Mr. Robot Review

Esmail directs almost every episode himself after the first season, and the visual grammar is the most distinctive on television: characters pushed into the bottom corner of the frame with an ocean of dead space above them, so the composition performs the alienation the writing keeps insisting on. It also gets the technology right, down to real exploits and plausible tooling, which buys the paranoia enormous credibility.

Rami Malek plays Elliot as someone permanently withdrawing from a room he is standing in, and the second-person narration makes the audience an accomplice well before the show starts using that against us. The first season's turn is guessable and lands anyway, because the interest is in what it does to Elliot rather than in surprising anyone.

Later seasons take real formal swings, an episode staged as one unbroken take, another shot as an eighties sitcom, a near-silent hour, and most of them come off. The writing overstates its themes badly, and the monologues about consumer capitalism are the least interesting thing in it. The fourth season lands its ending properly, which almost nothing of this kind manages.