edit - a great example and one of my favorite scenes from the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc
You really feel it. Even when we know he's a manipulative sonuvabitch. It's mesmerizing. You have to admire his ability to spin shit into gold. The man has vision.
There's a sequence around S01E07 that I'm looking forward to reaching again, in which Joe is out on the front lawn with Donna's daughters during a hurricane and it's FEELS like magic. His performance feels earnest, and hypnotizing, and genuinely magical as he puts on a show for these young girls in the rain.
There's something intangible and hard to describe about the series. The writers have a way of making it transcend it's core drama and feel very different from just about any other show I can recall. Somehow it feels like pure creative expression that manages to defy outside expectations and tell a story that feels true to life and convey the ambitions of creative people who are fighting to make something beautiful.
It's shocking how few people have seen this show, let along watched it. Part of that probably has to do with how inaccessible it is on streaming. It's only readily available on AMC+. And no one has AMC+.
This is one of those shows that would likely shoot to the top if Netflix got the rights to it and even did a mild push. It's genuinely peak prestige TV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
[actors gathered] at Pace's house on weekends to prepare dinner, drink wine, and discuss the scripts and their characters.. "it was really nice, because you got to hear other people's point of views about your character." For the third season, Pace, Davis, and McNairy lived together in a rented house in Atlanta, with Toby Huss joining them for the fourth season..
Rogers called Lisco the duo's mentor, saying: "He.. showed us the ropes.. it was a master class in how to run a room, both in terms of getting a great story out of people, and.. being a really good and decent and fair person in what can sometimes be a brutal industry.." Between the second and third seasons, all of the series's writers departed to work on their own projects, requiring Cantwell and Rogers to build a new writing staff.He's also fantastic in Apple TV's Foundation and it's been really impressive seeing his range put on display there.
I'll also second your comment about the kid, which is one of the best child performances I've seen.
I haven't yet seen season 3 and beyond, but it's clear the OP blogger agrees:
> The best thing the show’s writers ever did was realize that Joe wasn’t the most interesting character.
Like, Lee is a good actor for sure, he was just given a poorly story crafted role.
I remember seeing this discussed around the show The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, which is about a midcentury NYC divorcee getting into the world of stand up comedy. Overall it works and is a funny and enjoyable show, but there's definitely some of the standup routines depicted on-screen that are not actually as funny as the baked-in audience laughs might indicate. Because yeah... you can't really fake delivering good standup, even with a whole writer's room preparing the jokes and all the editing magic in the world, you still have to actually stand there and tell them in a funny way. That part can't be faked.
I sure do miss 'Mrs. Maisel'. What a stellar series.
An absolute legendary performance.
The thing is, Joe is supposed to actually have substance and vision. He's not faking it. The difference is that all those sales guys are pretending to be someone like Joe.
But yes, him and Jared Harris are pretty much the primary reasons to watch. And given the limited Harris screentime, definitely Pace carries it.
This! It's not a bad show but people calling it the Best Drama are wildly overselling it.
also something about him with a good engineer
reminds me of me and my boss, i hope lol
You really have to believe in yourself and your plan, and have a real plan even if its in flux, to communicate like that and carry it off. But when audacity is backed up by substance, it really gets people's attention.
I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk.
Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season.
What's so great about it is:
- mushroom theory of management works - trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible - throw all the corporate bs away, just build - competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works - real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down
as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show!
Soul of a new machine is a fantastic book. About DG going up against DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and their Vax machines.
Also, I really liked DG/UX, for reasons I no longer recall.
Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and Compuserve, and still in Texas.
Season 3 is about the early commercial Internet, same characters, SFBA.
Season 4 is about the Yahoo era of the Internet and about venture capital, also SFBA.
The first season is semi-accurate if you just replace Compaq with their company. But it quickly goes off the rails.
Even billionaires like Zuck bite off more than they can chew and flail around.
