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Good Times
Netflix takes a classic sitcom, Good Times, and turns it into a vulgar, violent, sexually-charged TV-MA show.
Elliot Alderson has a problem. Several, actually.
He has an anxiety disorder. He doesn’t like to be touched. He takes morphine. He hallucinates. Oh, and he thinks an omnipotent corporate entity is out to get him.
Elliot’s biggest problem? He may be right about that last one. And the omnipotent corporate enemy is larger and darker than he ever imagined.
After building a brand on featherweight dramas and funny crime stories, USA Network pushed into prestige television with Mr. Robot, a subversive, creepy serial centered on the most unreliable of narrators: a dysfunctional, delusional, sometimes drug-addled hacker with a persecution complex.
Not that Mr. Robot’s antihero is all anti and no hero. He has his good points, too. He loves his dog. He cares about the few people close to him (albeit so much so that he’ll digitally spy on whoever’s getting close to them). And he is, naturally, a veritable Merlin with a computer. He figures out a way to use those skills to become, he thinks, an information-age Robin Hood. Joining an organization called F Society—led by the enigmatic Mr. Robot—Elliot manages to cripple an organization he calls Evil Corp, wiping away the collective debt of millions of ordinary folks.
Good, right?
Well, maybe not so much. Plenty of ordinary folks were hurt by that cleansing of debt, too. Oh, and Mr. Robot? Turns out the guy was Elliot himself—a fragment of his personality that’s growing more and occasionally more violent. Is it possible that Elliot, under the influence of Mr. Robot, might be a killer, too?
Clearly, this Robin Hood is on the crazy train to Nottingham, and Elliot wants to jump off the tracks. In an attempt to weaken Mr. Robot’s hold on him, Elliot flees off the grid often to try and retain his sanity. But Mr. Robot is still there—threatening him, hurting him, egging him back into the game.
And the game is ever expanding. E Corp is no longer the threat. No, a much larger, darker corporation lurks around every corner. It’s called the Dark Army. Turns out it owns E Corp. And they might own everything else too.
Now, the only way Elliot, and those he occasionally cares for, has a chance of surviving is to team up with E Corp and send the Dark Army back to the hole from which they came.
But the world wide web isn’t easily untangled.
Mr. Robot is a well-written dramatic thriller that received a bevy of critical praise after its first season. Indeed, the show was nominated for four Emmys in 2016, including Outstanding Drama, and won two of them—including Outstanding Actor for star Rami Malek.
But as is often the case with dramatic darlings these days, the series also comes with a litany of serious content concerns. In the very first episode, Elliot tells us that it’s possible to take morphine without getting addicted. Sure, series creator Sam Esmail intends his antihero to be an unreliable narrator. But Elliot’s anguished loner persona might still seem pretty attractive to some viewers who might be struggling with the same kinds of issues he struggles with. And there’s been plenty of drug use and drug references since then.
Elliot’s been known to sleep with his dealers. Sex is a regular theme on the show—both heterosexual and homosexual—and onscreen trysts can be frank and lewd and downright disturbing. Also, as Elliot descends ever deeper into the murk that surrounds him, violence is a common theme. Those around him are sometimes terminated with lethal prejudice. Characters smoke and lie habitually, too. The language can be brutal. F-words (censored in the broadcast version, but unbleeped if you buy episodes off Amazon and Apple) make regular appearances. They’re also referenced right in F Society’s very name.
And then, of course, you’ve got the series’ strong anti-capitalist thread.
“Everyone steals,” Mr. Robot tells Elliot. “That’s how it works. Someone in the chain always gets bamboozled.” And the show, unreliable narrator or not, sympathizes. Plucking themes in vogue around the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Mr. Robot suggests that big corporations are the real crooks today, asking us all to shovel money into their pockets while we stagger through the streets shackled to anvils of debt and darkness.
Elliot, Mr. Robot and E Corp CEO Tyrell Wellick work together to get rid of a dead body, but the body mysteriously goes missing and they’re forced to trek through the woods to find out what happened. Darlene, Elliot’s sister, takes a road trip with a drunk stranger. Dominique, an FBI agent and forced Dark Army recruit, tries to find human connection on a sex chat room but is interrupted by nightmares of the Dark Army.
Tyrell hits a man in the head with a hammer and kills him (blood pours from his head). A drunk Santa references suicide multiple times. A man commits suicide (we see him shoot himself in the head and blood flies). A woman has a nightmare that she’s being drowned. A dead, bloodied deer lies on the road.
A woman masturbates (we see her hand down her pants) as she looks at pictures of another woman. Later, she gets on a sex chat room (we read vulgar conversations about sex and male genitalia) and invites a woman over to have sex (they make out).
A drunk man drinks hard liquor, references spiked egg-nog and carries around a bottle of Percocet. Two women share a beer.
Jesus’ name is abused five times and God’s name is misused twice, paired with “d–n.” The f-word is heard nearly 20 times and the s-word, 10 times. Other profanity includes multiple utterances of “a–hole,” “d–k” and “d–khead.”
In a flashback, Elliot goes to jail—a stint that was supposed to be 18 months but instead lasts just 86 days. A guard, giving Elliot his private possessions back, tells the former hacker not to squander his newfound freedom. But Elliot immediately renews acquaintances with his fellow rebels and dives into the same life that landed him into the clink in the first place.
