‘Halt and Catch Fire’ Is the New ‘The Wire’

A spoiler free plea to watch 2017’s best television show.

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When HBO’s The Wire finished its run in 2008, it became a topic you couldn’t escape at
parties. Inevitably, some dude would walk up to me and we’d start talking about prestige
television and they’d ask if I’d seen The Wire.

“No,” I’d reply and they’d get this look in their eyes. It’s not the incredulous look I receive
when I tell people I don’t watch Game of Thrones. (Note, I watch Game of Thrones . I just like
to mess with people at parties.) When I told people I hadn’t seen The Wire, they’d get excited,
as if they were about to reveal a great and primal truth.

“What’s it about?” I’d ask.

“Everything,” they’d say, unhelpfully.

AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire just finished up its fourth and final season. The whole show is now
on Netflix. Prepare yourself. It’s the new The Wire. This is the show that frenzied and
desperate fans will posteltyze after they corner you at a party. They will tell you it’s about
everything. It’s going to happen. Do yourself a favor and watch it now before you start to avoid
the show out of spite because it’s actually that good.

Halt and Catch Fire is an hour long period drama that starts out in the Silicon Prairie of the
1980s. In the popular mythology of tech, California is the central hub of computer innovation.
But that’s not true. The Dallas Fort Worth metroplex gave rise to dozens of tech companies
that rivaled anything happening in Palo Alto at the time.

My dad was an engineer at Texas Instruments and I had a front row seat for the DFW tech
boom. I remember our home computer starting up with the IBM logo being slowly devoured
by Pac Man. The show was an easy sell for me. But Halt and Catch Fire, unlike so many other
modern prestige dramas, doesn’t stay in one place. It has the courage to grow, change, and
develop along with its characters. It’s always trying to get to the next thing.
On the surface, the show is about computers and the people who built the world we now live
in. Each season tackles a different tech innovation and focuses on the work it takes to get it
out the door. The first is all about creating the laptop, the second about building an early
gaming network. IBM, the video game Doom, and Nintendo all make an appearance and
computers are constantly changing the character’s lives.

But the show’s Don Draper stand-in reminds us early that “computers aren’t the thing. They’re
the thing that gets you to the thing,” and that’s what Halt and Catch Fire is about—the tangle
of five human lives as they live and work together over a period of two decades. That’s what
makes it exciting and wonderful television. The tech is beside the point. It only exists to
connect people.

Lee Pace’s who plays the incredible Joe MacMillan starts at the center of the story. The show
lures the audience in by setting him up as the typical prestige drama anti-hero. In the
beginning, he’s a smart guy in a nice suit with a mysterious past. He doesn’t play by the rules
and that’s why the audience is supposed to love him. It’s not true. Unlike other brooding male
anti-heroes (see: Tony Soprano and Walter White) MacMillan is capable of profound and
interesting change. This isn’t just another story about an asshole dude with a dark backstory
who always gets what he wants in the end.

In the orbit of MacMillan is visionary engineer Gordon Clark and his smarter wife Donna,
smooth talking Texas business executive John Bosworth, and a genius coder Cameron Howe.
Over the course of the show’s four seasons these five people become a family. Sometimes
they love each other, sometimes they hate each other but they’re always—at their core—a
family.

Halt and Catch Fire is also an LGBTQ positive show, but it’s not about the LGBTQ community. It
has important things to say about women in tech, but it’s not exclusively about women in tech.
It’s about computers, but only because they’re the thing that gets you to the thing.

That’s why the show is so important. We need it right now. This year it felt like tech was a
driving a wedge between us. Families turned against families and friends found out their
friends were scumbags. Countries weaponized social media against the world in a war against
truth itself.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can do better. We can build something better. These
characters aren’t perfect—they fail repeatedly, hurt each other, and lose sight of what’s
important. But they always change and do better. There is always hope, something that the
world is in precious need of right now and they always know that this hope comes from their
connection to each other, not from the machines they used to forge that connection.
I didn’t watch Halt and Catch Fire when it was on the air and, according to some, this was a
cardinal sin. But it doesn’t matter that no one watched it when it aired because we live in a
binge watch culture and the whole thing is out there, ripe for the streaming. You can watch it
right now and you should before some asshole at a party ruins it for you.

I loved AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire. I can’t wait for you to love it too.

The tech drama went from a curiosity to one of my favorite shows of all time.

