Lee Pace's performance in that show is one of my all time favorites. It's incredibly hard to play a charismatic marketing guru because in some sense, you're not acting. In a given scene, the character might be trying to convince people around him of some crazy idea, but if he hasn't convinced you, the viewer, then the entire illusion falls apart. So he really has to do in real life what he's pretending to do on screen.
Funny that this came up today. Last night I started re-watching the series after several years. Just this afternoon I was reflecting on how genuinely charismatic Lee Pace's Joe McMillen is.
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.
That is where I originally watched it. It was on Netflix at one point. And now, it is not. Which is most of the problem with streaming service in general.
Scroll past the subscription options to find the full series listing. "Box Set" licensing terminology is as anachronistic as "Seasons", but both are used in Apple TV product listings for non-subscription streaming media purchases.
I'm not seeing anything anachronistic about either term. "Seasons" is absolutely aligned to the way television series are still produced and distributed. "Box Set" implies physical media. Using the latter term to refer to something else sounds like a case of false advertising.
With the advent of digital music, "record album" morphed from referring to the physical medium, to referring to the recording that would be put on it. I think something similar is happening for "box set".
Apple offers refunds for unwanted digital purchases, and this description in Apple TV app:
When you purchase access to this item, you can permanently download it to your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC. Once downloaded, you can access this without an internet connection, and Apple can't remove it from your device.
Wait, so it's actually a standalone, DRM-free download? If that's the case, then while the term is still somewhat misleading, it's considerably less so than I assumed.
Not DRM free, but unlike most streaming services Apple TV will download purchased media via different countries or VPNs and has no time limit to watch the download. In practice, it "just works". Buying all 4 seasons individually would be 4x$13=$52.
I don't see how it qualifies as a legitimate download or ownership. You cannot save the file to a disk you control and you have no way to ensure you have continued access to it. Apple or the IP holder can cause this "download" to dissapear from your device/account without prior warning. Its actually written in the terms.
It's available on Prime Video (at least on amazon.de). For a long while they would only sell access to season 1, but I've just checked now and all 4 seasons are available at the moment.
What gets me about this show is how it nails the emotional cost of building things. Most tech dramas focus on the product or the money. HaCF focuses on what it does to the people. The relationships that get wrecked, the compromises you make, the way obsession eats everything around it. If you've ever been deep in a startup you feel it in your chest watching this show.
I have watched the first two seasons a few years ago and didn't continue because I was getting so emotionally invested it was making me anxious, not just in front of the screen but also for quite some time afterwards. I'm looking forward to finishing it once I decide my skin has grown thick enough :D
> 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.
[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.
I have Lee Pace on the radar since Singh's The Fall.
Your assessment of movie magic is only partially correct. Obviously, a character has to be convincing by himself but the heavy lifting of the illusion is done by the peer characters acting as if they believe the role he plays.
"The king is always played by the others"
Not sure who is to credit for this quote but in my opinion it is one of the most important insights to understand how movies work and also why movie characters are never relevant role models.
He's also extraordinary in Apple's Foundation, some say he carries the show. I treasure The Fall and every frame of it, in this he's uniquely blended with other great actors and images.
Apparently part of The Fall's magic stems from the fact that the girl playing Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) somehow didn't really understand that she was playing in a movie. The director, as well as Pace, received some criticism for this manipulation. She also didn't really continue acting afterwards.
IMO the plot of Apple's "The Foundation" is an infuriating insult to the original series. However, the production is great and Lee Pace is awesome as usual.
I think it's best appreciated as an original space opera that just happens to have the same name, especially given that so much of the show is genuinely original.
I generally agree, and also that it's impossible to take a book to video without change. I tend to try to think of it like this, imagine Bob and Jim watched a battle scene, but one from the west, the other from the east side. Bob wrote the book, Jim the movie.
Naturally, although it was the same battle, they'll have seen different things up close, and have different views on the battle overall.
Having said that...
It's like someone wrote the Foundation movie three generations after the book was written, turned into a play, and then told over the campfire for decades.
It literally has no more connection with Asimov's works, than Star Wars is like Star Trek. All of the technology is different, the size of the Empire is wildly different, literally almost nothing maps.
Is it good? Yes, sorta. But it's not Foundation, by any stretch. It's not even remotely in the same "world".
Last season's Brother Dude was awesome. I really felt sad for him. I have to say, however, my tolerance for manipulative sociopaths is very low - I'd totally punch McMillen in the face.
I was only aware of The Fall for its brilliant photography.
Often in movies you have the scrappy character that rises to the occasion by making a great speech, winning everybody over. I used to love those scenes.
Now, I've realized, in real life they wouldn't have let them finish their first sentence.
stuff like this. if i enjoy a movie but the script simply doesn't check out from a rational perspective (plot holes, implausible behavior, inconsistencies etc.) then i sometimes decide to switch to a fairy tale mental mode where those issues are excused magically. only works with some movies. kingdom of heaven comes to mind.
Project: Hail Mary, a fantasy world where geopolitics are trivially simple and every state in the world collectively agrees how great it would be to cede power and work together. (And therefore enable a genuinely fun and amazing science story which was the actual focus of the book to begin with, 10/10).
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.
It never occurred to me that the jokes were oversold. I think the show is genuinely funny, with a very high batting average. Easily one of the funniest shows on television.
I sure do miss 'Mrs. Maisel'. What a stellar series.
