In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, USA Network. Starts June 24 In the UK: Not yet acquired
I want you to hack me as hard as you can
Over the years, the USA Network has struggled to work out what kind of network it is. Scroll back a decade or more in the timeline and most people associated it with the likes of country & western reality talent show Nashville Star. Then it started trying to do drama, with a brilliant but quickly cancelled remake of the UK’s Touching Evil, which was perhaps a bit too dark and unmarketable for the likes of USA.
The network didn’t abandon its attempts with drama, but the set back did lead it to start going a bit fluffier. By about 2007, Burn Notice, Monk and Psych were the network’s go-to shows, and while Burn Notice was obviously a much darker show than either Psych and Monk, it still wasn’t quite Requiem for a Dream. These shows had something of an 80s nostalgia to them, which led to the fluffy likes of In Plain Sight.
Now some of these were great, some of them really weren’t, but they almost all still had something of an edge to them, at least. And slowly, with most of the new fluff fluffing in the ratings, the pendulum has started to swing back over the past year or so towards USA’s skulking darker side with the likes of Rush,Satisfaction and, coming soon, Complications.
This is all for the good, since now we have perhaps USA’s darkest – and best – new show for quite some time, Mr Robot. It sounds fluffy, doesn’t it, with that name, but it’s really not. Think Fight Club if it was all about hacking or Batman, if Batman was a socially anxious coder who used technology to stop people faking identities, end the distribution of images of child abuse and bring down the corporate elite who secretly rule the world.
Rami Malek (24, The War At Home, The Pacific) is Elliot, a white hat techie at a cybersecurity firm. He has social issues, which means in between bouts of crying to himself at home from loneliness, taking morphine, having sex with his drug dealer, hacking people he knows about to find out more about them or talking to his new friends – the viewers at home – he’s busily putting the world to rights. Or to rights as he sees them.
In particular, he’d really like to destroy his company’s biggest client, The Evil Corporation, and one day he comes across ‘Mr Robot’ (Christian Slater) and his team of socially minded hackers, who offer him the chance to do just that and liberate society from this menace. Is The Evil Corporation really running the world? Is what Slater says possible? Can he be trusted? And is he even real or is he just the Tyler Durden of Elliot’s unmedicated, occasionally paranoid schizophrenic sub-conscious?
All these questions and more are asked and you will want to know the answers. If you’re in the US, you can watch the full episode below; otherwise, I’ll leave you with some trailers and we can talk more after the jump.
Netflix is entering a new phase of its existence, learning what pretty much every big TV provider is finding out these days – you need partners if you’re going to keep making global television shows. These things are just too expensive to do by yourself if you’re going to maintain quality or at least avoid bankruptcy.
To be fair, as we’ve seen with Residue, Netflix doesn’t mind chucking out the occasionally cheap and cheerful bit of work, but I can’t imagine that’s its long-term business model. At least I certainly hope for Netflix’s sake that it’s not resting all its hopes and dreams on Residue.
So Between, a co-production between Netflix and Canada’s City TV, marks the first fruit of this change in strategy. Also new – at least for US Netflix subscribers if not for UK viewers – is its episodic, weekly release.
But then I can’t imagine you’d really want to binge-watch Between, a sterling example of the perils of international production and of how very unexceptional Canadian TV can be. Set in the aptly and ridiculously titled town of Pretty Lake, it sees a mysterious disease break out, killing thousands. At least, it’s probably a disease, what will the bile n’all, but since no one ever gets any symptoms until they simply throw up and die and as doctors can’t seem to find any cause for either the disease or the deaths, it might be something a bit more supernatural. Or alien.
The disease also has one other trick up its microscopic sleeve: it doesn’t kill anyone aged 21 or less. That means that in the space of just a few days, pretty much everyone inside the now-quarantined Pretty Lake is a kid… with no parents telling them what to do. What will happen next? And can anyone say Carousel?
We’re nearing the end of our brief Ken Loach season, but this week I’m going to use up two of the remaining plays in one go, as they’re a two-parter. 1977’s The Price of Coal was written by Loach’s Kes writing partner Barry Hines and is set in Yorkshire colliery community.
The first part, Meet The People, is a slightly comic affair, with management trying to enlist the miners in sprucing up the pithead in preparation for a visit by Prince Charles. A strangely comic affair for both Hines and Loach, it sees Loach abandon his documentary style of filming in favour of something a bit more Czech new wave that’s merely content to observe, although Loach did do his usual trick of casting some non-actors in key roles, drawing on some local stand-up comics when casting his humorous miners (Duggie Brown, Bobby Knutt, Stan Richards and Jackie Shinn).
The second part, set just a month later, reverts a bit more towards the Loach mean, with an underground explosion at the colliery killing several miners, the play then following the attempts to rescue others than remain trapped.
