There’s a scene during the sixth episode of USA’s “Mr. Robot” in which the lead character, a painfully anxious computer hacker named Elliot, pulls off an extraordinary feat. He cripples a prison’s security system to free a single inmate: a drug dealer whose thugs have been holding Elliot’s girlfriend captive. After he frees the bad guy, he is handed the keys to the car he’s been riding around in all day. In the trunk lies his girlfriend, dead.

The hand-held camera pivots around Elliot’s face. With his jaw clenched and bulbous eyes downcast, the reaction of the actor Rami Malek is so minimalist as to be disturbing. Sam Esmail, the creator and show runner of “Mr. Robot,” said that there had been a question about how to approach the moment. “Finding this person that you really deeply cared about dead in the trunk and you’re not exploding in tears?” Mr. Esmail said by telephone from Los Angeles. But, he continued, “We were never worried about getting the audience to like Elliot.”

It is that sort of stubbornly confident storytellingthat has made “Mr. Robot,” which has its first-season finale Wednesday night, one of the most acclaimed shows of the summer. Critics have praised Mr. Malek’s performance, the show’s hacker-world verisimilitude and its visual aesthetic. And even though the show’s ratings (which started at 2.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen’s live-plus-three-days data, and have declined to 2.3 million) still fall below USA stalwarts like “Suits,” the network was enthusiastic enough about the show to order for a second season even before its debut.

Mr. Esmail, who released “Comet,” his first film, in 2014, conceived “Mr. Robot” out of a passion for socioeconomic causes — and tech. He cites the 2008 financial crisis, the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring demonstrations as sources of both frustration and inspiration. “I’m Egyptian,” said Mr. Esmail, who was born in New Jersey. “And to see my cousins over there in their late teens and early 20s channel their anger for this really positive change using technology, that was incredibly moving to me.”