he critically adored drama Mr. Robot wasn’t a
science-fiction show—despite its title—yet it was
one of the best series ever to tackle technology and
its terrifying central role in our lives. And now that
the USA Network series wrapped its four-season
run last December, creator Sam Esmail is ready to
tackle the topic again.
Esmail’s next big project is a reimagining (he
hates to call it a “reboot”) of Battlestar Galactica—
which was first a ’70s series and then, ahem,
rebooted as a much-loved Syfy series in 2004—for
Peacock, NBCUniversal’s upcoming streaming
service. (He’s also working on several nontech-
themed projects, including the USA anthology series
Briarpatch and Season 2 of Amazon’s Homecoming.)
Esmail spoke with Adweek about ending Mr.
Robot (and whether it’s truly over), that time he
tried to take on AOL with his own internet startup,
his plans for Battlestar Galactica and why he
finds technology simultaneously fascinating and
“horrifying.”Adweek: Are you going through withdrawal now
that Mr. Robot is over?
Sam Esmail: I’m going through extreme relaxation.
Now that you’ve had a little bit of distance from it,
what are your thoughts on wrapping it up?
Making the show was near and dear to my heart,
but it was quite exhausting. It was like running
a marathon, but sprinting the entire time. I was
surrounded by talented writers and crew members,
and the cast was unbelievable, but I’m glad we were
able to finish the story the way we intended it. I’m
glad for my sanity that I could take a breather and
relax for a couple of months.
You had said you’d known almost from the beginning
how the show was going to end. Did those final episodes
match up with what you had planned all along?
Lucky enough, we were able to build toward that
original ending I had in mind. I give a lot of that credit to
the writers room that we had over those four seasons.
They helped me ground the world and explore the
characters in interesting ways without losing sight of
the endgame to the story. We were pretty disciplined
about not straying too far off the path.
Even when we went into this fourth season, there
was that temptation to just keep going and invent
tangential storylines to add another season’s worth
of episodes, because we really did love the world and
we loved working with each other. But we knew that
we had our endgame in mind from the beginning, and
we thought the respect that we had for the story was
much greater than any temptation to hang out in this
world any more than the story allowed for us. So we
stuck to what we originally planned.
So it was completely a story decision to end the
show, and not a case of Rami Malek’s career taking
off or you wanting to focus on your other projects?
In fact, it was quite the opposite. I think
everybody, including Rami, would have wanted to
keep going. It was ultimately my call where, for
all the reasons I just gave, it was time to close the
curtain on the Mr. Robot chapter. I’ve loved a lot of
television shows in my life where I’ve seen them go
on for longer than they should, and that’s something
we never wanted for this show. It was a hard
decision, but we felt it was the right one.16
‘I never wanted to even go down the path of Battlestar unless
there was something very relevant
to say about the world today.’
ADVENTURES IN STREAMING
Esmail has had success in both linear TV (USA
Network’s Mr. Robot) and streaming (Amazon’s
Homecoming), and says there’s surprisingly little
difference between how he approaches each
platform. “When we wrote Mr. Robot, I never
even put in the act breaks into each episode,
which is what typically is done for a commercial-
based network,” he says. “I’m a big believer in the
story is the most important, and you shouldn’t
worry about the delivery system or platform,
unless it affects the storytelling.”
However, Esmail admits that making
Homecoming for Amazon gave him the
freedom to approach the show as a half-hour
drama, even though “the instinct was to make
it an hourlong drama, because that’s what you
do,” he says. “I remember hitting the pause
button and saying, ‘It was so strong in the half-
hour format in the podcast, why do we need to
mess with that?’ The fact that we were on a
streaming platform is what allowed us to even
consider it as a half-hour drama.”
He plans to continue that experimentation
with Battlestar Galactica on Peacock. “We’re
going to free ourselves in terms of format,
meaning there are going to be certain
episodes that may be shorter and certain
episodes that are longer if they’re required to
be longer,” he says. “We want to loosen those
reins so that we’re able to tell the best story
possible for what that episode calls for.”In this new TV world, nothing is really ever done,
and shows are constantly getting rebooted or revived.
Could you see yourself revisiting the Mr. Robot
characters again at some point down the road?
No, the story of Elliot and Mr. Robot is completed.
That’s one of the reasons why we ended it when we
ended it, because we did not want to come up with
excuses to keep the story going. I can definitively tell
you that the Elliot Alderson/Mr. Robot journey is over.
How are you approaching this new iteration of
Battlestar Galactica?
We’re still in the early stages, so there’s not
much I can go into, but it’s a project that’s near and
dear to my heart. When I found out that this was
even a consideration, I reached out to Ron Moore
[who oversaw the acclaimed ’00s Syfy reboot]
right away because I’m such a huge fan of his show
and I, a) wanted to get permission and b) wanted
to understand what wasn’t going to be allowed [in
my version]. We had a very lovely conversation. He
was very encouraging, and we were both on the
same page that this was not going to be a rehash
of what he had already done so masterfully. I was
going to explore a new story, a new mythology, and
that’s where I’m at right now. I’m still figuring that
out. With a project like this, and a title like this and
with what Ron Moore did, which was so timely and
relevant to when it came out, there’s a lot of things
to consider. I never wanted to even go down the
path of Battlestar unless there was something very
relevant and vital to what we want to say about the
world today. We’re still formulating what that is.