Sam Esmail’s hacker drama looks like nothing else on television and, for the most part, earns it. Rami Malek carries four series on a stare and a voiceover. The second series loses its way for a while; the rest is as good as its admirers say.
Sam Esmail’s series began on 24 June 2015 and ran for four series and 45 episodes. It was made for USA Network, a channel not then known for anything this odd, and it is as good as most of its admirers say. It is about a young hacker recruited to bring down a corporation, and it is really about a man who cannot trust his own head. The series is at its best when it keeps those two things in the same frame.
Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) is a hacker who breaks into other people’s lives at night. He tells us about it. The voiceover is addressed to “friend”, meaning us, and Esmail makes clear from the first minutes that we are something Elliot has invented because there is nobody else. That got at us more than we expected. Malek plays him with wide, unblinking eyes and a body that wants to fold in on itself, and the first time he said hello we felt spoken to by someone who had not been listened to in years.
Tod Campbell and Tim Ives shot it, and they are the reason it looks like nothing else on television. Faces are pushed into the bottom corner of the frame with a great deal of empty room above them. Two people talking are placed at opposite edges, as if a third person between them had stepped out. By the third episode it is simply how this world is. Mac Quayle’s score is cold synthesiser, pulses and low drones. Matthew Munn, Stephen Beatrice and Anastasia White give Elliot a flat with a mattress and a computer and nothing on the walls. Kim Wilcox, Mairi Chisholm and Catherine Marie Thomas dress him so plainly that you know who he is from the back.
Christian Slater plays Mr. Robot, the man in the battered jacket who recruits him, as a preacher of the old anarchist school, and he is loud in a way the series needs. Carly Chaikin’s Darlene is the one who feels like someone you might have met, brittle and funny. Martin Wallström’s Tyrell Wellick, climbing the ladder at the corporation, has learnt charm from a manual, and Stephanie Corneliussen, as his wife Joanna, is the more frightening of the two. Portia Doubleday has the thankless part of Angela, the childhood friend who works for the enemy, and makes it hold. Later, Grace Gummer arrives as an FBI agent, Dominique DiPierro, BD Wong as a figure called Whiterose, and Bobby Cannavale as a fixer named Irving, and each lifts it when it needs lifting.
It does need lifting. The second series, twelve episodes from July 2016, is where Esmail took over directing every episode himself, and it is the stretch where the style runs ahead of the story. Elliot spends a long time doing almost nothing in a controlled way, and there is a piece of information the show withholds for weeks that most viewers will have worked out in minutes. We were bored, and then irritated at being bored by something this well made. The voiceover, so exact in the first series, starts telling us what the frame has already shown. Niels Arden Oplev directed the pilot with a plainness that Esmail, left alone with it, does not always keep.
The debts are open. Fight Club and Taxi Driver are quoted so directly that the show is asking you to notice, and in the first series that is a weakness. What gets it clear of them is that Esmail is more interested in Elliot getting better than in Elliot being right. The third and fourth series are about the cost of what happened in the first two, and the last of them, thirteen episodes in 2019, is the best thing here, for reasons we will not go into. The editors, Franklin Peterson and Rosanne Tan among many, do their sharpest work there, moving between places and states of mind without once losing us.
Watch it in the dark, one episode at a time, and resist the next one. It was built in hours and it wants the gap between them. The 15 certificate is fair: there is violence, and one scene in the first series we still cannot watch without looking at the wall.