I think I really loved Barry for exactly the opposite of this reason. Seeing a truly great actor play a bad actor was both impressive and hilarious at the same time.
Sadly, Season 1 Joe is just incohesive. Like, you want there to be some structural reason behind his madness and there just isn't any, because there's too much of crazy. Season 2 tries to walk much of that back.
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.
If you like Lee Pace, check out The Fall (2006). It's my favorite film, incredibly ambitious and funny and yet virtually unknown to the public. Lee's performance is incredible, as is his young co-star's.
Yeah, it's somewhat splintered in that you're unsure what movie you're watching between different parts, but I have a strong love for movies that dare, and that one certainly does.
I'll also second your comment about the kid, which is one of the best child performances I've seen.
It was easy to dismiss the show at the time because, though Pace’s performance was great from the beginning, it felt like he was a Temu Don Draper in an 80s Mad Men wannabe with ‘tech’ replacing ‘ads’.
The show is not at all that if you stick with it for even a short while.
Totally agree, he was incredibly good in that show.
He's also really great in the show Foundation, with a pretty different role. I watched Foundation much more recently and it took me a while to realize it was the same actor from Halt.
Are we watching the same clip? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
This is from the pilot and I watched it based on high recommendations, and I couldn't keep going because the character you're describing as so convincing and charismatic is so dramatically unlikeable!?
In this scene, he is:
* disrespectful and entitled with a coworker
* privileged and self-important about his background with a client
* then makes an admittedly pretty rousing speech, but TBH the show doesn't really trust us to understand that "this is meant to be inspirational" because it keeps cutting to the other character reacting "inspired", which is significant because
* he doesn't make the sale
* then proceeds to verbally scream abuse at the other character.
and then i'm supposed to be excited about watching the two of these start a computer company together? ..........why?
The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
> The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
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.
No, Joe wants to have substance and vision. The tragedy of his character is his slow realization that he just doesn't have it. Indeed it's the tragedy of all the main cast that each has some of what it takes to make something truly revolutionary, but they lack some key aspect. They each know that another has the missing piece they need, but they can't sustainably maintain a relationship with them.
He's basically supposed to be a Steve Jobs character - manipulative, with weak technical knowledge, but with high charisma. The part where he takes credit for Gordon's work is very much a reference to the Jobs/Wozniak relationship.
I dont know about substance, but possibly vision. Its an old pattern, he kept selling more until the technical reality caught up with him. And he would abuse the technical staff to try and squeeze more out, but mostly because his reputation was riding on having sold it.
I got really disappointed at the mainframe booting into PC-DOS with a CGA font on a 3278 terminal. The show made such an impeccable job at rebuilding the 3033 CPU and the 3278 terminal just to make such a horrible job depicting its boot process. A VM/SE banner or an MVS login screen would have been sufficient (if inaccurate, if we are looking at the operator console). Did the research point out mainframes don't run PC operating systems?
The articles I can find say he's staying on as a EP, just stepping down as the main show runner. That seems very different than leaving the show behind.
Maybe I should watch a full episode but this clip doesn't sell -me- on it. Heavy handed and a bit phony. Great talent in these scenes, not directed or crafted for my tastes. I'm saying my feelings not downvoting!
Lee Pace is a first rate actor but I could not recognize him or indeed, most of the characters in this show, as representative of their roles. I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it. I still enjoyed it somewhat. Not Silicon Valley good but okay.
I'm always surprised Lee Pace doesn't get more recognition; I've loved a lot of his quirkier projects like Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but it's not like he hasn't also been in mainstream things like The Hobbit and Guardians of the Galaxy.
He's in very heavy makeup in Guardians of the Galaxy (and his blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Captain Marvel), and while you can get a good look at his face in The Hobbit, his character doesn't get much screentime and isn't especially prominent - and indeed I don't think the Hobbit trilogy really turned any actors into household names which weren't already.
I love Lee Pace but there really hasn't been a blockbuster where he's front and center.
That's fair. I think his starring moment was really Pushing Daisies, but that kind of thing is not for everyone; even just the hyperreal aesthetic would be a barrier for some.
I really liked the show despite Lee Pace's performance.
Pace really nails the intense Jobs vibe, but having seen his other work, it seems like it might not be 100% acting. There's consistency to the off feeling he gives across roles.
Gordon's role was probably the most setting accurate, but I do feel the story would have suffered if the entire cast was realistic to 80s standards rather than translated into late-2010s sensibilities.
> I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it.
This! It's not a bad show but people calling it the Best Drama are wildly overselling it.
Anyone modeling themselves after someone, isn't going to have that electricity.
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.
And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.
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!
My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.
I got the sense that Kidders side was approximately equal to my father’s side, as my father said he provided a lot of information to the author through interviews and was happy with the account that ended up in the book. I’ll see what I can find though.
I ended up working for the lead of the competing team within DG (whose product lost to the book’s protagonist) for many years right after college at a different company he founded. I suspect he has a slightly different perspective on the whole thing, but I never asked.
Sadly my father and many of his contemporaries are no longer with us. But I’m really happy that this book exists as a durable & accurate snapshot of the period. The computer history museum also has a wonderful collection of interviews worth checking out, which includes several of the staff from DG [1]
The problem with it is that it is ahistorical enough in the tech that some things just don't work. The show tackles stuff about like a decade before it was actually relevant in market, and that has subtle problems that give the business stuff an uncanny-valley feel. Still a fun drama though.