By Todd VanDerWerff@tvotitodd@vox.com Oct 15, 2017, 8:20am EDT

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Lee Pace stars in Halt and Catch Fire. AMC

When you’re a TV critic, one of the hazards of the job is that a show you adore might be one
nobody else has heard of. If I go to a dinner party and people inevitably ask what’s worth
watching, I’ll probably get one or two shows deep before somebody says, “Oh, what’s that
about?” and I have to try to find a way to distill some show I love into a sentence or two.

So it’s always been with Halt and Catch Fire, an AMC drama I came to love in its second season,
that grew into one of my all-time favorites over the course of the next two seasons. Its series
finale aired just last night, and its quiet affirmation of everything the series had been about
only made me love it all the more.

The show — about the intertwined lives of four people caught up in the ’80s and ’90s tech
boom — was never outwardly flashy or obviously self-impressed. It had a low-key confidence
in itself, and it was as well-made as anything on TV, even if its visuals rarely offered, say, an
undead dragon tearing down an ice wall. It was always more interested in navigating the
vagaries of its characters’ relationships, betrayals, and reconciliations, in a way prestige drama
has struggled with of late.

But it’s also the rare case where I feel like in telling you about the show, I’m giving you a rare
gift. Maybe you’ll hate it — I can’t possibly know. But I’m betting you’ll love it as much as I do.

And I can’t wait.

Halt and Catch Fire does a rare thing in TV — it retroactively justifies some of its worst choices

Halt and Catch Fire

The cast of Halt and Catch Fire, toward the end of season three. AMC

The knock against Halt and Catch Fire — like the knock against The Leftovers or The Americans
— is that its first season is a bit rough. It doesn’t always know what it wants to be, and it
occasionally feels as if it’s fetishizing the idea of a white guy antihero. Joe MacMillan (played
by Lee Pace) is more a collection of character twists and quirks than an actual human being in
the first half of season one, and the show’s other characters often feel like they’re
placeholders, meant to be filled in later.

The series figured itself out pretty quickly. By the back half of season one, it’s already turning
into the show it will become in its last three seasons, and the ninth episode of that inaugural
season is one I’d stack up against the series’ very best, in part for a beautifully handled twist
ending that recontextualizes everything that has happened so far.

On the other hand, those early episodes (especially the handful of hours immediately following
the pilot) are rough. Even those who worked on the show seemed aware of this. They were
proud of the episodes, sure, and they could see the good intentions involved. But they also
knew that their intentions didn’t always match up to their execution.

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AMC's Halt and Catch Fire is set in tech's past. But it just might be TV's future.

What’s amazing, then, is how Halt and Catch Fire reinvented itself in season two, focusing
more on its two most prominent women: Mackenzie Davis, as the genius but antisocial
programmer Cameron; and Kerry Bishé, as Donna, who started out as the standard “prestige
drama wife” and then turned out to be far more complicated than that. Instead of an antihero
drama, the show turned into a workplace ensemble show — sort of like The West Wing, but
with computers.

It has that political drama’s same sense of optimism, and the same sense that its characters
can be at odds without wanting to literally kill each other, but it saves itself from
sentimentality by always feeling shot through with a bittersweet melancholy. At all times, as
the characters slowly work their way toward our current internet era, there’s a sense of
everything gained by their technological advancements, but also everything we’ve lost in the
wake of packing up our psychological baggage and moving it online.

Halt and Catch Fire is about four people — Joe, Cameron, Donna, and Scoot McNairy’s Gordon
— who start the series longing for connection, then find it with each other (and others) in
various permutations, then try to spread that feeling of connection to the rest of the world. It’s
telling that the foremost innovation any of them come up with is, essentially, an online
message board system, which allows various members of a gaming community to talk about
things other than video games.

Halt and Catch Fire

The cast of Halt and Catch Fire, toward the end of season four. AMC

By recapturing those early days when it seemed as if computers might give us the world,
instead of slowly seal us off into our own bubbles, Halt and Catch Fire invites viewers to
reexamine our own relationship to technology and each other, and how often we try to let our
online selves stand in for the people we really are. Presenting a happier life than the one
you’re actually leading for the benefit of social media followers isn’t exactly an undiscussed
phenomenon, but Halt and Catch Fire captures beautifully just how old this impulse is. We’ve
always tried to use computers to buff off our rougher edges. Then again, we’ve always tried to
use everything to make ourselves seem cooler, or better looking, or happier than we actually
are.

