CoverStory

IF ENTERTAINMENT IS how we escape from the ills of the world, we sure are making some curious viewing choices these days. In the wake of high-profile, high-

New series ranging from awards magnet Mr. Robot to the revived X-Files and several more are resonating by mining the dystopian downside of our increasingly digital lives

By Michael Malone mmalone@nbmedia.com | @BCMikeMalone

tech hacking and spying incidents, a glut of programming focused on the dark side of technology has risen to prominence, including USA Network’s Mr. Robot, Fox’s revival of The X-Files and Show-time’s new Dark Net. The popularity of some of these series—Mr. Robot shocked many as the big winner at last month’s Golden Globes—means it’s likely the be-ginning of a trend in programming related to hack-ing, snooping and other cyber-skulduggery. So get used to the gloom.

“It feels like every day, there’s some new headline about an individual or a company being hacked,” said Heather Olander, senior VP of alternative devel-opment at Syfy, which debuts The Internet Ruined My Life—an unscripted series on the perils of living in the digital age—March 9. “It’s hit news, and it’s

hit popular culture. In the hacker space specifically, there’s a lot of development happening.”

Indeed, amid all the technological advances we’ve enjoyed as a society, digital ubiquity presents a fresh batch of challenges. A year ago, retail giant Target announced it would pay $10 million to settle a class action suit involving as many as 40 million credit and debit card accounts. Late in 2014, a shad-owy organization calling itself Guardians of Peace leaked a trove of confidential data from Sony Pic-tures Entertainment. High-profile leakers such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange have emerged as household names—heroes to some, traitors to oth-ers. Movies have tapped this vein a bit. HBO’s film

about Snowden, Citizenfour, won the 2015 Academy Award for best documen-tary. Less of a smash: Benedict Cumber-batch donning a white-blond wig to play Assange in The Fifth Estate.

Television series can go much deeper, though, and the new crop of shows is delv-ing into technology’s dubious underbelly in a range of different ways. A hacker and

a leaker were key characters in the most recent sea-son of Homeland on Showtime. Dark Net, which ex-plores “the side of the Internet few have ever seen,” debuted Jan. 21. The premiere told the stories of a woman whose life was nearly ruined when an ex-boyfriend posted salacious photos of her online; of a long distance romance between a dominatrix and a submissive, carried out online; and a young man in love with a digital avatar, who eschews the compan-

ionship of human partners. Dark Net is developed by Vocativ, a news and tech-

nology platform that explores the “deep Web”—the digital matter (and chatter) that our popular search engines don’t access—for troubling trends. Vivian Schiller, former president and CEO of NPR and head of news at Twitter, is an executive producer on the show. “We live in a transitional period,” said Mati Kochavi, Vocativ’s founder and the program’s creator. “We are much more digital, but still don’t know what it really means, and how it affects our lives.”

Gary Levine, Showtime president of programming, said the docuseries captures the odd dynamic be-tween something that brings us pleasure and conve-

nience daily, yet is something we may not understand the full ramifications of. “In the midst of everyone enjoying the undeniable benefits of technology, we thought we’d shine a little light on the realities of technology’s underbelly,” he told B&C.

Art Imitating LifeGovernmental snooping is a noisy theme in the

new X-Files, and the second episode features a mys-terious suicide at a secretive tech firm. Creator Chris Carter told B&C how the nation’s attitude toward being monitored changed dramatically post-Sept. 11, with people much more willing to give up per-sonal freedoms for an increased feeling of security.

8 B R O A D C A S T I N G & C A B L E F E B R U A R Y 8 , 2 0 1 6 B R O A D C A S T I N G C A B L E . C O M

WHY THIS MATTERS

The cyber-malfeasance dominating the news

has trickled down to our entertainment choices.

Hack to The Future

“We are much more digital, but still don’t know what it really means and how it affects our lives.”

—Mati Kochavi, Dark Net creator and founder of Vocativ

(Clockwise from above) Showtime’s new Dark Net; The Internet Ruined My Life debuts March 9 on Syfy; hacks and leaks were central to Homeland this past season; CBS’ CSI: Cyber; Edward Snowden was the focus of Citizenfour.

Sho

wti

me;

Ste

phan

Rab

old/

Sho

wti

me;

Mic

hael

Yar

ish/

CB

S;

Dav

id G

iesb

rech

t/U

SA N

etw

ork;

HB

O

B R O A D C A S T I N G C A B L E . C O M F E B R U A R Y 8 , 2 0 1 6 B R O A D C A S T I N G & C A B L E 9

USA’S ‘ROBO’-CALL TALKS THE TALKUSA HACKER-SLACKER hit Mr. Robot is full of surprises, so it only made sense that the drama was a shocker at the Golden Globes Jan. 10, coming away with two prestigious prizes. Star Rami Malek was up for a SAG award for outstanding performance in a drama, which went to Kevin Spacey of House of Cards, but Mr. Robot grabbed three Critics Choice prizes, including best drama.

Creator Sam Esmail and the writers are at work on the new season, which is slated to air on USA this summer. Until then, many are catching up with the 10-episode first season, which sees a bug-eyed young hacker in a hoodie, played by Malek, thwart cyber attacks by day and launch new ones by night. The show is heavy on hacker jargon, monitor screens filled with indecipherable code. One staff writer, Kor Adana, worked in cyber-security before writing for television. Along with a few tech consultants, he makes sure the tech-speak is authentic for the small minority who might actually understand it.

One need not speak that strange language to enjoy Mr. Robot, which is as much about alienation, depression and addiction in the big city as it is hacker stuff. “It’s story and character,” said Chad Hamilton, executive producer, on the reason for the show’s popu-larity. “It’s that simple. There are character moments and story threads that people can relate to their own lives.”