When he’s first incarcerated, a guard forces Elliot to strip naked (we see him from the side and rear) and forces him to expose his anus (to ensure he’s not smuggling something into the prison). He meets an inmate nicknamed “Hot Carla” in prison (described by fellow inmate/friend as a “chick with a d–k”). An inmate offers to get Elliot anything he needs: booze, drugs and/or porn, including gay and “grandma” porn. “I don’t judge,” the inmate tells him.
Whiterose, a mysterious figure who helped take E-Corp down in the first season, is a male who sometimes dresses as a woman, sometimes as a man. Whiterose, in a dress, squats down and urinates on the tombstone of a former rival. (Elliot also urinates during an episode, but unlike the Whiterose scene, we don’t see the urine fall.) We hear references to murders, both past and planned.
Characters say the f-word a dozen times (uncensored in a version downloaded from Amazon). The s-word is used six times, and we also hear “a–,” “p-ss,” “h—,” “b–ch,” and “g-dd–n.” Jesus’ name is abused twice.
Elliot is off the grid, using strict discipline to try to silence Mr. Robot. It doesn’t work. Mr. Robot cautions Elliot that he’s annoyed, and might soon feel hurt—and Elliot wouldn’t like him when he’s hurt.
An annoyed Mr. Robot is plenty bad as it is. He pulls a gun and puts a bullet in Elliot’s head. Elliot (with blood dripping from the wound) walks over to his desk and journals. “He shot me in the head again,” he writes. Later, when he’s talking to his old employer, Mr. Robot walks behind the man and slices his throat. (The camera turns after the cut but before the blood spurts.) In a flashback, we see Elliot as a child fall from a window and hit the snowy ground below, blood pooling around his head. (We know that it was his father who slugged him so hard that he fell out.) Doctors later tell Elliot’s parents that he only suffered a minor concussion and a broken forearm, but his Mom and Dad argue over how they’re going to pay for the cast.
F Society members vandalize a bull statue on Wall Street, cutting its testicles off. (Later, revelers pose with the removed brass body parts while holding bottles and cans of beer.) Mr. Robot reads a pornographic magazine (featuring a busty, masked model on the cover), tossing it to Elliot. F Society launches another attack on E Corp, demanding millions in blackmail money. A woman’s smart home is hacked: We see her in the shower from the shoulders up as the water grows scalding hot. These and other disturbances force her to leave while “repairs” are made, though in reality her posh New York casa becomes base of F Society operations.
Elliot attends a church group in an effort to stay sane, breaking the fourth wall to tell the audience that the other attendees (perhaps recovering alcoholics or drug addicts) seem like normal people. He calls a local arsonist his own “personal totem.” We see a number of religious fliers in a doctor’s office. Characters say the f-word (unbleeped in some versions) three times. We also hear the s-word twice, as well as “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n” and “a–.” We see lines of code include a version of the f-word.
Elliot’s drug-dealing girlfriend, Shayla, is kidnapped by the henchmen of their mutual supplier, Vera—imprisoned because of Elliot’s machinations. Vera demands that Elliot hack him out of prison, or else Shayla will die.
We hear about supposedly secret sexual trysts, sometimes by way of graphic language. A business executive exposes himself to an underling (he sees; we don’t), threatening to urinate in his general direction. We additionally hear several crude references to male body parts and erections. A woman flirts with a police officer, making sure he sees her cleavage.
A man is shot in the head. The corpse of a woman is stuffed in a trunk, her throat cut (and blood covering her shirt).
Henchmen roll joints and smoke weed. A lawyer pours alcohol into her coffee. Elliot hacks into the prison’s security system, releasing scads of criminals. Characters utter partially censored f-words six times. Uncensored crudities include about 20 uses of the s-word, as well as “b–ch,” a–,” “p—,” “h—,” “pr–k” and “c–ks—er.” God’s name is paired with “d–n.”
Elliot saves E Corp from an Internet catastrophe, stopping a vicious hack. But in the process, he discovers a hidden message in the code he believes is meant for him.
Elliot hacks people’s online lives. Sometimes his snooping seems justified: He tips off police to a child pornographer. He forces his psychologist’s love interest to confess his multiple affairs, dalliances with prostitutes and the fact that he’s married. But he also spies on his counselor, too—and everyone else he knows. He grinds up and takes a morphine pill, saying the secret to not getting hooked is to keep the dosage low. He takes other drugs, too, and his female dealer asks if he’d like to do some Molly with her. We later see the two of them in bed together, he covered partly by a sheet, while she’s lying sideways, naked (though nothing critical is visible). “Don’t ever make decisions when you’re on morphine,” Elliot’s narrative voice tells us. Someone later asks Elliot if he’d like to get high while watching his favorite movie.
Elliot and others smoke cigarettes. A flashback suggests that his mother abused him: She’s about to snuff out a cigarette on his arm. Characters drink wine. Elliot’s boss, Gideon, tells Elliot that he’s gay. We hear references to sadomasochism and underage sex. A man abuses a dog. Characters say the s-word (unbleeped on iTunes) at least 14 times. Someone nearly says the f-word, as well (though it trails off indistinctly). We also hear “a–,” “p–s,” “d–k” and misuses of both God’s and Jesus’ name. Elliot says that the country is ruled by the rich who “play God without permission.” We see a “Repent, Follow Jesus” sign. Lots of people lie and mislead.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).
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