But this focus on connection and dissolution, present from the first moment of the first
episode, also means that the final three seasons of Halt and Catch Fire somehow manage to
make many of the worst moments of those early episodes seem better than they came across
at the time. Particularly in the show’s fourth and final season, it revisits the dynamics of season
one — especially by exploring a business partnership between Joe and Gordon — but with the
benefit of added character development.

Now we see the woundedness in Joe, and not just the wounds he shows to the world. Now we
see how hard Gordon was trying to be someone he wasn’t, and how much happier he is when
he embraces a truer self. Cameron’s flinty brilliance, Donna’s need to chart her own course,
even the aching longing for family of bossman Bos (Toby Huss) — they were all there in season
one, just a little harder to see.

One of the big ideas of Halt and Catch Fire is one it shares with AMC’s earlier drama Mad Men,
an obvious inspiration: We all keep repeating many of the same mistakes, because of our own
internal logic that we can’t entirely fix or escape. Halt expresses this in the idea of iterations —
the idea that a computer program can slowly become less buggy over time, can smooth out
flaws. Nobody in Halt completely becomes whole, perfect. But they all do become better, as
they endlessly iterate themselves. To put it in a religious sense, none of them achieve nirvana,
but all of them get a little bit closer by being together.

For a show so filled with conflict and sadness, it was also a series filled with hope and beauty,
with the idea that everything might be okay if you find your people and stick to them like glue.

It was a great show. I hope you’ll come to love it too.

Halt and Catch Fire’s first three seasons are available on Netflix, with the fourth and final
season to join them soon. That fourth season is currently available on AMC’s website

Halt And Catch Fire wasn’t Mad Men, it was Six Feet Under

Sean O'Neal

10/16/17 5:54pmFiled to: HALT AND CATCH FIRE

25

Photo: Tina Rowden/AMC

This article discusses plot points from both Halt And Catch Fire and Six Feet Under.

When Halt And Catch Fire premiered in 2014, the show seemed like little more than an
attempt to, as our review put it, “reverse-engineer” a Mad Men replacement for AMC’s soon-
to-be-exiting hit. It was a pithy summation and not an inaccurate one: From its period setting,
to its characters chasing a future that we can judge smugly with the certainty of hindsight, to a
protagonist who was also a charming, enigmatic lothario—a confident salesman who’s equally
adept at smooth-talking his way into boardrooms and bedrooms, but mostly he’s selling the lie
of himself—Mad Men comparisons were inescapable. They were also damaging. Audiences
who were turned off by what seemed like a pale imitation of that show never returned, even
as Halt And Catch Fire underwent one of television’s all-time great creative resurgences, and
those now-chastened early critics began to sing its praises.

It also didn’t help that Halt And Catch Fire presented itself as about something—namely, about
the ’80s/’90s technology boom, and the circuitous journey taken by the myriad engineers and
entrepreneurs in first North Texas’ Silicon Prairie and later Silicon Valley. That very premise
portends something self-inflated and boring, promising episode after episode of people typing
dramatically into boxy computers, perhaps while crowing anachronistically amusing lines
about floppies and 2400-baud modems. (I’m the son of an engineer who built Tandy
Computers in ’80s Dallas; let me be the first to tell you, his story would make for dull
television.) If you were at all ambivalent about technology, you’d have been forgiven for
rejecting a show that was ostensibly about its history.

Still, what Halt And Catch Fire proved, from its revitalizing second season through its moving
series finale, was that it was never really about computers. Sure, its storylines were propelled
by big inventions—by its characters always chasing the next big thing, only to discover that
someone else got there first. Or more often, to implode thanks to their own selfish impulses.
But if the show does bear another resemblance to Mad Men, it’s in its similar use of its
characters’ professions as a manifestation of their brokenness: Just as Don Draper’s skill for
manufactured images was born of a desperation to conceal the truth of himself, Halt And
Catch Fire’s players fumbled their way toward building the internet out of a need to connect
with others. That focus on personal relationships, and all the tiny ways in which they stumble
and fall apart, gave Halt And Catch Fire an unusually novelistic depth that went well beyond
the basic trappings of its plot. By the end, the show it most closely resembled wasn’t Mad
Men; it was Six Feet Under.