Esmail initially saw Mr. Robot as a feature film, and has said the first season represents the first 30 minutes of the movie. (Appropri-ately enough, the show premiered at Austin’s South by Southwest film festival last spring.)

Speaking at the TCA winter press tour in January, Esmail said the Golden Globe trophy will stay out of the writers’ room. “We just won this massive award, which is humbling and flattering and obviously sur-real,” he said. “But we try and keep that out of the room because, at the end of the day, it’s about telling the story, and that’s where our hearts are.”

Season 1 of Robot averaged 1.36 million viewers in the 18-49 group, and 2.74 million total viewers. On-demand usage of the show has doubled since the Golden Globe wins, USA says.

Hamilton acknowledges the pressure of delivering a standout sophomore season, but says it’s nothing new. “There’s always pressure—there was a lot of pressure in season 1,” he said. “We have a lot to live up to.” —MM

Mr. Robot

CoverStory

“We’ve upped our game in the conspiracy aspect of the show,” he said before the show’s successful relaunch. “We looked to our government to protect us [after Sept. 11], and now we see a blatant abuse of that.”

Other series offer their own take on tech’s perni-cious grasp. In the fall, Netflix ordered a new season of buzzy U.K. drama Black Mirror, which it described as “sharp, suspenseful tales exploring themes of con-temporary techno-paranoia.” Netflix’s dense drama Sense8 also deals with how technology both unites and divides people. Crackle, for its part, chose drama Startup, about a controversial tech concept that falls into the hands of reprobates, as its second-ever origi-nal scripted drama.

To be sure, the concept of cyber-hacking and snooping on TV is not a new one. Christian Slater, who picked up a best supporting actor Golden Globe for his work on Mr. Robot, had the lead in short-lived Fox comedy Breaking In, about a rogue security firm assigned to hack various high-tech security systems. Fox canceled it in 2012. CBS’ Person of Interest, about a pair of cyber-sleuths, debuted in 2011; CSI: Cyber in 2015.

Dystopia itself has been the focus of TV series dat-ing back at least to the iconoclastic Twilight Zone. And this era of peak TV has largely been defined by antiheroes who dwell in that gray area between black and white. Walter White, Don Draper and Tony Soprano showed that mass audiences will go along for the ride on dark series, as long as the characters and story lines are compelling.

The tech paranoia series push the moral am-biguity even further. It’s increasingly difficult to figure out the good guys from the bad guys, and the victims from the perpetrators. In Dark Net, the show’s subjects, the casualties of tech

overload, live mostly ordinary, humdrum lives that many viewers will relate to. In Mr. Robot, idealistic hackers run roughshod over laws to attack a corpora-tion, all the while reminding us that we’re all just a few keystrokes away from having our deepest digital secrets revealed.

“People are terrified of hackers,” said Chad Ham-ilton, executive producer of Mr. Robot. “These shows play into that paranoia.”

Dom Caristi, Ball State University professor of tele-communications, posits that the dark-tech themes on TV may have migrated from the video game world, where such motifs have long been common. “They may not be the main theme of games, but underlying

them may be this dark side of technology thinking,” he said, citing the Portal and Half-Life franchises.

Golden ‘Robot’ The tech-paranoia subgenre has a star performer

these days in Mr. Robot, whose anxious first sea-son was a departure from USA’s traditional blue-sky originals. The series is centered around a misfit named Elliot who toils at a cyber-security firm and joins a hacker collective that sets out to bring down an evil corporate behemoth.

The show, which creator Sam Esmail has noted was picked up the same day the Sony hack was made public, has proven eerily prescient. At one point, Elliot hacks a foe’s profile on Ashley Madison, the dating site for those looking for extramarital flings. When Ashley Madison was hacked in real life after the episode aired, Esmail explained that his name surfaced on shame lists because of the research he’d done for the series. “That was an awkward conversa-tion,” he quipped last October at a Paley Center for Media event in New York.

The success of Mr. Robot, which beat out Fox’s Empire, HBO’s Game of Thrones and Netflix’s Nar-cos, among others, for the best drama Golden Globe, was a surprise to just about everyone. “This is a weird show—there’s no getting around that,” said Esmail. “My highest expectation was, hopefully it’ll be a little cult hit.”

As is the nature of Hollywood, its success means series with similar themes will follow. Amidst new pilot orders, APB, from Person of Interest’s David Slack, is about a tech billionaire with an unorthodox philosophy on fighting crime. Mr. Robot showed that hacking, which may not seem to make for compel-ling television, can thrill on screen. “People chase hot concepts,” said one network exec who asked to go unnamed. “Mr. Robot has swung open the door, and showed that a show set in the tech space can work. It helps people embrace other shows in this space.”

For her part, Syfy’s Olander says a second season of The Internet Ruined My Life is a real possibility, given the great unknown that technology represents, and the surfeit of victims it claims. “The stories are endless, and there’s no case law, no history,” she said. “We’re really just dipping our toe in the water here.”

Joe

Vile

s/Fo

x; M

urra

y C

lose

/Net

flix

1 0 B R O A D C A S T I N G & C A B L E F E B R U A R Y 8 , 2 0 1 6 B R O A D C A S T I N G C A B L E . C O M

(Above) Film The Fifth Estate saw Benedict Cumberbatch (left) as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (Top right) Before signing on with Mr. Robot, Christian Slater (foreground) played the boss of a hacking outfit on Fox’s short-lived Breaking In. (Right) The Twilight Zone dwelled in a dystopian universe a half-century ago.

Netflix drama Sense8 depicts how the digital world

unites—and divides—us.

“People are terrified of hackers. These shows play into that paranoia.” —Chad Hamilton, Mr. Robot executive producer