Cybersecurity series, reviewed honestly.

An anthology of speculative shorts. The good episodes are unmatched at making abstract privacy and platform risks viscerally legible; the weak ones are op-eds with budget.

Alex Garland's eight-episode FX limited series on a secretive Silicon Valley division building a deterministic-quantum simulation, used as a vehicle to interrogate surveillance, free will and corporate power.

Four seasons covering 1983 to the early commercial web. Not a security show, but the cleanest dramatization of how the platforms we now defend were built, and why the trust assumptions in them are so casual.

John Rogers and Chris Downey's TNT heist procedural about a team of ex-criminals (hitter, hacker, grifter, thief, mastermind) who run cons against bigger criminals on behalf of victims.

Amazon Prime continuation of Leverage by John Rogers and Dean Devlin, restoring most of the original cast (minus Timothy Hutton) and updating the targets — modern data brokers, biotech billionaires, the specifically-2020s villains the original couldn't have written.

The only mainstream show where the hacks compile. Esmail consulted real practitioners and it shows in every shell, every Tor relay, every social-engineering pretext.

Jonathan Nolan's CBS show about a private surveillance system that flags ordinary people in danger. Aged remarkably well as the cultural anxiety it dramatized became infrastructure.

CBS network procedural about a team of geniuses (cyber, mechanical, mathematical, behavioral) who solve crisis-of-the-week problems for Homeland Security. Loosely inspired by Walter O'Brien.

Mike Judge's HBO satire of the startup ecosystem. Not a security show, but a sharp ethnography of the engineering and venture culture that ships most of what security teams later defend.

German Netflix limited series dramatizing the real lawsuit by Berlin developers Joachim Sauter and Pavel Mayer, who accused Google Earth of infringing their TerraVision patent — early-internet history, German hacker culture, and David-vs-Goliath IP litigation.

Ben Chanan's BBC-made conspiracy thriller about deepfaked CCTV footage being used to frame innocent people for serious crimes — and the counter-surveillance unit that has to decide what to believe.

BBC's investigative podcast series by Jean H. Lee and Geoff White on the North Korean state-hacking program — the Sony Pictures attack, the Bangladesh Bank heist, the WannaCry release, and the Lazarus / APT38 / Bluenoroff sub-units.