I like the fact that it's the wrong years for the idea to succeed: Kind of like with the Newton, they are going into visionary ideas when the tech or the market isn't there. There's a lot of companies out there that fail because they go in too early to have good execution.
1000%. One of the big reasons I love Halt & Catch Fire is because their reach exceeds their grasp and they were too early for the ideas they dreamed of. I wrote a piece, partly inspired by the show, on category-defining products and how many factors have to line up for a product to become category-defining:
So many people have been there. Working to put something together, but with gaps that are hard to close. I have been there.
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.
And NeXT was the spiritual successor to Apple's internal "Big Mac" project which never even made it to market before it was killed. (The project leader Rich Page and others started phoning the already-fired Jobs, begghing him to step in, when Big Mac was deep-sixed.) The Mac had come after the Xerox Star, which failed commercially, and the Apple Lisa, which failed commerically: then it too nearly failed commercially, until the desktop-publishing market finally came together around it. And even then industry wiseacres like John C. Dvorak had years more fun mocking it (not completely without justification) as an extravagant toy and a market also-ran.
Of course Compaq was Houston rather than DFW. The case design for the first portable was scribbled on the back of a paper placemat at the House of Pies diner on Westheimer.
They still could have had Donna working at TI, which has a presence there.
During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous.
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.
It also annoyed me that the Commodore 64s used for their online service were shown with DOS prompts. I think the set designers thought "Commodore 64s are old; old computers ran DOS; therefore Commodore 64s ran DOS"
Season 1 feels like its connecting back to Compaq, which made a competitor to IBM's PC platform. Founded by previous TI employees, reverse engineered IBM's BIOS, etc.
Patriot is amazing, more people should watch it, everyone I know who has was enthralled by it.
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.
Patriot is my single favorite show of all time. I absolutely adore it and every preposterous, absurd line.
So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.
So many phenomenal scenes. I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public but it was unafraid to take some serious and weird risks. But they pay off in spades for me!
Are you me? Patriot is amazing and I will never stop recommending it no matter how many dumbfounded looks I get.
I have a framed "Structural Dynamics of Flow" poster on my wall in my home office, visible on Teams calls. Only 1 person has ever recognized the reference.
> So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.
My friends and I have found that Patriot phrases make excellent team names in pub trivia, even if no other teams get the references. (Also "double great", "disgraced veterinarians", "pin-flam-fastened pan traps", more I'm forgetting... clearly I need to rewatch the show yet again!)
> I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public
I suspect the show would have had a larger audience if it had a better title. That seems to be an instant negative whenever I try recommending it to someone. Hopefully Steven Conrad's new hbo show will raise his profile enough to let more people rediscover Patriot. It's an absolute gem.
If you like Patriot, you might enjoy Mr Inbetween. It's one of my favourite shows ever. Different story, same level of dark comedy, with a heaping dose of Aussie humour.
If you want something more American, the show for you is Barry.
Evil got cancelled with a 6 episode finish, which is unheard of when making TV. It wanders around, and has highlights in each season. The x-files got real sloppy near the end too.
Also in the running for great title sequences as well
HACF only has four seasons, but it features great character arcs and a beautiful ending. I don’t think it’s on the level of The Wire, but it’s way more than enough to stand apart.
I've heard about the show on an episode of the podcast "Endless Thread", where the creator Joseph Bennett talked about how the show came to be and how his creative process worked.
It was very intriguing and I started watching it on the same day. This would have really deserved a renewal for another season, but sadly it got cancelled.
One of the few sci fi shows that makes an alien world truly feel alien. Where it clearly has its own evolution, ecosystems, rules, etc., but they are so... alien that it is barely comprehensible to the characters and audience.
He has something to do with this show as well which was obtuse enough to keep me at a distance. It's an unhinged, detective story with puppets in a noir-laden city grit setting.
I need to get around to Perpetual Grace; I've watched the first 15 minutes of it like four times and always ended up bouncing off of it for one reason or another; but I know if I got into it, I'd probably really dig it.
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.
If the first episode doesn’t draw you in, it’s probably not your kind of show. I’m not saying episode 1 is all it has to offer, but if you don’t enjoy episode 1 it’s doubtful you will enjoy the rest.
I have seen two of your five shows and like them a lot, and heard of another and it’s already on my to-watch list. This is enough overlap to get the other ones added to the list (plus that pilot).
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).
My understanding was that if you know you're on the last episode then you'll expect things to be resolved or something like that. Similarly, you probably don't expect any twists on the second episode.
I've not heard of the series so I can't comment on it specifically but that was my take on their warning.
> Scavengers reign is from the same people as common side effects.
In case it matters to someone, the order is reverse. As in, Scavengers Reign came before. Also, be aware it wasn’t renewed for a second season. But it absolutely deserved it, just not enough people knew about it.
Rubicon is excellent. I was disappointed at the time it only got one season, but in retrospect it worked out okay because it's one season done very very well.
Station Eleven. Wouldn't have made it past a few episodes if I didn't know how good Mackenzie Davis was from watching HCF 1000 times. I stuck through a few things I didn't care for at first, now it will probably remain my favorite show of all time.
Station Eleven is so beautiful and human. Great pick. Highly recommend The Leftovers if you liked that one. Its exploration of life and grief and humanity following a secular rapture is stunning, and the performances are outstanding.
I have (re)watched everything Patrick Somerville has worked on because of Station Eleven :) I rewatched The Leftovers last month. Maniac last week (this time I noticed a funny reference by Sally Field's character pitching something on the phone about a guy with special hugging powers).
