Inspired by seeing Lee Pace in the Pushing Daisies post.
I feel like this show got overlooked amongst many of AMC’s big hits around this time - Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. But Halt and Catch Fire deserves to be right up there with the best of them.
The storytelling is rich and compelling, the writing is great, the characters are nuanced and dynamic, and the actors are phenomenal. The show manages to capture different eras for the same characters flawlessly with each season - the sense of time and place is so well developed, and there is strong conceptual continuity throughout the show despite each season having a very different arc, look, and sometimes tone. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out!
I loved this show, but it got pretty formulaic after a while with the same 3-4 people inventing every technological breakthrough in recent history. If you can suspend your disbelief for a bit, it’s a lot of fun. Great soundtrack too.
Yeah, fair enough. But one of the genius bits of the show is that they often actually failed or got beaten out by others. It’s sort of an illustration of how at some points in progress the ideas are just in the zeitgeist, and multiple people may have them at the same time. Being brilliant may not be enough - you may need to have luck, or power, or wealth to win out.
The NYT article on the last episode summed it up beautifully:
But above all, “Halt and Catch Fire” was about failure. Which was part of what made the show a triumph.
In the Silicon Valley whose emergence the show chronicles, “fail fast, fail often” has become a glib entrepreneurial mantra. “Halt and Catch Fire” was more interested in failure as a condition of human growth. In its eyes, failure — chafing against limits — is painful and necessary.
Anyway, the show was often marketed based on it’s techno-historical setting and storylines, which honestly was one of the reasons that I avoided it for a while. But like most great dramas, it’s worth watching for the characters and relationships even more than for any plot points!
