Mr. Robot‘s season 2 rollout is keeping with the themes of the series.
According to Deadline, season 2 of USA’s hit hacker series debuted its premiere on various online platforms for an incredibly small window of only 2 hours on Sunday, July 10th ahead of its official premiere. For those who missed it, the Rami Malek and Christian Slater-starring series will officially kick off season 2 with its first two episodes on Wednesday, July 13th.
The sneak preview of the premiere, titled ‘eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc’, was announced on a Facebook chat early Sunday ahead of its airing on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube and usanetwork.com.
It was recently announced that season 2 will get an extra couple of episodes, upping the season order to 12 episodes from 10. Mr. Robot is also getting an aftershow in the same vein as Talking Dead and all the other recent aftershows, called Hacking Robot.
Ahead of the sneak peak at the season 2 premiere, the cast of Mr. Robot did a Facebook live Q&A that was moderated by actor/writer/comedian Keegan-Michael Key. The cast at the Q&A included Rami Malek, Christian Slater, Portia Doubleday and Carly Chaikin.
Alexandra Shapiro, USA’s executive vice president of marketing and digital, spoke to the Wall Street Journal about the unique marketing strategy. “We’re still in franchise-building mode. We have a big traditional ad campaign. But any amplified conversation in social media should have an inevitable halo effect. As a marketer [of TV shows] it is increasingly hard to break through and we didn’t take anything for granted.”
As for a significantly less substantial, but still fun thing for fans, USA also announced a Mr. Robot emoji keyboard for iOS and Android devices that is now available (although don’t be surprised if the emoji keyboard is a way for fsociety to hack into your phone).