It's your last chance to watch Mr. Robot on Netflix
All four seasons of Mr. Robot are currently on Netflix — but they’ll leave the service in January 2026.
Published 3 hours ago
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If you start watching Mr. Robot on Netflix at exactly 11:48:06 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, you can hear Rami Malek say “Fuck society” in the pilot episode just as 2025 comes to an end. This feels like a pretty appropriate way to send off the last 12 months. And as an added bonus, you’ll also be kicking off 2026 by watching one of the best TV shows of the past decade.
All four seasons of Mr. Robot, which originally aired on USA starting in June 2015, are currently on Netflix — but they’ll leave the streaming service on Jan. 3. That means you’ve got just enough time to binge through the entire thing (a roughly 36-hour ordeal), or, at the very least, watch the excellent first season. It gets a bit uneven after that.
Image: USA/Everett Collection
Created by Sam Esmail (Netflix’s Leave the World Behind), Mr. Robot stars Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson, a disillusioned hacker who’s struggling with a suite of psychological issues and abusing morphine to get through the day. We see the world through Elliot’s fractured psyche — he works for a cybersecurity company called “Evil Corp” — as he attempts to dole out vigilante justice via his laptop and an internet connection. Elliot soon joins up with a group of anarchist hackers called fsociety led by a mysterious “Mr. Robot” with the goal of wiping out all consumer debt.
Mr. Robot is best described as a techno-thriller, and it feels like a worthy successor to the films and TV shows that helped pioneer that subgenre. Esmail constantly ratchets up the tension with each new episode, leading to some truly mind-blowing reveals about Elliot’s backstory that tie neatly into the propulsive narrative. The internet and Elliot’s hacking abilities are also portrayed with an impressive amount of realism; in the pilot, he breaks into his therapist's online dating account by guessing her password (her favorite musician plus her birthday), rather than simply mashing his fingers against the keyboard and then whispering, “I’m in.”
Image: USA/Everett Collection
Esmail displays a firm understanding of the internet and its overwhelming influence that feels ahead of its time by 2015 standards, even if some of his more specific predictions come across as naive a decade later. (Bitcoin still hasn’t replaced the U.S. dollar IRL, and we’ve mostly abandoned the term “hacktivist” these days.)
Released a year before Donald Trump’s initial rise to power on the cresting wave of right-wing online culture, there’s a cynical undercurrent running throughout Mr. Robot that was prescient for its time. While most of liberal-leaning Hollywood assumed things could only get better as Barack Obama prepared to pass the torch to Hillary Clinton, Esmail saw the imminent backslide coming our way and called his shot before almost everyone else.
Image: USA/Everett Collection
Originally conceived of as a movie, Mr. Robot was stretched into a season of television. That first season doesn’t suffer for it (if anything, the added runtime was probably an improvement), but by season 2, it’s clear the showrunner was struggling for ideas to keep telling a story that was never designed to continue.
The show’s second season remains a lowpoint, as Elliot struggles to deal with the society-fucking ramifications of the season 1 finale — only for a mid-season twist to reveal that nothing is as it seems. Email’s over-reliance on shocking reveals over substantive plot development scared a lot of fans off permanently, with some people not wanting to watch the showrunner spin his wheels aimlessly. And anyone who stuck around for the season 2 finale left disappointed by a seemingly random conclusion that left Mr. Robot on unsure footing. After his sophomore slump, however, Esmail eventually managed to course correct, delivering two additional seasons that are worth watching if you enjoy season 1 — even if they never quite reach that same initial high.
Maybe that’s for the best. After all, you’ve only got a few days to watch Mr. Robot before it disappears from Netflix faster than a hacker covering his tracks on the way out. Then again, if you finish season 1 and need to know what happens next, you can always watch the entire series for free with ads on Tubi.