Amazon Prime Buys Exclusive Streaming Rights To ‘Mr. Robot’

According to the Verge, Amazon Prime has purchased exclusive streaming rights to the critically acclaimed USA Original series Mr. Robot, winner of the 2015 SXSW Film Award for best serial drama.

The new Amazon Prime show’s tagline is “Just a regular cyber-security engineer by day–but I’m a vigilante hacker by night.”

The show is basically a vigilante-procedural with a twist. We’ve seen a few of those in recent years: Dexter, Gotham, House — and that’s just to name a few. The show speaks to wired, digitally native millennial culture as well as older techies, without losing the fans of mystery-thriller shows from all professional backgrounds who will make up the show’s bread & butter audience.

Mr. Robot‘s plot, as described by our own Alana Voppi, can essentially be described in a few bulletpoints:

• Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a dark, brooding, somewhat bug-eyed Millennial-aged cyber security programmer has severe and crippling social anxiety issues
• He consumes illicit morphine to medicate the pain of his loneliness
• His primary mode of engaging with other humans is to hack into their online lives and the people they come in contact with.
• Terrible stuff discovered while snooping occasionally motivates or inspires our protagonist to right wrongs and generally act as a “Hacker-vigilante” which compound-word essentially defines the dominant motif.
• Elliot gets caught involved with a hacktivist group called Fsociety, run by a character known as Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) who convinces him to take part in their plans to redistribute the wealth of the world’s corporations back to the people.
• World-debt is erased as part of a hack. All hell breaks loose.

To get a sense of the show’s ambiance, check out the extended preview below:

Amazon Prime has likely inked the deal with Mr. Robot as one of this business quarter’s “big plays” in their ongoing turf war with Netflix and Hulu — an epic battle for exclusive content, and for the hearts and minds of subscribers who can’t stop binge-watching their way through the aforementioned exclusives.

Committed fans who still don’t have an Amazon Prime account will maintain an ability to purchase the show digitally through iTunes and other stores, but they won’t be able to stream it anywhere else. Amazon Prime’s press release notes that Mr. Robot‘s first season will exclusively premiere on Prime across the U.K., Germany, Austria, and Japan, as well as the second season premiering soon in the U.S.

Mr. Robot won praise from critics for its first 10-episode run, and Amazon is quite thrilled to have snatched it up — and locking streaming rivals out. Mr. Robot, whose cast includes Rami Malek and Christian Slater, had its contract renewed for another season by USA before the first episode even aired. It finished behind Fear the Walking Dead as the summer’s second most popular new cable series.

There is, perhaps, a certain irony to the fact that a show about an anti-establishment, anti-capitalist “Anonymous“-esque hero is the “hot new property” of one of the world’s biggest corporations.

[Image from USA Network]