None of that was my type of thing before, now it's all I want. I think the genre might be called absurdist fiction, but I'm not sure that covers the full vibe.
Dan Romer is an excellent composer too, I listen to his stuff a lot. I have the Station Eleven soundtrack in my car, now my kid randomly sings Wandering Under The Moon, and it's one of my favorite things in the world.
great recommndations, Patriot is amazing dark comedy with great atmosphere, SR is great semi-documentary about alien planet ecosystem, very peaceful, didn't like CSE and Counterpart though
I would suggest also Devs just for the visuals and Tales from the Loop for the most peaceful TV show I've ever seen
As someone who lived through that era, I couldn't watch it. A deep sense of uncanny valley. The 97% that they got completely right was ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Often senslessly so. Stuff that a technical consultant would have caught in an instant.
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....
> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong.
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!
Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents.
So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip.
Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an 8KB EPROM chip if you do a web search) and plugs it into a breadboard and proceeds to dump out each byte of the chip with Joe (Lee Pace) writing down the address and data at that particular address on a pad of paper.
After writing the address and address contents for the first time, Joe asks Gordon how many times they have to do this procedure. Gordon replies 65536, which would imply a 64KB ROM chip - but the web search said the IBM PC used an 8KB EPROM for the BIOS.
After more dreary, repetitive work, they accomplish the dumping and transcribing of the IBM PC BIOS in one weekend.
But one could have used a short BASIC program to dump the IBM PC BIOS ROM - the IBM PC wasn't a locked down game console...
Maybe as a HW guy, writing a BASIC program to dump the BIOS would not come to mind.
For a legal clean-room implementation of the IBM PC BIOS, the actual contents of the IBM PC BIOS aren't needed.
You need the specs for each BIOS function (input/output parameters and description of what the BIOS function does).
The IBM PC Technical Reference Manual (which cost $99 back then) contains the BIOS assembly language listing.
One would need to type up the lines that list the input/output requirements for each BIOS function and their purpose and they'd be half-way to a clean-room PC BIOS.
But that'd be way less dramatic (and easier) than the way shown in the episode.
I lived through parts of the tech eras depicted and I thought it captured the culture of people really well. It would have been boring to get bogged down in the details of historical differences, I'm not expecting this to be a documentary. Many of the people I worked with referred to the mushroom farms referenced in Soul of a New Machine from first hand experience The show had to change things as the years passed on the show in order to have the same main cast of characters involved as technology changed. I read Soul of a New Machine recently and one really has to have the right mind set to appreciate it, there are a lot of very specific details to that time in Massachusetts, working for what feels like a small division of ponderous Data General, competing technically and politically with separate groups within Data General, where every main character is a man, almost incidentally competing with the other computer companies, it does convey the feeling of a startup within a bigger company, so I don't hold the book in nearly the same high regard as others.
It’s very hard to capture everything in such an era. Maybe they made other choices that aligned with the fiction they were writing. It’s not a documentary. And TV shows can’t capture as much as books.
The show successfully gives enough to people to haven’t lived in that era. It’s an amazing show.
I view any historically based show as an alternate history. Nothing good comes from expecting too much consistency with our reality.
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 hear you. After the first season, the tech and industry was just a backdrop, and I couldn't get into because the rest of it was pretty weak.
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.
I've only visited Palo Alto, but I recognised way too many aspects of that series from various VC startups. Up to and including the startup I was apart of that had offices in a bedroom in a house in Atherton for a while, and the craziness around Techcrunch (which was incidentally started out of the bedroom next to "ours" in that house in Atherton).
There is a scene in the first season where they're all on a bus and Gilfoyle sees a middle aged woman on a bike waiting for a light. The soliloquy was so random and not even funny, but fit so well. That woman was basically every middle aged woman neighbor of mine.
I remember the writers of SV actually somehow had to tone down the ridiculousness of the SV setting. See this quote from The New Yorker [0]:
>“His [Teller, working for Google] message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’
>Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!
PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating
I just finished my third run through the series. There have been a lot of movies and shows about how tech "grew up" in the 80s and 90s, but this one feels closest to home for me. It was an incredible time to live through. Everybody was trying all kinds of stuff, fundamental stuff not stuff around the edges, and nobody knew what would hit and what wouldn't. Some kid in East Minnesota had the same shot as some guy in Stanford. There was very much a Wild West feel to it.
With apologies for going all old-guy, today it seems that whatever you do, you end up in some walled garden along a pre-programmed path. Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple? I don't know. It does not look like a worthwhile thing to spend my time on.
Everything you do today, it's like you automatically end up on some set of train tracks somebody else has made. Maybe they let your train run, maybe not. Maybe they like what you're doing and let your train run like the wind so that they can copy it all.
HCF reminded me that there was a time before all of this. Good memories.
Agentic coding may be an even bigger change, and it might kick off a new time like that. Too soon to tell. I sure hope so. I can't help but notice there are a lotta folks looking to get their hooks into the system.
> Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple?
Yes! I've spent much more time screwing around with linkers and search paths than I ever have App Store Connect. It's really not very difficult, it's always surprising to hear engineers expect it'd be something they'd sink time into.
Honestly, I think it's pretty remarkable you can distribute software to billions of devices with about as much clicking and form-filling as buying a plane ticket. Was there a time it was even easier?
