Mr. Robot Is Now on Netflix and More Relevant Than Ever

Hello, friend. You may have forgotten about Mr. Robot, stashed your memories of the USA Network thriller series away in a hidden compartment of your mind. But now that all four seasons are on Netflix, you should hack into your next resurfaced TV obsession. Ten years after its debut, Mr. Robot's anti-capitalist vision of people fighting back against technologically mediated corporate dominance is even more relevant than it was back then.

Mr. Robot tells the story of Elliot Alderson, played by Rami Malek in his breakout role. Elliot works as a cybersecurity engineer in New York City, but his job is a cover for his true mission as a vigilante computer hacker. He's part of an underground hacker organization called fsociety, led by the enigmatic Mr. Robot (Christian Slater). The group's goal is to bring down E Corp, aka Evil Corp, a world-dominating corporate conglomerate that owns a large portion of the global credit industry. Elliot dreams of "saving everyone from the invisible hand" of late-stage capitalism. It will be extremely difficult and dangerous, but if they can hack into Evil Corp's data center, they can erase everyone's debt and bring about what Mr. Robot describes as "the single biggest incident of wealth redistribution in history." 

Elliot also suffers from severe mental health issues. He is anxious, depressed, and dissociative, not to mention angry and isolated from other people. His unstable sense of reality facilitates his hacking, but it creates serious problems in his life — sometimes in ways he's not even aware of. 

The show combines the tense action of an espionage thriller with the paranoid atmosphere of a psychological thriller. It makes the world of computer hacking seem not just exciting, but like the thing that will bring about revolution. Mr. Robot ended in 2019, before the rise of TikTok and ChatGPT; as technology has become even more oppressive in our daily lives since then, watching Elliot and his fellow hackers use the same tech that corporations use to control us against them is even more potent now. 

The series does all this with impressive technical accuracy in its depiction of hacking and an abundance of cinematic style. Creator-writer-director Sam Esmail, cinematographer Tod Campbell, composer Mac Quayle, and all of the other craftspeople built a show that earns its comparisons to the work of great filmmakers like David Fincher and Stanley Kubrick. Mr. Robot is overt in its influences, but it's worthy of them. Each season, Esmail pushes himself as a filmmaker, with a one-shot episode in Season 3 and a nearly dialogue-free one in Season 4. 

Mr. Robot was a sensation when it first premiered. It seemingly came out of nowhere on USA Network, which at the time was known for light dramas like Psych and White Collar, not dark dramas with weighty themes and cinematic style. Esmail was unknown, as was most of the cast. But they weren't for long. The first season was nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, and Malek won Outstanding Lead Actor for his layered performance. His enormous eyes have the ability to express a half-dozen emotions at once while the rest of his face remains impassive. 

Season 2 got off to a slow start and wasn't able to maintain Season 1's popularity, and the show lost its momentum in the ratings and at the Emmys. Season 2 is the weakest of the four, but it's still very good; its slower tempo early in the season feels different in the context of the show's entire run, and also when it's streamed at a self-directed pace instead of being released week to week. After Season 2, Mr. Robot became one of the most underrated shows on TV, with a small but devoted cult watching it deepen its themes and characters and broaden its emotional palette. The final season has moments of devastation and catharsis that the first season wasn't capable of. All four seasons have dazzling technical prowess, striking plot twists, bold themes, and fascinating characters, but all of those elements get even more impressive as the show goes on and Esmail gets more comfortable going for the heart as well as the brain. (After working with other writers and directors in Season 1, starting with Season 2 Esmail wrote and directed every episode himself, which puts him in the company of other creators with clear, distinctive visions like Yellowstone's Taylor Sheridan and The White Lotus' Mike White — though Esmail maintained a higher level of quality control than those two.) 

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Mr. Robot arrived at an important moment in TV history. FX CEO John Landgraf coined the phrase "Peak TV" that summer to describe the sheer number of high-quality TV shows that were being made at that time. Mr. Robot — an award-winning show that demanded a lot of its audience and came from an unlikely source — is one of the shows that best exemplifies that moment. It's hard to imagine a dark, resolutely non-escapist show about a depressive cybersecurity engineer that takes a positive view of wealth redistribution getting made at any other point in time. 

It also arrived at an important moment in American history, when Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were starting their status quo-challenging 2016 presidential campaigns. Mr. Robot was one of the first shows to tap into the anti-establishment energy that was bubbling up at the time, on the decidedly Sandersian end of the spectrum. We know how both of those campaigns ended up — and have been living in the aftermath for the past nine years — but with democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani's recent win in the New York City mayoral primary, the Mr. Robot energy is coming back around. 

Mr. Robot is available to stream on Netflix. It's also available to stream for free on Tubi.