Should You Prepare Your DVR For An M2M Relationship With Mr. Robot?

What Is This Thing?

By day, Elliot protects corporations' data at Allsafe, a computer security firm. By night, he performs acts of vigilantism on behalf of the people he cares about...or, more accurately, for whom he struggles to feel conventional human emotion. Soon, he discovers he's not the biggest badass in town, but at least has the comfort of knowing that F Society, the actual biggest badasses in town, want to recruit him.

When Is It On?

Wednesdays at 10 PM on USA.

Why Was It Made Now?

USA has, for the past couple of years, been moving away from its "blue sky" shows (Royal Pains, White Collar) and toward darker, more complex premises -- a trend that started with Graceland back in 2013 and has continued through Satisfaction and Complications. (Where Chrisley Knows Best fits into this plan, I'm sure I don't know, unless it's heading toward the father finally coming out as a gay man, and why would he, he's clearly straight!) If Royal Pains is the ultimate blue sky show, Mr. Robot is the last few hours before a hurricane.

What's Its Pedigree?

Apart from writing and directing a 2014 Justin Long/Emmy Rossum feature film called Comet, Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail is light on credits, but his cast makes up for it: Elliot is played by Rami Malek (Short Term 12, The Master, the Night At The Museum movies). Michael Gill (a former president on House Of Cards) plays Elliot's boss, Gideon; Youth In Revolt star Portia Doubleday is Elliot's childhood friend and current co-worker Angela; Ollie Parker, another Allsafe staffer and Angela's boyfriend, is played by The Good Wife and Outsourced alumnus Ben Rappaport. Elliot's therapist Krista is played by former ER star Gloria Reuben. When Elliot gets jumped in on F Society, he meets Darlene, played by Suburgatory's Carly Chaikin. That whole operation is run by our titular Mr. Robot, one Christian Slater. (Also appearing, at least in the pilot, is veteran Hey! It's That Guy! Bruce Altman, playing the CTO of Allsafe's biggest client.)

...And?

This is going to sound weird coming from someone who has taken affirmative steps to watch every episode of Royal Pains, but the best compliment I can give Mr. Robot is that it doesn't feel like a USA show at all. Commenter shapeshifter likens it to AMC's dead-too-soon conspiracy drama Rubicon, with which it certainly shares many similarities -- that's a good thing! -- but I was also reminded of the recently-killed Channel 4 series Utopia: here we have a paranoid protagonist who...um, makes some pretty solid points about what's wrong with the world, whether we're supposed to admit it or not? (#IAmNotACrackpot) For example, when Krista asks Elliot the rather uninspired question "What is it about society that disappoints you so much?," he replies: "Oh, I don't know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man even though we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes [b-roll of Lance Armstrong, Bill Cosby, and Tom Brady] are counterfeit? The world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary bullshit masquerading as insight [b-roll of a Twitter feed], or social media faking its intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this -- not with our rigged elections but with our things, our property. Our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this -- not because Hunger Games books makes [sic] us happy but because we want to be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend. Because we're cowards."

Or, rather, he fantasizes that reply, and doesn't actually tell her anything real.

A mouthful like that could turn off the viewer (this viewer, anyway) if it were coming out of an actor who brought nothing to it but a sense of shallow pinko-ness. But Malek makes Elliot's stillness fascinating, not flat: we can perceive how much is going on under his unblinking, seemingly placid exterior. On the first vigilante outing that opens the episode, Elliot describes for his mark -- a coffee-shop entrepreneur running a pedophilic website on the side -- the feeling that makes him investigate outwardly upstanding people or operations as an "itch," and as he carefully explicates the process by which he takes down his marks, we can understand that feeling: when something is Not Right, he feels it, almost physically, and can't rest until he's addressed it. Lots of lesser shows put characters with tech talents somewhere on "the spectrum" in order not to flesh them out with any other attributes; Elliot feels like a fully three-dimensional character starting right with his very first scene, and understanding his specific experience of day-to-day life makes the jargon-ier coding stuff easier to sit through.

As for the larger conspiracy -- an aspect of many other shows that has driven me away because I get too bored having one tiny piece of a puzzle revealed over what feels like interminable seasons and/or confused because I can't remember what the previous 500 tiny pieces were -- I saw enough of it in the pilot (a) to be intrigued about the possibilities; (b) not to be overwhelmed by its scale or over-complicatedness; and, above all, (c) feel confident that Esmail has a solid grip on where it's going.

...But?

Maybe because it's a USA show, part of me spent the pilot tensed for the (lame) reveal that Mr. Robot -- the apparent head of F Society, who tails Elliot for several days before making contact -- is actually a double agent who's infiltrated F Society on behalf of the FBI, or that the group will turn out to be more straightforward whitehats with a formal law enforcement mandate. Fortunately, that hasn't happened yet...but I'm still kind of worried that it's going to. It's much more interesting to me to watch Elliot pursue what's Right as opposed to what's legal.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't note Darlene's wardrobe on the two occasions we see her.

Clichéd much?! You're trying just a little too hard, dear.

...So?

It's smart, fun, and looks gorgeous. Let's all watch.