In the first episode of “Mr. Robot,” a drama that is nearing the end of its first season on the USA Network, Elliot — the show’s main character, played by Rami Malek — delivers a memorable monologue about his disillusionment with society. Elliot’s Margaret Keane-size eyes go blank as he describes feelings of isolation and disconnection from popular culture.

“Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children?” his voice-over intones. “Or maybe it’s that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself is just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary, masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money.”

Any good television show can let you crawl inside the head of a character, but “Mr. Robot” does more: It gives you access to the inner workings of a culture. The series, about a hacker (Elliot) with social-anxiety disorder, has become a sleeper hit of the summer for reasons that go beyond the show’s clever pacing and dramatic story arcs. We now live in a world where hacks of all kinds are happening with alarming frequency and data dumps have become a weapon in both the geopolitical and personal arenas. (A colleague who covers cybersecurity for The Times is fond of saying that the difference between companies that have been hacked and those that haven’t been is simply that the ones who say they haven’t been hacked just don’t know it yet.) “Mr. Robot” feels, then, like a fictional CliffsNotes for the dark corridors of the Web, offering a degree of insight into the mentality of the kind of figures that, for example, targeted Ashley Madison, a dating service marketed to people interested in extramarital affairs, in an exhaustive leak of customer data earlier this month.

At its core, the show is a study in how hyperconsumerism and social-media overload have produced a class of disenfranchised individuals who also happen to have the ability to crack databases containing valuable and vulnerable information. Elliot is a chronically depressed computer technician who works at a omnipotent and powerful technology company. His preferred means of interacting with people is breaking into their email and social-media accounts to understand who they are, a habit that is portrayed as both tragic and creepy. Occasionally, when he finds something he finds abhorrent — like a cafe owner who peddles in child pornography — he turns the incriminating data over to the police. But as the show progresses, his anarchistic ideas become more convoluted, and the moral footing he uses to justify his behavior morphs in ways that make it harder to sympathize with him.