I really don't know why this idea still persists that going through App Store review is this awful thing that takes forever and eats up all of your time. It really doesn't nowadays. I've shipped several apps in the last few years and the longest one of my apps has been in review has been maybe 3 days, and the average is between 1-2 days. That's usually for new apps. For updates, it's usually half a day to 1.5 days to get it reviewed.
It takes barely any time to manage the review process. I have had apps and updates rejected but it was easy enough to make some changes and re-submit.
That's absolutely bitchun. You should definitely do so. What's actually in there? Ideally you'd have it done up as a set piece and mock up a connection to Mutiny on there ;)
It's quite good, but it gets very Six Feet Under by the end, and you have to suspend a lot of disbelief about technology; it's a little like Hackers in the sense that it's trying to communicate a feeling about operating in specific eras of computing, but not so much trying to realistically depict what it was like.
Christopher Cantwell, the showrunner, is also doing the new series of The Terror (aka North Pole Bear Show) that's premiering this year.
I think the problem is that you can't really communicate that feeling without taking a lot of liberties, because it will seem boring and tedious to those not as invested, because it's hard to convey the excitement of a little box that can hold a small number of page-equivalents of text to someone who didn't know what it was like before.
I was a child during the early parts of that era, and so for that part I got most from reading books and seeing the public announcements, but I started my first company during the era depicted towards the end - an ISP - and I feel they got that balance roughly right.
But, sure, there were annoying deviation that is obvious to those of us who know how things happened. I don't think that was avoidable.
The first one, the one based on the book, was great and did fly a good deal under the radar. But definitely one of those ones with a core fanbase that evangelized for it and good critical notices. Elsewhere in this discussion Jared Harris's role in Foundation has been mentioned; he's a major, consistent, and excellent fixture in The Terror.
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.
Yeah, the the characters kind of feel like Doonesbury characters, where they just slot in wherever they're needed at a particular moment in history. Each season's story by itself feels authentic, but when you watch their character arcs from start to finish, each person involved would have to be a generational talent.
And it's not like that kind of thing never happens, like look at General Magic and its through-lines through the tech industry up until 2015 or so, but it just happens too conveniently in the show. Particularly Bosworth's role seems far-fetched to me. He's already at the end of his career in season 1, and somehow he remains relevant through the internet age?
The "Phoenix" monologue in the last episode evokes nostalgia for everything Donna and Cameron have been through, but it also breaks suspension of disbelief by pointing out just how much of history these two people have been involved with firsthand.
Take a look at the careers of Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, Larry Wall, James Gosling, Kirk McCusick, Allen Holub, Al Aho, Marvin Minsky, Daniel Friedman, Gerald Sussman, Lance Leventhal, John Carmack, John Romero, Paul Graham, Guy Steele, Christopher Date, Bill Joy, Eric Raymond, Douglas Comer, Andrew Tanenbaum, David Patterson, Jeffrey Ullman, Fred Brooks, or Jim Keller.
> This piece contains spoilers for Halt and Catch Fire.
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.
I haven't watched it nor have I heard of it prior to this post, but based on the comments here, it seems like required watching for a techie! Adding it to the never ending list of things to watch :)
(I also haven't seen Silicon Valley which, as I understand it, is simultaneously required watching and required avoidance for HN people...)
I binge watched all four seasons in 2021; personally I felt Season 1 was the best with Season 2 doing a good job of building on it. But everything changed in Season 3, in terms of the characters, the feeling of the show, etc... And it wasn't that they had "grown" via their story arcs. They just felt - different.
It looks like some of the key writers changed halfway. This likely contributed to the change in characters, feeling, and everything that made the first two seasons so good. Jamie Pachino the executive story editor, was only there for the start. Also writers Jason Cahill, Dahvi Waller, and Jonathan Lisco only contributed to the first two seasons.
I can only imagine how the last two seasons would have felt if more of the early writers were still involved.
I don't disagree but I also don't think it's a bad thing. This is a show that stuck the landing. You never know, it could have felt stale with a singular writing team
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.
I genuinely enjoyed it and do recommend. As another commenter mentioned, Lee Pace's performance is stand out.
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.
This is one of the vanishingly small instances of actually representing the tech industry well in media, even if there's a lot of exaggeration and they elide the boring stuff. There are so many scenes in that gave me deja vu. Everyone gets treated even handedly, no 2 dimensional heroes and villains, just a load of people trying to build something while their egos get in the way. I'd give it the highest recommendation possible, representation is important!
It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.
It captured a bit the feeling of being at the start of the computer boom in 60s-70s. The partnernship between the 2 male protagonists was central till the end of show (evolving through different phases). The show was great, it went in very unexpected directions later on.
I started watching this and was genuinely interested, but I kinda got tired of all the drama around the stuff I actually found interesting. I know that for a general audience, you need to pad technical stuff with scenes of the tech screwing the business guy, but I just wanted the computers!
I started my tech career in Dallas in the mid-80s. I had friends and relatives who worked for TI while I was at a startup. The story seems to be a mish-mash of early PC and networking companies, but the vibe is spot on.
Donna's experiences at TI mirror those friends related to me. The club the gang visited felt just like the Starck Club. Engineers at Cardiff "felt" just like the engineers I worked with.
Add to that the excellent performances by the whole cast... I love this show, especially the first season that started with a PC and ended with the Mac.
Thank you! It's difficult to convey an environment where everyone wants to be right instead of finding the right answer, while the company accelerates towards a wall
It's got nothing to do with liking it or not. This is ChatGPT:
> 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.
