USA’s Mr. Robot Is the Anti-Capitalist TV Show We’ve Been Waiting For
USA’s Mr. Robot Is the Anti-Capitalist TV Show We’ve Been Waiting For(In These Times) The USA Network is not exactly synonymous with prestige drama. This is a channel currently airing the third season of Graceland, a show about undercover FBI, ICE and DEA agents who all live together in a fricking house. (Imagine that pitch meeting: “Guys, what if we remade Melrose Place, only populated it with characters from J. Edgar Hoover’s id?”) How delightfully incongruous, then, that USA is now the home of Mr. Robot, the best new TV show of the summer, and the most explicitly anti-capitalist work of mainstream pop culture since Snowpiercer.
Mr. Robot is narrated by Elliot (Rami Malek), who addresses the viewer as “friend,” one he believes he has made up to cope with his loneliness. As that suggests, Elliot may be suffering from mental illness, although the extent of it is unclear—one of the ongoing mysteries teased along throughout the season.
What is clear is that Elliot is a paranoid, rabidly asocial computer savant who is self-medicating on morphine. A network technician by day, Elliot is a “hacker vigilante” by night, anonymously tipping off police to online child pornography rings and gangbangers bragging about murders in code on Twitter. His daytime employer is a cybersecurity subcontractor helping the massive conglomerate E Corp.—which Elliot always calls Evil Corp.—fend off an increasingly intense series of cyber attacks. (In a nice touch, series creator Sam Esmail straight-up jacks the old Enron logo for E Corp., reasoning in one interview, “it’s not like they’re going to sue us for it.”) Because of his connection to E Corp., Elliot finds himself recruited by the mysterious “Mr. Robot” (Christian Slater) to join the hacker collective society, which wants to take down the company.
Mr. Robot has become a critical darling, and it’s easy to see why. For starters, it’s built around the performance of Malek, which is phenomenal, an unusual combination of intelligence, deadpan affect and charisma. It’s also one of the better-looking shows on television, with a visual aesthetic that alternates shots of perfect symmetry with ones framed from slightly off or tilted angles, creating an unnerving beauty. (This was especially the case for the first and fourth episodes, directed by Niels Arden Oplev and Nisha Gantara, respectively.) And the writing is generally excellent: witty dialogue that’s rarely cloying, genuinely surprising plot twists, and realistic characterization. There’s also a pretty great musical score by Mac Quayle, borrowing heavily from the playbook of rattling snare taps and spooky synths that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have employed in David Fincher’s most recent films. .................(more)
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18264/usas-mr.-robot-is-the-anti-capitalist-tv-show-weve-been-waiting-for
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The "Mr. Robot" title name actually doesn't refer to Elliot, but is the handle of the character played by Christian Slater who runs a small hacker group called fsociety (which is closely modeled on the very-real Anonymous). So far, there has been no interaction between Mr. Robot and Tyrell in the show, so I doubt that both names were intended to be a combined Blade Runner reference. I could be wrong though 
LOL 
The article glosses over a few salient points though. Elliot isn't targeting Evil Corp because he's some sort of anti-Capitalist crusader who wants to save the world. Evil Corp killed his father. Many of the things portrayed in the show are based off of real-world corporate crimes, and there was some type of chemical pollution (think "Love Canal meets Bhopal"
that caused his father...and a lot of others...to get leukemia and die. Evil Corp, with the best lawyers money could buy, essentially walked away scot free. Not only did that give Elliot a very personal reason to hate large corporations and capitalism, but it gave him an unyielding desire to see Evil Corp itself burn.
Beyond that, the show is brilliant. Beautifully scripted, gritty, and well written. I thought that last weeks episode pushed the boundary of believability a bit, but the show does a great job of keeping itself grounded in reality most of the time. The gritty believability includes the fact that Elliot, the main character, is also a junkie on a slow downward spiral with his addiction. The show will not end well for him.
And, as a bonus for us computer security guys, the tech is ACCURATE. The writers have actual computer security people on staff, so all of the hacking and coding scenes, and really all of the tech discussions in their entirety, are 100% based on real technology and tools used by real computer security people, white hats, and black hats. When F Society hacked the network of a data storage facility, they did so by physically jacking a Raspberry Pi into the ethernet cable behind one of the facilities IP based thermostats. It was a nod to the Target hack two years ago where hackers breached the system via the monitoring system for the chains air conditioners, and it was a brilliant and factual way to pull off that kind of intrusion.
It's a great show.
Halt and Catch Fire just ended, Better Call Saul won't be back until Feb, and True Detective sucks this season
Forgot to add that. Great show! I love seeing William Hurt in it 
Thanks for the info on the Swedish version. I was wondering where to see it. I will check it out for sure!
Maybe it's my aging ears but I sometimes can't tell what the hell Elliot is saying. 
Thankfully there are subtitles.
Other than that, I like it so far. Although too dark for my wife.