For that matter, Jobs at NeXT succeeded in an unlikely way in the end. But for much of NeXT's existence it chronically couldn't get enough traction. They ended up droping the hardware. Then down purposed their OS into a developer platform to run on other OS's. So disappointing. But they did such good work, when Apple had a need, they were ready.
So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such.
I've only watched the first season and really don't see the link to Soul of a New Machine.
I did rather enjoy the way that they captured the manic energy of the generation of dirtbag sales and marketing people that drove the PC industry in that era.
What it missed, I though, is that it failed to capture the breathless sense of wonder at finding yourself at the center of an event around which the entire universe was going to pivot -- something that was obviously going to change everything. That's what you lived if you worked on the technical side of the PC industry.
Tracy Kidder's book, The Soul of a New Machine, however....
Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!
After all, if we could rewind those years, all that chaos would have all happened very differently. We canonize our own particular history too easily. Manifest destiny is not a real thing.
I had the same feeling but the opposite outcome with Silicon Valley. Growing up in Palo Alto, it took me a while to figure out if I was enjoying this show because it was genuinely funny or if it was just because it hit the absurdity of the time and place so well.
One thing I liked about HACF is despite using a decent amount of technobable, it plausibly captures the approach and spirit of hacking and coding, like reverse engineering a memoryless chip by rigging up a hex LED system to read out the values for each of the 65536 inputs to a ROM.
The expertise of the coders are demonstrated mainly by others admiring the structural complexity of their code as objects of beauty. This is something that feels extra nostalgic now.
https://michaelchinen.com/2023/12/31/halt-and-catch-fire-pos...
In an effort to sing the song of underappreciated works of greatness...
Patriot - a CIA hitman who writes folk songs about his exploits imdb.com/title/tt4687882/
Counterpart - not a multiverse, just a biverse imdb.com/title/tt4643084/
Scavengers Reign - Robinson Crusoe by way of a nature documentary of a very bizarre alien planet. imdb.com/title/tt21056886/
Common Side Effects - cops, robbers, magic mushrooms, corporate bad guys and the cure for everything. imdb.com/title/tt28093628
Evil - x-files meets Catholic mysticism. imdb.com/title/tt9055008/
The Heat Vision and Jack pilot episode - Jack Black, Owen Wilson and a script by Dan Harmon. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6lWgXDOAJ5s&pp=ygUUaGVhdCB2aXN...
Counterpart was great but structure made it hard for to watch knowing it'd been cancelled.
Scavengers Reign was great; I couldn't get into Common Side Effects.
Evil is exactly the Catholic X-Files, which is an amazing concept, but by the end of the 2nd season it is all the way off the rails and hurtling into a canyon.
Given your list, you might dig Lodge 49, which is somewhere in the intersection of HACF, Evil, The Big Lebowski.
Given the agreement in taste so far, here’s a couple to try if you haven’t:
- Sweet Vicious — marred by getting cancelled after one season, but a fun season anyway. College sexual assault survivor becomes an anti-rapist vigilante. It’s, uh… more light-hearted than the premise sounds?
- Review with Forrest MacNeil — A guy has a review show where he attempts to review… life. Takes viewer requests for what specifically to review in each episode. He takes his job very seriously. Avoid seeing episode counts if at all possible. Trust me on that part. Doesn’t ruin it if you do see them, but being blind to that does improve it.
Another that I’m not sure counts as under-watched as it’s more recent, but I rarely see it discussed in the wild: Dickinson, a magical realism biographical show about the poet, that mixes in humor and some modern pop culture (think: A Knight’s Tale).
I don't understand. How would knowing how many episodes there are have an impact on the show? (And the number of episodes seems just... fine?)
Funny thing about watching Patriot for the first time: my sister in law showed up on it. We had no idea. Just all the sudden there she is on my TV. She's the mute cop, Sophie.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4497617/?ref_=ext_shr
I will binge anything he makes with the double bullseye of these shows
PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating
PPS - ATX TV did a 10 year anniversary interview with a handful of the cast and crew that's worth watching if you're a fan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6L1suN-mGE
Christopher Cantwell, the showrunner, is also doing the new series of The Terror (aka North Pole Bear Show) that's premiering this year.