Whether something sounds like a human, a book, or a language model doesn’t really affect whether the behavior it describes exists.
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?
> Whether something sounds like a human, a book, or a language model doesn’t really affect whether the behavior it describes exists.
It matters.
> the hardest thing to scale is not software. It is trust.
For example: Is this your sincerely held belief, the conclusion of all of the preceding words, and the point you were trying to express?
Because it reads, superficially, like shallow self-help pablum.
If you want your readers to differentiate these words from those words, you at least owe them the assurance that you've thought this through, and are willing to defend this idea.
If this is your own idea, it might be worth some consideration beyond its superficial presentation. If this is the output of an LLM trained on shallow observations and presentation style, it is not worth consideration.
If the claim is simple, why didn't you just state that, what is the AI Generated nonsense prose adding to anything? Prompting an LLM with 'Write me an essay linking Halt and Catch Fire to the idea that in creative orgs disagreements often escalate into identity conflicts because people map ideas to self-worth.' then pasting that into a substack is low-effort slop, embarrassing to post; embarassing to read.
The post is about people turning disagreement into a status fight. Your reply is mostly a status fight about the existence of the post. Kind of strengthens the thesis.
You can debate the argument: what’s embarrassing is feeling the need to announce to strangers that they’re wrong on the internet.
It allows people to form a "watch club" around the show, similar to a book club, and have plenty of extra reading materials to understand the different tech eras covered in the show.
I think this show -- combined with the documentary "General Magic" and the book "Fire in the Valley" -- is a great way to be immersed in the techno-optimism of the early tech industry around the time of the desktop PC revolution and early internet.
For me, that sort of techno-optimism has stuck with me even if modern tech has more dystopian elements with which one has to grapple. It is still an amazing industry, all things considered.
p.s. total aside that Apple TV sells a digital "box set" of this show for a pretty low price these days. I am usually not a fan of "buying" a show from a streaming service but might be worth it in this case since it's around $16 USD for every episode across its 4 seasons, Apple has a good track record honoring digital purchases, and watching the show is a commitment.
This is one of those shows I've had in the rolling background rewatch queue for years, I love it and I try to recommend it to as many people as possible. Flawed, yes, but still special.
I wrote a bit about how the kind of tech culture in HACF feels more relevant in light of the LLMs even 2 years back before I heard of mourning a craft. Here's an excerpt:
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.
I enjoyed the actual entrepreneurial endeavoring in the show, but I would have preferred if it was a bit drier. Would be interesting to see a series based on Skunk Works.
Good show but wouldn't want my hypothetical kid to look up to the main woman character thinking it's cool to be perpetually high-strung, antisocial, with a highly unregulated nervous system/unhealthy habits just because she is 'cool' and 'brilliant'
I've watched through the show and I enjoyed season 1 a lot, but I found it eventually ran into the issue lots of shows do where it's just meandering and you realize it won't go anywhere because if they write towards a conclusion they can't make more seasons.
I was pretty bored by the time it got into browser wars stuff. And the ending of the show was kinda baffling and cringe-inducing.
I've heard many great things but have not been able to make it past the classroom scene in the first episode. I love both of the actors in other media, but I find the dialogue in these opening scenes makes me feel..embarrassed? I have similar feelings about other shows and movies at times where I just have to turn them off because of the way the characters are behaving. I think it just ties directly into some anxiety I have.
Consider just fast-forwarding past a scene you can't handle. Like many shows, it takes a few episodes before the actors truly understand their characters.
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.
Idk man, the entire second season gives me that feeling of embarrassment, I couldn't finish the show. The first season was alright, but honestly the second season is some of the cheesiest/worst storytelling/acting I've ever seen.
Interesting how this thread has people saying they love the acting and people saying they hate it. I can't say as I found the acting itself to be amazing outside of a few scenes, but I never found it cringe enough to not want to see more. It'd be cool to understand more about what triggers this differently for different folks.
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.
It might be more of an issue with the story telling than the actors performance themselves. For instance the changes in Joe and Gordon's characters was confusing. Gordon goes from being shy nerd to reckless coke addict, like huh.. Joe kinda becomes a new age softy. The hacker house vibes were off, a bunch of 20-30 year old playing tag and having nerf gun wars.. okay, I guess. Its just very hard to suspend belief and get into the story. As someone else mentioned, it gives off Hackers vibes. It feels like the writers weren't really familiar early tech and were just going off what they thought it would be like.
We're in the minority, but I'm with you. It felt like in the first season, the tech and era took center stage to the point it was accurate enough to be an enjoyable element of the show. After that, they just wanted to rush and touch on different eras and the tech and eras were no longer the center stage. However, the stories were too cringey and couldn't carry it. And I'm just not a fan of Lee Pace. His deliver is one-dimensional.
You and others are both right: the first season is better in the "tech authenticity" dimension but worse as a script (literary dimension); with seasons 2+3 it's the other way round.
Had the exact same reaction to that exact scene. Just couldn't get past it. It wasn't as bad as when I tried to watch Big Bang Theory (which multiple people assured me that I'd love), but it was in that ballpark.
This show started to get so strong into season 1 and season 2, then completely lost it for me and went full soap opera. Seems super-common for new series; they (rightfully) don't put a lot of effort into future episodes of a show that's unlikely to last beyond the first, and run out of the motivating material. In the 80's/90's sitcom this was the "have a baby" storyline; on the grittier cable series it's focus on the broken characters and lots of sex.
