Mr Robot - 'eps1.0_hellofriend.mov'

This series makes the most of a protagonist who looks like literally no-one else on our screens.

Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) is a cyber security technician who moonlights as a hacktivist, exposing malfeasance almost more as a compulsion to reveal the ugliness of the world than because it's right or necessary. He is also a delusional schizophrenic with social anxiety, and this is important. He has very few friends: his boss likes him and he also works with his childhood friend Angela (Portia Doubleday), and he hooks up with his dealer Shayla (Frankie Shaw) from time to time, largely it seems because he only meets her while already high.

Elliot is drawn into a wider world when the enigmatic hobo Mr Robot (Christian Slater) invites him to become part of fsociety, a hacker collective working on a nebulous project aimed at destroying the credit information held by the massive conglomerate E Corp. The largest client at Allsafe, Elliot's place of work, E Corp stands for the megaelite conspiracy controlling the world. Can it be brought down? Can Elliot trust Mr Robot? Or even his own senses?

Mr Robot is a cyber-aware conspiracy thriller, sort of like Person of Interest on a budget, but in a lot of ways its selling point is not the conspiracy of 'the top 1% of the top 1%' or the hacking, but the vexed question of Elliot's reliabilty as a narrator. His voice over hangs a lampshade on this, opening up by admitting that he is talking to himself. Moreover, he tells us that he has conditioned himself to see and hear any mention of E Corp as 'Evil Corp', and throughout the show that is what people call it; what we see, what we hear is filtered through Elliot, a self-described delusional schizo whose worldview refuses to accept that anything can exist that is unequivocally good (he finds a cafe with great wifi and immediately looks for the porn servers its connection is supporting.) No-one else ever substantially interacts with Mr Robot and the rest of his crew, and they are explicitly invisible online, almost as if they didn't exist.

The show is thus also an effective psychological thriller, and so hangs hard on Malek's core performance. Fortunately, it's a doozy. Malek plays the anxiety and alienness of the outsider to the hilt, and it helps that he looks like no-one else on TV, with the traces of Brendan Fraser about the eyes countered by the lantern jaw and odd haircut (or am I just not with it on that one?) The support playing is also good, although the other characters are intentionally ciphers, viewed only through Elliot's distorted gaze.

With aspects of PoI, The Matrix and Fight Club vying for screen time, the show could become cluttered, but the opener keeps it tight and together and I'm interested to see where we go from here.