“Mr. Robot” cuts through the world’s bullshit—and then sometimes offers up its own brand as a replacement. Illustration by Rune Fisker

When the anti-corporate thriller “Mr. Robot” débuted, last year, it felt like a shock to multiple systems, one of them being the network on which it aired. That was USA, a subsidiary of NBCUniversal and Comcast; the home of upbeat, aspirational procedurals, it’s known as the “blue skies” network. “Mr. Robot” was more of a hurricane advisory. Created by a newcomer, Sam Esmail, it was a parable of class rage, with a vigilante anti-hero, welding the paranoid style in American TV drama onto the ideology—and, just as important, the aesthetics—of both the Occupy movement and Anonymous.

Esmail’s plot was a Philip K. Dick puzzle box, exposing one false reality after another. By day, the alienated junkie genius Elliott Alderson worked as a corporate cyber-security expert; by night, he was part of a radical hacker collective called FSociety. He’d been recruited by the mysterious Mr. Robot (Christian Slater, doing his jocular-bully shtick). Later, we learned that Mr. Robot was Elliott’s dead father. Elliott’s colleague Darlene was in fact his sister. And who was Elliott talking to in that deadpan voice-over? Was it . . . us? In any case, by the finale, FSociety had accomplished its goal: it had hacked Wall Street and dissolved global debt, erasing student loans, hospital bills, and exploitative mortgages. Anarchic celebrations erupted, framed by Sephora and Starbucks billboards—potential advertisers held up for mockery, a startling break with TV tradition. It was as if USA Network had rebranded as Jacobin.

Rami Malek’s performance as Elliott was tremendous, as he peeked from a hoodie with sad-owl eyes slicked with sweat, shuddering as if he were in continual detox from society’s poisons. And yet there was something synthetic about the show, too, despite its rhetorical boldness and its sensational editing and music direction. The storytelling was a grab bag: niftily disorienting but also, at times, humorless or claustrophobic, as if it were less a show about human beings and more a staging ground for cathartic spectacles of economic justice. Conformist bad guys (cheaters, porn hounds, bankers) were hacked and blackmailed; a Wall Street shill shot himself in the head on live TV; and, at the end, the screen swarmed with protesters in Mr. Monopoly masks, holding signs that read “We Do Not Compromise.”

In an affectionate critique written after the first season, the New York critic Matt Zoller Seitz diagnosed “Mr. Robot” ’s deep investment in what he described as “Cinema de Dudebro”: “ ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘American Psycho,’ ‘The Matrix,’ the complete works of Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher—you name it, ‘Mr. Robot’ probably carries it deep within its aesthetic DNA, along with the original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy.” In Zoller Seitz’s eyes, Esmail’s mastery of fanboy pastiche was both a mark of the show’s undeniable ambition and the “bug” in its code, the quality that kept it skittering on the surface of greatness.

That analysis nailed the show’s most maddening quality, the way that it sometimes felt as if it cut through the world’s bullshit—and then sometimes offered up its own brand as a replacement. This problem continues in the second season, which, in its first two episodes, alternates between sequences of masterly beauty—including two memorable acts of digital terrorism—and one too many deep talks between Elliott and his friends.

Still, I knew that I would keep watching, no matter what, after an early sequence that flashes back to a young Elliott in the hospital, because his abusive father has shoved him out a window. While his parents bicker about co-pays, the camera drifts, in a woozy unbroken shot, to gaze first at Elliott, then with him. We see an X-ray of his brain, and then, peering closer, a Rorschach test, or Dalmatian spots, a nagging pattern that we recognize but can’t quite place. As Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydreamin’ ” plays, the black-and-white blobs dance, and the lens widens to reveal the answer: it’s the cover of a grade-school composition notebook. In quick cuts, we rise up to see the notebook, then the notebook framed by a desk, then the notebook framed by the now grownup Elliott’s room, where he lies in bed like an invalid. He’s sober, living with his mother, and, crucially, offline. His brain is the notebook is the computer: imperfect memory devices sustaining a broken system. “I’ve been keeping a journal,” Elliott explains, in his trademark monotone. “It’s the only way to keep my program running.”

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Sequences like this are so moodily elegant, evoking the fragility of perception, that they elevate the show’s more familiar musings, especially Elliott’s perseverations on the brainwashed basics who surround him. Yes, identity is an illusion created by advertisers; happiness is for analog folks who take Lexapro and watch “NCIS,” who favor “the thick grimy film of Facebook friend requests and Vine stars.” (“Isn’t that where it’s comfortable—in the sameness?” Elliott asks his therapist.) We’re not supposed to accept Elliott’s Andy Rooney hot takes at face value (for one thing, he’s still hallucinating his father as Mr. Robot), but his reflections are too often borne out by the show’s cartoon vision of the world: in the land of the one per cent, soulless rich bitches get off to knife play, sad P.R. flacks mutter along to motivational tapes, and dumb gigolos switch from the news to “Vanderpump Rules.”

Elliott’s own mental state is treated not so much as an illness (some combination of autism and schizophrenia) but as a metaphor for the pain of wokeness, the suffering of the princess who really feels the capitalist pea. This intensity can be accidentally funny, as in one sequence during which Elliott laugh-cries so hard that he resembles Paulina Porizkova in the Cars’ “Drive” video. There’s something exhausting about Christian Slater doing his “Dream Ghost” routine, too. But, even as I write these sentences, I feel like an absolute jerk. I mean, is Wall Street rigged? Pretty much, yeah, it is. “Mr. Robot” may be self-serious, but it’s also a rarity on TV, capturing a modern mood, an ambient distrust based on genuine social betrayals. For all its flaws, it feels like an alarm going off. It’s worth paying attention to.

There’s a paranoid underclass hacker in “BrainDead,” too, an autodidact chess genius who compares himself to Edward Snowden. His name is Gustav Triplett (played with fabulous flair by Johnny Ray Gill), and he’s just one of the self-appointed detectives trying to figure out what’s gone wrong in Washington, D.C. In “BrainDead,” on CBS, it’s not one-per-centers but space aliens who are rigging the system: a mysterious meteorite has crashed to Earth, releasing ants from another planet, which tiptoe into politicians’ ears and literally eat their brains. Sometimes, those ants also fart inside the brain—and then the brain explodes.

Perhaps this premise sounds a little juvenile and simplistic to you! It certainly did to me when I saw the pilot, as a devout hater of both ants and scenes where bright-red brain matter leaks out of people’s ears. But, two episodes in, it became clear that Robert and Michelle King—who are also the creators of “The Good Wife”—were working up a far stranger, more original, and certainly funkier allegory for Washington’s woes. Ant-ification doesn’t make senators and congressmen stupid or corrupt. (For one thing, they were already corrupt.) It just makes them insanely partisan and deaf in one ear. Ordinary Republicans become seething zealots; Democrats can’t stop ranting about Denmark. Neither side sees the other as human, and, as a result, both sides become increasingly inhuman, incapable of participating in a system that is dependent on finding common ground, and compromise, with one’s ideological opponents. Meanwhile, the non-infected people stare at the infected ones in bafflement, as the system grinds to a halt.