This became especially obvious in Halt And Catch Fire’s final run, where the death of Gordon
(Scoot McNairy) mirrored that of Six Feet Under’s Nate Fisher (Peter Krause) in happening
several episodes before the finale, which forced those around him—and the audience—to
spend our last few hours together coming to terms with our grief. But in both series, those
crushing final moments were really just the culmination of a mutually shared underlying
melancholy that defined their overarching moods. Both shows were portraits of perpetually
uncertain, unsatisfied people, always believing that their next big life-changing leap will finally
be the thing to make them feel whole. Both shows were about how their search for that
fulfillment causes them to shut out and repeatedly hurt the ones they love. And both were
dramas that overcame their somewhat gimmicky premises—a family who lives in a funeral
home; a mysterious yuppie helping geeks build a computer—to find their greatest resonance
in small, quietly devastating, human interactions.

There are other, more microscopic parallels, if you really start digging into it. Gordon dies of
chronic toxic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disorder that, like Nate’s AVM, lurks as a
silent threat throughout the series’ run. Both live in utter denial of their diagnoses; both
initially deal by seeking comfort in impulsive sex with women who remind them of their youths
(Lisa for Nate; his brother’s high school girlfriend for Gordon). By the end of Halt And Catch
Fire’s run, Gordon had even acquired Nate’s knack for giving tidily reassuring speeches, as
when he reminded a suddenly lost Joe (Lee Pace), “Most of us in the human race, we don’t get
to know what comes next. We just feel shit as it’s thrown at us. This, right now, is all there is.”
It’s a little bit of zen wisdom that could have come straight out of one of Nate’s speeches to a
crying widow, right before he used it as an excuse to cheat on his wife.

Although it wavered a bit in later seasons, there’s obviously some of Nate’s overconfidence in
Joe’s own propensity for pithy spiels as well. The early dynamic between Joe and Gordon, as
Joe muscles his way into Cardiff Electric and Gordon’s territory, evokes the bristling between
Nate and his brother, David (Michael C. Hall)—the clash between the classically trained guy
who’s suddenly being bossed around by the brash, unskilled egomaniac. And there’s a little bit
of both Fisher brothers in Joe when it comes to his romantic entanglements: Joe’s longing to
settle down and have kids with a reluctant Cameron evokes David’s desire for the same with
Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), though Joe’s entire relationship with Cameron (Mackenzie Davis)—
from their hooking up mere minutes after meeting, to their repeated rendezvouses in between
serious relationships with other people, to Cameron’s general, guarded flintiness—also closely
recalls Nate and Brenda (Rachel Griffiths). Certainly neither Cameron nor Brenda make it easy.
Cameron’s a bit like Claire (Lauren Ambrose), too, with both characters evolving over the
course of their series from sardonic, self-sabotaging punks to more open, emotionally complex
adults. Though that could broadly be applied to any young character on this show; after all,
there’s also some Claire in the smartly nonconformist Haley (Susanna Skaggs). What both
shows more generally have in common are these sorts of strong female characters, messy and
unbound by traditional archetypes. Donna (Kerry Bishé) may have started off as the stock
“unfulfilled wife,” but she underwent a dramatic reinvention to become the show’s most
compelling figure, with her growth into a powerful entrepreneur—and many manipulations,
betrayals, and wine-soaked fuckups along the way—offering a complicated portrait of a
woman who had felt forgotten, and who was now finally forging her own identity. In this,
Donna has a lot in common with Six Feet Under’s Ruth (Frances Conroy) and her own journey
toward self-actualization. Hell, Donna and Ruth both even had drug-induced vision quests
where they processed lingering emotions about those they’ve left behind (mushrooms and
Cameron for Donna; ecstasy and her dead husband for Ruth).

But again, those are the little details. (A few more: Both shows’ first seasons featured big,
bonding road trips to a convention in Las Vegas; that scene where Donna finds Gordon digging
a huge hole in their backyard is a lot like Ruth’s discovery of George’s bomb shelter—and hey,
speaking of which, both shows had James Cromwell!) Where Halt And Catch Fire most closely
mirrors Six Feet Under is in its larger exploration of that big, existential question lurking at the
root of of the human condition, made explicit in Joe’s ad for Comet: “What are you looking
for?”

In Six Feet Under, the gentle irony of the Fishers’ conundrum is that they’ve repeatedly
suppressed that question, putting it off despite living their lives surrounded by death. In Halt
And Catch Fire, it’s that they’re all figuring out how to help others answer that question
through technology, which only waylays answering it for themselves. In both series, the lesson
is that what matters most is who we are and who we are with, right now, while we’re all still
doing the looking. They’re both richly, uncommonly human dramas about recognizably flawed
people, and if you’re a fan of one, it stands to reason you’d be a fan of the other. Maybe
spread the word to those lingering skeptics.

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