Elliot Alderson, the tech whizz at the centre of the TV thriller Mr Robot, hacks anything and everything: computers, smartphones, even his own therapist. “Hacking her was easy,” he brags in the show’s first episode. Her password he guessed straight away: Dylan_2791, her favourite artist and the year she was born, backwards. Within minutes, Elliot had wormed his way into her email, looked through her dating history on eHarmony and found out the name of her current boyfriend. “I’ll hack him soon enough. I always do,” he says dispassionately. You don’t dare doubt him.

If Rami Malek, the Egyptian-American actor who plays Elliot, can’t quite boast the computer chops of his character just yet, he does seem to have picked up a few pointers. “In the car the other day a friend wanted to play music on her phone. She was driving so she gave me the four-digit code. I looked at it and said: ‘Ha, four digits! That wouldn’t happen to be the pin code to your ATM card, would it?’” He laughs then pauses: “People don’t realise how vulnerable they are.”

Vulnerable is the right word. In a society where every last detail of people’s lives is catalogued and shared online, our data has become a much-coveted commodity. Governments pore over our phone records and WhatsApp threads, corporations sell our hobbies and health records to the highest bidder, and – somewhere in the murky corners of the internet – a dark army of phishers, spammers and general villains lies in wait, ready to pilfer our credit card details or leak our darkest secrets to the wider web.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christian Slater as Mr. Robot and Rami Malek. Photograph: Christopher Saunders

Now, finally, there’s a show that holds up a mirror – or perhaps a cracked smartphone screen – to society’s uneasy relationship with its own information. Set in a paranoid New York City, Mr Robot follows Elliot, a expert coder with social anxiety disorder and a major morphine habit, as he balances a double life. By day, Elliot works for a cybersecurity company; by night he transforms into a virtual vigilante, targeting the worst of a society that he views as inherently rotten – drug dealers, serial adulterers – from his bedroom.

People don’t realise how vulnerable they are Rami Malek

Soon enough, Elliot’s have-a-go heroism attracts the attention of both the 1% – shadowy men in black suits seem to follow him at every turn – and the other 99: a masked organisation calling themselves “fsociety” wants him to join their cause. Their leader is the scruffy, speechifying Mr Robot, played with scenery-chomping glee by Christian Slater, and their targets are a little more ambitious than Elliot’s: fsociety seeks to erase all consumer debt by attacking the servers of E Corp – the monolithic multinational blamed by Elliot for causing his father’s death from leukemia – and in the process topple the very pillars of capitalism itself. The Big Bang Theory this ain’t.

In an era where iPhones and people carriers are routinely folded into the plotlines under the guise of “product integration”, it’s bracing to see a programme that’s so damning about consumerist culture. When products and individuals are namechecked in Mr Robot, it’s usually as the recipient of a barbed criticism: one gasp-worthy moment in the pilot sees Elliot question why we celebrate the late Steve Jobs when “we knew he made billions off the backs of children”. Such broadsides have led Mad Men creator Matt Weiner to describe Mr Robot as US TV’s “first truly contemporary anti-corporate message”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hacking clan fsociety. Photograph: Virginia Sherwood

It’s a message that seems particularly well-timed, emerging just as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are attracting followings on both sides of the Atlantic for their critiques of capitalism. Indeed, Mr Robot couldn’t feel more “of the moment” if it came sliding into view on a hoverboard whistling Trap Queen. From its very inception, the show has seemed eerily twinned with real-life events. It was commissioned on the day Sony employees found their data had been leaked by a group calling themselves Guardians Of Peace, and its first episode alluded to Ashley Madison just as the adultery site itself was hacked. (More darkly, the show’s first-season finale had to be postponed because it featured a scene similar to the shooting of two Virginia journalists live on air.)

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Such real-world connotations have clearly resonated with viewers. Despite being buried in a summer slot on the unheralded USA Network, Mr Robot has proved an unexpected hit in the States, earning critical acclaim and building an obsessive fanbase. When Fortune magazine asked its list of the 40 top business leaders under the age of 40 what their favourite show was, Mr Robot came out on top, ahead of Game Of Thrones. Not only that, the show has also found favour with a certain NSA whistleblower...

“I just found out Edward Snowden’s a huge fan of the show,” Malek says, referring to a recent interview where Snowden praised Mr Robot’s depiction of hacking. “When you realise how much he knows about government spying tactics… it feels like we’re doing a very accurate job,” he adds.