I tried to get my (techie) gf at the time to watch it a few years back but she couldn't get past the Cameron x Joe relationship from the beginning episode, it icked her out. I've been keen for a rewatch and my wife might actually like it though so thanks for the reminder, I'll add it to the queue.
Binge watched it. I think the first 2 seasons were great.
Lee Pace did an awesome performance recently in Asimov's Foundation. Mackenzie Davis, another lead in the show, demonstrated good potential but she seems not to get much afterward (Terminator, Station 11 etc)
I watched this show when it first came out in the 2010's. Very enjoyable, having lived through the BBS and early Internet age, worked for early ISPs that reminded me a bit of "Mutiny."
Absolutely. One of those shows where I went to check what the songs were playing in specific scene often, and ended up with lots of new tracks added to play lists. Whoever did their music selection was top notch.
Uuuuh kinda? It's late '10's premium TV that's really more of a telenovela aimed for specific audience with a diminished level of self-awareness (not the one that's serving a sentence). HCF is kinda like that - very good if you're into the whole fantasy of tech entrepreneurship of the 80's/90's, but kinda corny when you think about it.
The main character suffers from DID. From trauma that happened when he was little. Maybe you didn't watch the whole thing, that seems pretty "human drama"-ey to me.
That's not human drama. That's a sensationalized depiction of a really rare disorder that 99% of the audience has no experience with and cannot relate directly to.
Look I love the show but it does feel like a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. In order to get more moments in the story itself took a backseat. Lots of cool moments if you love tech history but as a stand alone drama it was kind of a let down.
Amazing, highly recommended. I have watched all seasons ~4 times. It has just some magical feeling, because tech is in the end about people and their interactions/dynamics.
"In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly language mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers (introduced in 1964), making a joke about its numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)
The series is a memorable instance of what any self-respecting geek ought to have watched. It's better than "Silicon Valley", although the latter has pulled one scientific stunt regarding scientific advisory that is unique in film.
What other films/series are "must watch" material for geeks?
I've not seen that since the 90s so it might not be a classic but if you've ever seen an unexpected pi symbol (look on the bottom right of old.reddit.com) in software then they're probably referencing that movie.
I almost stopped at the first episode. I remember the IBM PC manuals, and the build in ROM Basic, they could have read the ROMs and dumped them to the printer in minutes, there wasn't any mystery to it.
I'm glad I stuck with it though, the rest of the series was much, much better.
I despised this show. The acting, writing and (probably) direction was poor at best and, as someone else here mentioned, it's like what some writer thought things were and not how they actually were.
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.
> 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.
1. "Kissing session," "kissed," etc. Funny stuff. I hope you don't really think they were just looking for wine when they were off camera.
2. He's bi. We meet an ex boyfriend in a later episode, although the fact of his ahem "kissing session" would seem to be evidence enough.
3. The reason is obvious enough if you watch through the end of the dinner.
You're making an odd request, but I'll bite because it seems sincere. I'm younger! I didn't live through the period, and I'm not a statistician, but I have to ask if this kind of representation is really a gimmick?
For some, it's very meaningful. That character is bisexual, not gay, and it's pretty authentic representation. The reason why it's not so focused on is because people like this, especially at that time, often don't care much for labels. That scene you mention is with a closeted man. This is not unheard of. You may not have had this experience personally, but does that mean it didn't happen? The campy part? Okay. The show wasn't perfect. It did get canceled, after all. But it worries me that you singled this particular thing out because this is obviously a political topic, and you missed the fact that the scene did demonstrate some things about the character, like his recklessness, impulsiveness and opportunism.
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.
"it's like what some writer thought things were and not how they actually were"
Doesn't that refer to a lot of pop culture? I can remember the 1980s and my memories of that period rarely bear much resemblance to the TV/films I see nowadays set in that period. I don't think it's just my personal experience. It goes deeper than that because many of the writers can't remember it well, or at all. That said I think the author of "Ready Player One" could remember the 1980s, just not my 1980s.
I did look up the name when I watched the show. The characters and plot are the fictionalized early days of computing made entertaining. Definitely worth a watch.
It's a very good show and I did enjoy it (at least Seasons 1,2; never saw 3). But "best TV drama" is a stretch. BSG is a better drama IMO (sci-fi, yes, but essentially a drama about humanity).
I just tried to watch this show because someone told me its the next best tech show after Silicon Valley, and the second season is by far some of the worst storytelling and acting I've ever seen on a screen, I don't think I'll be finishing the show. I really don't understand why people are so into it.
Yeah, I don't get it either. I made it through the first season which was okay, but I couldn't get myself to finish the second one, it was just bad.
It is supposed to improve towards the end, but that is just too much to endure.
The first season is pretty taut, then the follow-up seasons suffer from every character being at the center of every big thing in tech for narrative purposes, which is to its detriment imo.
This is my opinion too. I loved the first season, but after that it felt silly making the same people invent basically everything in the computer world.
However it seems most people liked it the other way around.
It's "Ready Player One" for people who think SV is the most important thing in the world. It's very shallow and mostly just shoutouts to early computing history trivia.
It was engrossing as all hell, but it's one of the only shows I ever finished while really not liking it.
It feels so fake, and tries to keep your attention with gimmicks and artificial drama. When things are working out, characters sabotage things purposely to add drama back, as if it can't possibly be dramatic to succeed. The show basically ends up being a group of 4 or 5 assholes being assholes to each other for no reason.
