in a court hearing alleging excessive abuse and control through her conservatorship, including being forcibly hospitalized and medicated against her will as punishment for refusing to perform.

[22] Patterson wrote: "Where Ashley O is a kind of Pinocchio dreaming of becoming a real girl, Rachel and Jack Goggins are two sisters awaiting their discovery as princesses".

[22][41] However, Sims found it an "intermittently fascinating bit of pop-music melodrama", albeit "bizarre", and Heritage approved that it was not "pointlessly bleak for the sake of it".

[41] White found "fascinating ideas sketched here and there", but a reliance on "vaguely banal statements on the vapidity of pop and the lack of care afforded to some of its most profitable stars".

[21] Chelsea Steiner of The Mary Sue said that the episode "offers nothing new or nuanced" in its "poking fun at vapid pop music", a topic well-explored by other works.

[42] Heritage listed A Star Is Born (2018), Vox Lux (2018) and Yesterday as recent works that also addressed how "young creatives are at the mercy of their morally bankrupt handlers".

[36] Robertson found that after "a promising start", the storyline "becomes simultaneously overstuffed and underveloped", omitting "the intimate details that make its early scenes so compelling".

[22] In contrast, Vorel criticised the characterisation of both versions, saying that the idea "could have come straight from Cyrus' own marketing team, in a meta-attempt to prove that Miley Cryus The Performer is a being of depth and nuance".

[35][36] Steiner wrote that the episode fails to understand teenage girls and criticised an overall lack of "an authentic voice for any of the leads", suggesting that having a woman writer may have averted this problem.