Let’s face it. Anyone who is everyone is looking for their next form of entertainment, and they will most likely find it streaming the latest season of “Game of Thrones,” but what should you do when your favorite television shows are in off-season? There can only be one conceivable thing to do! Choose a new show.
The summer is a great time to revitalize your television viewing. For students, it’s your vacation. For full-time working adults, well… you have summer Fridays, at least some of you do. But the task of committing to a completely new show is almost insufferable. With practically 120 new and returning shows, as NPR suggests, airing between June and August, you cannot possibly make time to peruse through the list.
You will wait to hear your friends talk about it, social media to trend it and critics to give the final word. Well, all that’s been done here.
So enjoy the rest of your summer with a new show worth your binge-watching rabidity.
Following its June 24 debut on the USA Network – a channel not really frequented by viewers looking for a compelling series – Sam Esmail, the show creator, shook things up by introducing an engaging, brooding piece of cyberpunk drama thrown in to our modern techie-dominant world.
What other shows can you say of its pilot not to make you stop watching because of the main actor’s VO (voiceover). It’s just becoming more and more uncommon, and every time I cannot help but think of “Fight Club.”
The series, which has been greenlit for season 2, stars an uncanny yet brilliant programmer working at a cybersecurity firm where he is responsible for protecting a villainous corporation controlling everyone’s lives, aptly called Evil Corp. It’s not mind control just plain old American consumerism.
The real bait is Elliot’s deeply complicated story. Maybe it’s Rami Malek’s incredible portrayal of an emotional, morally questionable character coping with social anxiety or his nocturnal adventures as a vigilante hacker, helping those closest to him by “deleting” immoral people, that makes the show so appealing.
From the opening scene the audience can already get a sense of the show’s thematic binary when Elliot confronts a child pornography peddler in his own coffee shop. Everyone is either a one or zero, a yes or a no, you act or you don’t. Everyone has a choice, and ultimately, a decision is made. Hopefully, you’ll catch that reference early in the season.
In this case, Elliot has chosen to separate himself from the supposed naivety of society in which people let their lives go on, pretending that money doesn’t control their choices. This is precisely when the titular character Mr Robot, played by Christian Slater, steps in as an obscure hacker, trying to recruit Elliot.
Presumably, Mr Robot is the leader of a covert organization determined to destroy the very company Elliot is obligated to protect. The end game? Reset the wealth distribution in America. It’s hacker drama at it’s finest. If you think this is an oversell, then let USA Network president Chris McCumber tell you the facts.
“The overwhelmingly positive fan reactions to the pilot and the broad sampling of it, reaffirms our confidence in the series, and we’re excited to see where this timely drama will take us for season two,” said McCumber.
Positive word of mouth first spread after a showing at the SXSW Festival in March when Mr Robot walked away with the coveted audience award. Moreover, roughly 2.6 million viewed the pilot via online streaming services before it officially premiered on the network channel.
Last note: One of the show’s executive producers is Anonymous Content CEO Steve Golin, who also served the same role on the set of “True Detective.”
Happy watching.
Image Credit: Via Flickr/Roman Iakoubtchik