Since they used the book's story already, they made a turn for the series to be an anthology of loosely thematically-similar stories (think American Horror Story). The basic setting of season 2 is Japanese internment during World War II in America, and it's from different writers than the first, and of course isn't adapting the novel anymore. It was much less popular both in terms of viewers and critics.
I'm a little surprised they think the brand still carries enough power to put another original story in there under its name for a season 3. It's also a bit of a double-edged sword: you do get name recognition and some built-in initial audience, but you're also taking on expectations and baggage from the original. This is a factor in season 2's tepid reception, and there have been other similar attempts to slide something unrelated in under an existing banner that backfired: True Detective Night Country comes to mind.
Right down to obscure LucasArts first online game.
It tries to cram too many things into this one show. Like a medley of computing history.
I'm glad they put this at the top. I instantly closed the tab. On the off chance that the title is remotely true, I wouldn't want to have the show ruined for me before I even saw an episode.
For others who have never heard of this show, here's a little I picked up from carefully scanning over the wikipedia page:
It's a AMC period drama about the early days of PCs and the internet. It ran from June 1, 2014 – October 14, 2017, had four seasons, reviews are good (so it's not just this guy who liked it) and they got better as the show went on. Also "it was marketed as the first TV series to premiere on Tumblr and the first time AMC had partnered with a social media service to debut a new show." which is weird, but it does seem like it's worth checking out.
Carl was a Technical Consultant across all four seasons of Halt and Catch Fire, providing industry insight and script review. Hear what he had to say about his experience on the show, a breakdown of specific scenes, and some of his favorite memories.My only real critique is that it has the same problem as Mr. Robot. The writers and script are clearly very tech-literate, but the spoken lines are stilted and awkwardly delivered with odd intonation because the actors clearly have no understanding of what the words they're saying mean.
I like literally love it, not ironically, it makes it more like a stage play.
Feel like the flaws are what makes it special. I don't want Kubrick for a tv show about BBS'
Totally worth a watch.
- the archetype characters and their motivations to do what they do (100% valid today)
- struggles and exhilaration of startups
- as a pseudo-documentary of the early years of personal computing
Highly recommend it!
https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/halt-and-catch-fire-the-tra...
> The masterpiece quality of Halt and Catch Fire lies in how precisely it shows the zero-sum reflex at work.
> Disagreement becomes disrespect.
> Respect becomes status.
> Status becomes survival.
> When Cameron’s game doesn’t align with business strategy, it isn’t a tactical debate; it’s an assault on her identity. When Joe pivots the company without consensus, he isn’t merely decisive; he is declaring sovereignty. When Donna asserts operational control, it reads as treason to those who conflate ownership with authorship.
The claim is simple: in creative orgs, disagreements often escalate into identity conflicts because people map ideas to self-worth. Halt and Catch Fire portrays that escalation pretty clearly.
If that doesn’t resonate, what has your experience looked like instead?
The character of Cameron Howe resonated with me greatly.
What a fantastic show.
And please don't downvote my comment based on any political or social thoughts one might have. Based on the story line alone, I quit when, for no apparent reason, during a tense moment in the story, the lead sales guy has a kissing session with another guy. The lead guy isn't gay. I don't think the guy he kissed was gay. There is no reason given and none is forthcoming as to why all of a sudden he does this but it felt like another of many gimmicks to get people talking about the show rather than sticking to a story line.
He complicated something that could've been simpler, and he did this because he had a hard time separating his personal thoughts and feelings from his work. This is a theme that plays out a lot in his interactions, and I wonder if your understandable discomfort and lack of familiarity with the other aspects of the scene colored your perception here.
