Going in with low expectation, not knowing anything about this show, the pilot turned out to offer a pleasant surprise. In short, the show is a bit unconventional, like a mix between an audio book and a TV show, but one rather well researched and executed.
The acting is fairly good, the narrative style felt novel and fresh, and there's ample room for various subplots and story lines. The setting also felt real, as others have pointed out. Some interesting creative decisions were made, such as blatantly spelling out the antagonist, a company, by giving it an unmistakable name. It also makes subtle jokes and pokes fun of things probably only people in the IT industry would recognize.
Whereas most shows and movies seem to throw all connection to reality straight out the window when it comes to IT related stuff, this show does not. In fact, it seems extraordinarily well researched for an entertainment piece. Being in that industry myself and having had a bit of "fun" as a youth, I'd have to say that overall the portrayal of IT security and hacking in this show is leaps and bounds more accurate than anything that has come before it, even if the attentive viewer would be able to spot some minute factual errors.
Perchance even entertainment execs have realized they can no longer get away with silly and unbelievable things like "magic picture enhance", nerdy super hackers who as through divine insight guess their targets passwords in 1-2 attempts, or with peddling notions of tools that have weeks of artist design effort spent on them, for buttons that once clicked, reveal some information that would logically be impossible to get hold of through the channel used.
It seems as though we finally have a show that doesn't treat its audience as idiots, and where the writers actually spent some time doing their homework. I'm just concerned that the show may be targeting too small an audience, an audience consisting of people who do not switch their brains off when they turn on the tele, and as such it may not be awarded a series contract.
So far, highly recommended to tune into if you're interested in seeing something fresh and aren't allergic to narration (getting inside the mind of a somewhat odd protagonist), as there's quite lot of the latter.
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