The Ashley Madison hack continues to make the news weeks after the hacking. A Chicago-area unmarried man is suing Ashley Madison head honchos because of his data being exposed, and because of the alleged fake female accounts contained on the site. That man wants to keep using Ashley Madison to continue dating. Others, however, aren’t so sure. Some TV viewers, meanwhile, are buzzing about the season finale of Mr. Robot and how much the writers predicted the Ashley Madison hacking.
As reported by Variety , Mr. Robot , a show from the USA Network, did well for the cable station; the season finale caused it to sign off for the season as cable’s number two new summer drama. Wednesday’s Mr. Robot also featured an Ashley Madison storyline and reference that has Mr. Robot fans calling the writers prophetic.
Hitfix spoke with Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail about the Ashley Madison reference included in the script that has folks calling the writers people akin to the Carnac the Magnificent character Johnny Carson used to portray.
“It’s strange. And just to speak to the specific Ashley Madison line. That was originally in the script. If you remember from the pilot, that’s one of the things Elliot hacked about him, and one of the things Elliot used to manipulate him. When I wrote that in the season finale, I went, ‘Well, I’m kind of overdoing this,’ referencing Ashley Madison. I wound up cutting it before we were shooting it.”
That’s when Esmail cut the Ashley Madison line because he thought it was over the top, something that wouldn’t necessarily happen in real life. And then the Ashley Madison hack happened, something that overwhelmed Sam, calling it “too much.”
“It’s almost as if the world wanted me to keep the [Ashley Madison] scene as intended. It was actually purely a plot point. It wasn’t that Elliot had released that information, but that these other hackers who hacked Ashley Madison did it, and that’s why Lenny was at this desperate point of his life.”
Esmail called Mr. Robot mirroring real life “strange” and “surreal,” even with hacking in the spotlight because of the Sony hack — and now the Ashley Madison hack, which was seemingly predicted by Sam.
“For whatever reason, we’ve been step in toe with that. We even got picked up on the day the Sony hack happened. That’s just stuff I can’t predict. In general, the feeling is incredibly surreal.”
[Photo by Tommaso Boddi /Getty Images Entertainment]