What do a cybersecurity expert with a penchant for hacking, and a producer for a reality TV dating show have in common?
They both headline this summer’s latest engaging summer drama series, USA Network’s Mr. Robot and Lifetime’s UnREAL.
And just as notable, these shows sit as hot new members in the cable’s intersection of antiheroes and mental illness.
Each show, so far, has been engaging:
UnREAL as dishy soap infused with reality TV parody and third-wave feminism, and
Mr. Robot as a paranoid hacker thriller for today’s 21st-century, technocratic gilded age.
But when I watch both programs, I am intrigued by the ways in which the characters confront their mental disorders.
Mr. Robot’s Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) is presented to us from the pilot onward as paranoid, insular, depressed and angry. He covers his head in a hoodie as part of his social anxiety, like . Malek’s performance first stands out for his voice – strained, nervous, raspy and flat all at once – and then his eyes, rarely blinking, seemingly too large for his face, fixed in a thousand-yard stare that looks right through people.
UnREAL’s Rachel Goldberg (Shiri Appleby) returns to her Bachelor-like dating show, Everlasting, after an emotional meltdown that resulted in charges and jail time. As the episodes unfold, including a harrowing scene with her psychiatrist mother (written, by turns, as a sendup of the trope and declaration of its potential horror), we get some history of Rachel’s treatment for mental illness. Borderline personality disorder is mentioned as a potential diagnosis.
Elliot and Rachel don’t have mental disorders as a quirk or character note. This isn’t Carrie Mathison on Homeland with her bipolar that dipped up and down with the plot, or Sheldon Cooper with his delightful Asperger’s-that-won’t-be-named on The Big Bang Theory.
This won’t be the isn’t-it-silly obsessive compulsive disorder of Adrian Monk’s titular role. There’s nothing yet like OCD of Hannah Horvath on Girls, which flared from humorous into a melodramatic, perverse rescue by her boyfriend Adam.
Malek plays Elliot with an everpresent, wide-eyed, vacant stare always off a thousand yards away. Appleby plays Rachel with a frequently tilted head and a slight curl to her lip, especially when she’s producing the moment.
Both Elliot and Rachel wear hoodies, making them both commonplace (don’t we all wear them now?) but anonymous when combined with their all-neutral-colors wardrobes of grays, blacks, olive greens and dark blues.
In Mr. Robot, we specifically see much of the story through Elliot’s eyes. We get his nihilistic interior monologue as voiceover, narrating to us like Rorschach in Watchmen. We get flashes away from the camera that further confuse the reality as the self-aware Elliot knows that he has delusions and even asks us, “Do you see what I’m seeing?” (Of course, it’s unknown whether he’s really speaking to us at home, or to himself, or both.)
On UnREAL, a watch ticks whenever Rachel goes into her sociopathic producing of the contestants and suitor, reminiscent of Sylar’s theme on Heroes. Shiri Appleby’s performance is so good because, in these moments, her expressions sell that her brain is working to find an emotional angle to persuade, to manipulate. We see her know that she is doing something wrong, and she chooses it anyway.
Is it because she enjoys setting these people in motion for reality TV and ratings? Is it because she is stuck amid criminal charges and debt with no way out? Is she juggling everyone else’s agendas while secretly trying to sabotage the show by occasionally getting its people to act against expectations in some kind of feminist revenge at shows like The Bachelor?
Are all of these things happening at once? That may be the best answer of all.
Elliot spends a lot of time hiding his emotions, with his narration telling more of his depression, alienation and fretting over a creeping nihilism and loss of control. We see his crying fits that may be related to his father’s recent death, his apparently abusive mother, or his mental illness.
Rachel’s emotions, however, sit on the surface when faced with reflections of herself, her shortcomings, her embarrassments and fears. She’s defensive, horny, brokenhearted, and shows it.
Rachel reaches out with a hand to make a connection, to solidify a point. Elliot won’t let anyone touch him.
And like any fine antihero, there’s a lot of doing bad things in order to do good.
Elliot won’t blackmail the coffeeshop chain owner secretly running a child porn website; he tips off the police instead. He does blackmail a serial adulterer, but only for him to leave his therapist alone, not for money. He balks at fsociety’s plan that would involve killing in order to disrupt the world’s corporate overlords.
Rachel gets a contestant to come out to her, but won’t out her on national TV against her will. She tries to get one contestant to seek help for bulimia, all while using her illness to sow discord among the women. She reverse-psychs the suitor so that he makes fairer decisions – well, as fair as a Bachelor-type TV show could be.
But like any good antihero, Rachel and Elliot are also complicated by their own evil, and dragged down into the depths. Both shows use the conceit of their closed worlds to show the greater insanity around them.
Rachel brings in a woman’s abusive ex-husband, but only after being pressured into it by her boss. The ex-husband’s presence sets off the woman to a tragic outcome, but that came after a rival producer swapped the contestants’ medication for bipolar and PTSD with placebos, and fueling her with alcohol.
Elliot uses his hacker skills to set up the head of a corporation as the root of his own company’s hack, which leads to the CEO’s arrest, markets disrupted, likely people put out of work.
How UnREAL and Mr. Robot will play out, and how each show will use their characters’ mental disorders, remains to be seen.
Parts of Mr. Robot so far feel lifted from The Matrix: the computer worker who encounters a crew of revolutionary hackers featuring the Father (Mr. Robot, played by Christian Slater) and the Girl, Men in Black, Elliot Alderson sounding like Neo’s Mr. Anderson. (Not to mention another not-quite-white actor playing an apparently white role, but hey.) UnREAL’s first hook was as a Bachelor parody – series co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro was a producer on the ABC show – and reality TV takedown.
UnREAL could fall down the same reality-hate well that makes my eyes roll when NPR listeners get mad at news comedy show Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me having Kim Kardashian on as a guest.
Mr. Robot could wind up like the Matrix sequels or South Park’s “Ass Burgers” episode featuring an Asperger’s support group secretly filled with cynical losers attending to whiskey-fueled crusades of delusion. (In Elliot’s case, heroin is his drug of choice.)
But I gotta say, this is a promising start.
Bring me more. I’m plugged in.
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