Mr Robot’s creator Sam Esmail seems similarly excited by this unlikely thumbs-up. “That was a huge vote of confidence,” he beams. You can understand why he’s so enthused. An avowed nerd growing up, Esmail says he found himself “fascinated” by the world of hacking, but disappointed by the lame manner it was depicted on screen in 90s films such as The Net or Hackers. “A lot of times there was this fear that [the subject matter] would feel too inaccessible to an audience, so they’d throw in some CGI graphics or the ridiculous ‘big red [downloading] bar’ to water it down,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mr Robot. Photograph: Peter Kramer

Esmail’s response was to set about writing his own hacking film, one that actually “got” the subject it was trying to talk about. Somewhere along the way, though, he found he couldn’t stop writing. “I got to about page 90 and realised I was not even a fraction of the way through the first act,” he says. “In a feature, the first act tends to be about 30 pages. But I was thinking to myself: ‘I don’t want to trim this down.’ That’s when I did the conversion to television.”

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Esmail, who wrote and directed the sci-fi romcom film Comet prior to working on Mr Robot, is a fastidious figure. While other show creators might leave day-to-day running of projects to other people, Slater says that Esmail was present on set “98% of the time”. Every detail of Mr Robot is meticulously pored over. Tech consultants are employed to make sure each keystroke Elliot makes is as accurate as possible, every script is read by a psychiatrist to make sure Elliot’s social anxiety disorder – which leaves him incapable even of attending his best friend’s birthday party – is being represented honestly. Similar attention is paid to the show’s unusual aesthetic, one which banishes Elliot and his fellow members of fsociety to the outer quadrants of the frame, as if exiled from their own TV show. That framing device initially baffled some of the show’s cast, including Malek. After a while though, he says, “I started to get that these characters live on the edge. They are people on the fringes of society, ostracised.”

Striking, too, is the show’s heavy use of narration, uttered in a halting monotone by Elliot. While it’s not unprecedented, Mr Robot takes the voiceover into strange new territory, with the viewer becoming Elliot’s imaginary companion. “Maybe I should give you a name,” he says at the beginning of the show’s pilot episode. “But that’s a slippery slope. You’re only in my head. We have to remember that.” Taxi Driver’s internal monologue was an inspiration – “There’s something charged and energetic about that that I wanted to put in Mr Robot” says Esmail – and like Scorsese’s film there is a sense of complicity on the part of the audience. Elliot uses us as a confidante and co-conspirator: when he implants a virus or bangs a line of morphine, he looks to his “imaginary friend” for understanding or reassurance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rami Malek in one of the show’s distinctive edge-of-frame angles.

But Elliot is also a deeply unreliable narrator. He forgets things, contradicts himself, and reveals his own biases (in Mr Robot’s first episode Elliot tells us that he calls E Corp “Evil Corp” and from that point on everyone else in the show does, too). All of this casts doubt over what we’re seeing on screen. Do those men in suits following Elliot’s every move really exist, or did he just imagine them? What about Mr Robot himself, who seems to flit in and out of Elliot’s life, barely communicating with those around him? Could he be a figment of Elliott’s imagination, just like us?

Whatever the truth is about Mr Robot, Slater isn’t letting on. All he’s willing to divulge is that the character has “an air of mystery about him”. Real or not, Slater feels some kinship with Mr Robot, comparing him with Hard Harry, the lonerish pirate radio DJ he played in cult 90s classic Pump Up The Volume. He has admiration, too, for fan of the show and real-life Mr Robot, Edward Snowden.

I started to get that these characters live on the edge. They are people on the fringes of society, ostracised Rami Malek

“After watching CitizenFour and getting more information about what he actually went through and what he exposed, I do believe a very brave choice was made by this individual,” he says. “Look, if you and I wanted to have a private conversation and really share our thoughts of what’s happening with the government, and we didn’t have that ability because the government is listening in? That is definitely something that needed to be brought to the attention of the American people.”

Slater is more circumspect when it comes to fsociety’s corporation-crushing aims, pointing to the donations made by businesses to Syrian refugee camps as evidence of the more benevolent side of corporatism. “Sometimes these large businesses can help even faster than governments can,” he argues. “They have better access and they don’t have to deal with all the politics, all that nonsense.”

For Malek, the utopian goals of fsociety sound more tantalising in principle than in practice. “As smart as [Elliot] is, I don’t think he’s thought it through,” he says. He points to a scene in the final episode of Mr Robot’s first season where Elliot and his hacker friends free a dog pound of its inhabitants.

“It’s something Sam [Esmail] was trying to say: ‘Were the dogs better off in the cage? Because who’s going to feed them? Who’s going to take care of them? They may be free, but how are they going to survive?’ And I think we all are going to have to deal with the consequences of Elliot’s actions in the end”.

Series one of Mr Robot is available in full now on Amazon Video