Halt and Catch Fire ended last year after
four seasons. It’s not a show I’ve
talked about much on the blog (just gave a shoutout to Donna in a Top Five post
of actors I’ve had to reevaluate,) but I really did love it. It’s a bit of a sneak-attack show. It starts rather unevenly – I stuck it out
through most of season 1 largely because I’m a Lee Pace fan – but somewhere
along the way, it evolved into a truly rich show with interesting subject
matter, complex characters, and rewarding themes (a few spoilers.)
In the
early ‘80s, a Houston electronics company is rocked by the arrival of Joe, a
mercurial maverick with big ideas about the future of personal computing. Joe has a lot of vision but little knowhow to
back it up, so he enlists engineers and coders both within and outside the
company to help him in his goal of revolutionizing the industry. Over the course of the show, the characters
all go on their own journeys trying to stay at the forefront of the
rapidly-changing world of computers.
Like I
said, the first season can be hit-or-miss.
There’s a lot of focus on Joe’s particularly Machiavellian way of
conducting business, and it feels a little Don Draper redux. The other characters are still finding their
footing, especially engineer Gordon and coder Cameron. It’s all very dysfunctional but without
anything genuinely compelling to back it up.
As time
goes on, however, the show gets pretty awesome.
I especially love the threads that follow Donna and Cameron as women in
tech building their own company and getting involved in some really innovative
things. The more stock interactions of
the earlier episodes get fleshed out as the characters build history with one
another. Because of course, that’s what
the show really hinges on, more than any work crisis or technological
advancement. As Joe says, “Computers
aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that
gets you to the thing.” He’s talking
about computers as a means rather than an end, but the same holds true for the
show as well. This backdrop, this world,
is just our jumping-off point to examing these messy, flawed, talented
individuals as they chase ideas no one’s had yet, separately and together.
I also
want to note that this is a show that manages time jumps very effectively in my book.
There are a few at different points throughout the series, which makes
sense from a nuts-and-bolts perspective, since the show would want to cover
some of the different leaps in the tech industry between the ‘80s and early
‘90s. But, critically, with each jump,
we feel the effects of the time lapse with the characters and their
relationships. It’s not like Downton Abbey or The Assets where the show jumps ahead for the sake of the history
but leaves the plots in limbo for the interim.
Here, things have happened, lives have changed, and you see the effects
of those changes playing out onscreen.
As with
any strong character-driven show, acting is critical, and Halt and Catch Fire definitely delivers on that front. Like I said, I came to the show for Lee Pace,
and while Joe doesn’t do much for me early on, the series does a lot of work
with his character, and by the last season, I like him a lot. The show was my introduction to Scoot
McNairy, Mackenzie Davis, and Toby Huss, and as Gordon, Cameron, and Bos, they
embody their characters to a T. But for
me, the series MVP is Kerry Bishé’s terrific performance as Donna. I am an unabashed Donna fan, and even when
the character loses her way and does things I don’t like, Bishé knocks it clean
out of the park every time.
Warnings
Language,
sexual content, drinking/some drug use, a few scenes of violence, and thematic
elements (including suicide.)
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