The feeling you're experiencing has a name: it's called "cringe". I can't watch Frasier for more than about half an episode because of it. Or I Love Lucy... same problem. But Seinfeld, which has plenty of the same humour mechanic, always seems to manage to stay just below the threshold for me.
Halt and Catch Fire is really, really good. Please trust us. Give it another shot. Skip forward a bit when you feel the need to. Skip the first episode entirely and just read a synopsis if you need to.
A related thing I find difficult to watch is when characters are in impending danger too often. Breaking Bad, for instance, was a bit hard for me to get into because of the continual tension and risk of everything going sideways. I managed to watch it anyway and am glad of it, but definitely found Better Call Saul to be a more pleasurable watch.
I'm glad I stuck with it though, the rest of the series was much, much better.
Other thoughtful and well made shows: Dark Matter, For All Mankind, Foundation (also Lee Pace and also stellar).
Silicon Valley, the insanity that it’s both a comedy and true to life
Season 1 was absolutely killer. I like that they tried to capture different eras per season, but subsequent seasons got progressively weaker.
I still think Gordon's final scene is one of the best pieces of writing in TV drama history. Took my breath away the first time I saw it.
There's only four seasons and they're all solid.
...The engineer then rolls his eyes like "yeah no duh". If we could just magically do stuff like that, we would have done it already. Classic management thinking they have an original idea with no understanding of the engineering beneath it all. I thought they would just tell him off and that would be it. I really felt seen in that moment.
The frustrating thing is, they then take pointy haired boss's idea seriously. The rest of the season is spent actually pursuing that dumb, dumb idea... This felt disrespectful, and I stopped watching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...
It is an all timer.
This article? Not so much. Is OP one of the one's discovering it?
Seasons 2 through 4 were vastly more interesting. We've seen Joel a hundred times. Donna and Cameron and Gordon felt less worn, and Donna and Cameron's relationship vastly more interesting than Gordon (the skeptic) and Joel (the believer!) in Season 1.
If you prefer "great men" stuff, I can see preferring Season 1.
But it's not exactly a story you can't watch elsewhere.
> The story twists again: Joe loses his nerve. The Giant goes to market as a regular old fast/cheap PC. Then, in a Comdex hotel room darkened as if for a séance, Joe comes face-to-face with his first Macintosh, and realizes he’s made the wrong call: “It speaks,” he says, his voice full of wonder and dread. We realize we’ve spent the better part of a season watching these characters fail — that Gordon and Joe aren’t going to become the Jobs and Wozniak of this world because Jobs and Wozniak are the Jobs and Wozniak of this world.
https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-ha...
Cameron is just sort of an unstable tortured genius with a lot of baggage, and while Donna ends up being the responsible "den mother", it is really far from girlbossing, and rather trivializes those seasons and the characters to put it in such a way. And Joe does not take a backseat at all! He ends up being the main foil for most of the show, which is a really interesting turn for the character!
I do think Gordon gets sidelined (with a debilitating disease, no less!) far too easily. But then he's also sort of doomed to be a footnote, his fate is just all the more tragic for it.
In the same way that the beginning of Parks and Rec feels like they were setting out to make a version of The Office before it really became its own thing, the first season of HaCF felt like "what if we had a Don Draper type but instead it was Texas in the 80s?"
They could have compressed those into fewer episodes and it would have been more watchable.
I liked the storytelling in it, but, like I said earlier, it's pretty Six Feet Under-ish, in that as it progresses it is less and less about the original concept of the show and more about the relationships between characters built up over years of episodes. Whether that's a good or bad thing for you depends in part on how much fan service you want; it's why I find Mr. Robot completely unwatchable.
Maybe that's a challenge for the audience to stay with it, but it's definitely worth it for the payoff.
And those s04 episode titles matching http error codes? That might be the most masterful thing I've ever seen pulled off from a TV show.
But the other seasons were great in their own ways too. Random PC revolution personalities showing up in dotcom startups was both disjointed and inspired.
https://www.ratingraph.com/tv-shows/halt-and-catch-fire-rati...