9 Reasons Why Mr. Robot Is The Best Show On TV

Coming out of nowhere to announce itself as the most crucial show of the summer, USA Network's Mr. Robot was certainly one of the biggest TV surprises of 2015. A tech-y contemporary thriller about a young computer programmer (Rami Malek) finding himself sought by a group of hackers led by the enigmatic Mr. Robot (Christian Slater), the show has laid down the gauntlet for 2015 TV drama in its debut season alone. After just ten episodes of the first season, this new series - created and written by filmmaker Sam Esmail - has developed a massive cult following and broken Rotten Tomatoes records, with every episode from season one scoring an unprecedented 100%. With such record-breaking appeal, Mr. Robot can legitimately claim the title of the best programme on the air right now. While a perfect RT score for a show that's only one season old might seem a tad premature, there are actually a great deal of reasons to believe - with Breaking Bad and Mad Men gone, Game of Thrones still constantly blowing hot and cold, and True Detective failing to live up to the hype in its sophomore year - that Mr. Robot is the new best show in town. And, here are nine of them. 9) It's The Best-Looking Show On Television As Mr. Robot was first dreamt up as a feature film, it seems appropriate that the show looks so gorgeously cinematic. The pilot was stylishly directed by Girl With a Dragon Tattoo helmer Niels Arden Oplev in a heavily Fincher-influenced kind of grungy-slick film language, and the series on the whole appears to have wholeheartedly adopted the same striking visual aesthetic. As cinema and television increasingly converge, TV shows are looking more and more like film - and Mr. Robot is arguably the best current example of that. The show's all odd angles and characters edged into the corner of frames, like chess pieces on engulfing tableaux; not only that, but it looks at New York City in a completely new way, turning the shiny tourist-magnet into a cold, tech-y future metropolis. 8) It Sounds Better Than Most, Too For many critics and commentators, there was no escaping how much Mr. Robot had been obviously influenced by the films of David Fincher. The look was almost identical to Fincher's own style, while the plot of season one basically repeated Fight Club in an updated setting. The sound was pure Fincher too, with Mr. Robot's score closely resembling the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross-produced themes for Fincher's last three movies. As cinematic as TV has become, for the most part you still won't find really good, memorable scoring and sound design on the tube. Mr. Robot differs from most other shows in that respect: scored like a great silver screen techno-thriller, it sounds - thanks to composer Mac Quayle - by turns tense, playful, and emotionally powerful. It's the perfect soundtrack, an appropriately revolutionary sound for a show about the revolution. 7) It Taps Into A Mood Some shows just happen to come along at exactly the right time. Mr. Robot, with its grassroots revolution, its talk of inequality and the 1%, and its technological savvy, is the most current show on the air right now. It's so current that the pilot skewers Bill Cosby and Tom Brady, while the final episode references the recent Greek crisis. What's most important about this show, though, is the mood it happens to tap into. In the US, you have Bernie Sanders; in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn; in Europe, Syriza and Podemos. Right now, there's a growing global anti-establishment vibe, and Mr. Robot seems specifically catered to the growing number of people in the world who've had enough of an increasingly unfair system. It champions the people at the bottom, while portraying those at the top as power-hungry psychopaths ready to be toppled by angry lower-classes. It honestly couldn't be any more relevant. 6) The Emotional Impact Is Huge From the off, Mr. Robot presents itself as a sly modern drama, with a dark vein of comedy running through it. With the twist at the end of the second act (it's best to think of Mr. Robot season one as one overarching story, seeing as that's how Esmail originally envisioned it), though, it reveals itself to have an enormously affecting ace up its sleeve. That would be the story of Elliot, and his tragic history of mental illness. With the show's narrative shocker in episode eight, Mr .Robot becomes unexpectedly moving. It's helped no end by great performances from Rami Malek and Christian Slater (more on them in a moment), but mostly it's thanks to the crafty writing by Esmail. Even though you can probably see the twist coming a mile away, it doesn't stop the moment of revelation being heart-breakingly powerful. And in those scenes, when the twist comes, Malek is absolutely devastating. 5) It Offers Christian Slater A Worthy Comeback Let's face it, Christian Slater never really realized his full potential as a movie star. Despite showing promise in films like Heathers and True Romance early in his career, years of bad project choices and even dodgier life choices had lately left him looking like a never-really-has-been. With Mr. Robot, however, Slater has been given a second chance - no longer a teen heart-throb, the 46-year-old Slater in Mr. Robot looks like a more confident performer, one with a compellingly wise, world-weary edge. The show proves just how good Slater can be when he's got some decent material in front of him. It's too early to tell whether this will lead to other great offers for the actor, but it certainly feels in Mr. Robot like he's rejuvenated, a former wash-out leaving a dip to potentially enter a new phase of his career. Even if Mr. Robot is all he manages to do now, it'll still have been worth having the actor back on our screens for such a quality turn. 4) In Rami Malek, It Has TV's Best New Male Lead In 2010, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks's Band of Brothers follow-up, The Pacific, introduced many to Rami Malek, an almost unnervingly intense, offbeat character standing out even in such an ensemble of great young actors. Since then, Malek's been quietly making waves in projects big and small, for screens little and large, but nothing's really offered him a worthy showcase on the level of The Pacific. Nothing, that is, until Mr Robot came along, and gave him the biggest break of his career. Slater's is the biggest name in the cast, but it's Malek who emerges as the star of Mr Robot: approaching Elliot's at-times difficult nature with a radiant mix of easy charisma and vulnerability, Malek is awards-worthy in the main role. He'll likely go onto even bigger stardom on the silver screen after this, but it's hard to imagine - as with Jon Hamm and Don Draper, Bryan Cranston and Walter White - that he'll find anything so worthy of his talents. 3) The Female Characters Are As Well-Written As The Men It's become an all-too common feature of modern film and television that women are sidelined in favor of the more influential and impactful male figures. TV has a better track record in the equality stakes, but even some of the best shows still forget to give female characters much of anything to do. Not so Mr. Robot, which actually has meaty roles for its female characters, and features two of the more interesting, conflicted women in TV, in Carly Chaikin's Darlene and Portia Doubleday's Angela. Watching the first season through a second time, post-twist, reveals just how complicated Darlene is, while Angela gradually shows herself to be a quietly complex figure throughout the first season, a corporate lackey looking for revenge that also secretly seeks approval from the same powers-that-be that she despises. Obviously the title character and main character Elliot are the key sources of Esmail's attention, but the women surrounding them aren't shortchanged on good material. 2) Even Its Absurd Villain Is Frighteningly Believable Though Mr. Robot operates in a realm of heightened drama, there's something strangely believable about it all. Whether it's because of the firmly current real-world setting, the committed performances from the cast, or the quality of Esmail's writing, there's something that lends even the most un-real aspects of Mr. Robot a sense of veracity. One of the more absurd components of Mr. Robot is its villain, E Corp exec Tyrell Wellick, a man so flagrantly sociopathic he pays homeless people just so he can have the satisfaction of beating them up. And yet, for all his ridiculousness - his psychopathy at almost Patrick Bateman-levels - Wellick is still drawn so well he actually feels believable. Sympathetic, even; Esmail doesn't make any of his characters merely two-dimensional, and even with the terrifying Wellick, there's an understanding for where he's coming from, even when he's committing the most evil deeds. 1) Sam Esmail Has It All Planned Out Already Is it premature to label an as-yet one-season show the best on the air? Perhaps not: Unlike the aforementioned True Detective, there's a significantly reduced risk of Mr. Robot going off the rails in season two and beyond. This is because, unlike Nic Pizzolatto's chapter-by-chapter approach on True Detective, Sam Esmail has Mr. Robot planned out until the very final episode. Originally, Esmail wrote Mr. Robot as a screenplay for a feature, not a TV series. When he found the screenplay was dragging out longer and further than expected, he decided to transform the first third of his story into the first season of Mr. Robot. What's left from that original story will make up another three or four seasons, according to Esmail. This means fans aren't due a Lost-style scenario of unplanned seasons spiralling into inanity and confusion; it means that, with the story already mapped out, there's good reason to believe each subsequent season will be as good as the first.