No actually, 4 individuals are not solely responsible for 20 years of early computing history and making that so is absurd and kills my suspension of disbelief.
But it's short and self contained and there's enough character stuff to see that it's still worth experiencing.
I don't know how people say it's like "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracey Kidder. I read that book and there's just nothing comparable in the show. Soul of a new machine was a wonderful journey that was full of real people and real experiences, and maybe the first season of HaCF was like the McDonalds version of that.
I remember a scene in this show which felt like many real meetings I've had in my life. The big hot shot CEO guy pulls everyone into a meeting to share his big idea. The idea? Let's sell a computer that's "twice the speed, half the price!"
...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.
It's gotten so ridiculous, my wife was in tears trying to get at a show a few days ago and we have like all the subscriptions. Now that it's cross-services subs to services within subs, some hosted by the top level, some a separate app/site/login even though you signed up somewhere else, it's a friggin' nightmare!
They have essentially nothing in common, other than the fact that both rapidly degrade over the seasons and both are nostalgic looks back at recent eras of America.
Interesting. Different strokes I suppose. I loved this show but in the beginning they put too much emphasis on Lee Pace's character for my taste. Just kind of "ooooh, what will the brooding. mysterious maverick in a suit with a dark past do next? So unpredictable" and it didn't really resonate with me like the later seasons did.
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?"
Seasons 3 and 4 did a really good job of capturing what it was like being in the industry and in SFBA in the mid/late 1990s, better than anything I've seen. I worked at McAfee (then NETA) at the time and the MCAF-ish stuff was uncanny; the last gasp of cubicle culture in the software product industry.
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.
Except that Mr Robot was always planned that way, you can go back and see references to what's revealed in the final episodes as early as the pilot. Things are revealed at the end of S1 that make you have to re-evaluate what you've seen so far. The same is probably even more true for S4.
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.
I really love season 1, because of its specific technical detail.
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.
Season 1 was wonderful. The showrunner had initially written the pilot to get a job on Mad Men. It was eviscerated by critics for being too male, too masculine and seasons 2 onward pivoted into a girlboss series with Lee Pace's character taking a backseat and Scooter's character becoming a stay at home house husband. But if you like Breaking Bad and Sopranos, S1 is very well written.
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.
I've heard of Season 1 described as "Don Draper teaming up with Walter White", which makes it sound far more juicy than it is. The entire show gets way into the melodrama of the characters' personal lives, but S1 is no better than the rest in terms of that; it's strongest when the personal melodrama is rooted in the tech, like Joe's self-sabotage of their COMDEX demo followed by the fateful realization in the hotel room of their doom. There's a really great article in Grantland about HCF, Silicon Valley, and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland which points out that these characters are not great men, because they are but footnotes of history:
> 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.
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.
Lee Pace's performance in that show is one of my all time favorites. It's incredibly hard to play a charismatic marketing guru because in some sense, you're not acting. In a given scene, the character might be trying to convince people around him of some crazy idea, but if he hasn't convinced you, the viewer, then the entire illusion falls apart. So he really has to do in real life what he's pretending to do on screen.
edit - a great example and one of my favorite scenes from the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc
Funny that this came up today. Last night I started re-watching the series after several years. Just this afternoon I was reflecting on how genuinely charismatic Lee Pace's Joe McMillen is.
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.
You're making me really want to start a rewatch.
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.
That is where I originally watched it. It was on Netflix at one point. And now, it is not. Which is most of the problem with streaming service in general.
40-episode box set is $30 ($16 today) on Apple TV.
Also free to watch on The Roku Channel: https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/523a290683575d449483...
Also free to pirate for LLM training purposes
And just like that, their sales skyrocketed.
Apple TV is distributing physical media?
Scroll past the subscription options to find the full series listing. "Box Set" licensing terminology is as anachronistic as "Seasons", but both are used in Apple TV product listings for non-subscription streaming media purchases.
I'm not seeing anything anachronistic about either term. "Seasons" is absolutely aligned to the way television series are still produced and distributed. "Box Set" implies physical media. Using the latter term to refer to something else sounds like a case of false advertising.
With the advent of digital music, "record album" morphed from referring to the physical medium, to referring to the recording that would be put on it. I think something similar is happening for "box set".
Apple offers refunds for unwanted digital purchases, and this description in Apple TV app:
Wait, so it's actually a standalone, DRM-free download? If that's the case, then while the term is still somewhat misleading, it's considerably less so than I assumed.
Not DRM free, but unlike most streaming services Apple TV will download purchased media via different countries or VPNs and has no time limit to watch the download. In practice, it "just works". Buying all 4 seasons individually would be 4x$13=$52.
I don't see how it qualifies as a legitimate download or ownership. You cannot save the file to a disk you control and you have no way to ensure you have continued access to it. Apple or the IP holder can cause this "download" to dissapear from your device/account without prior warning. Its actually written in the terms.
Is a monthly subscription better? Few are willing to buy and rip physical media.
That's a problem for the "many" then to sort out. Everyone else that wants to own their media just uses Automatic Ripping Machine.
Not in Europe?
It's available on Prime Video (at least on amazon.de). For a long while they would only sell access to season 1, but I've just checked now and all 4 seasons are available at the moment.
It does seem to be available on ITVX in the UK.
I recommend AMC+ if you like horror because you also get Shudder. I get to watch Joe Bob Brigg's "Last Drive In."
Plus all the Prestige Y2K Television - Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Walking Dead.
It used to be available as part of Prime. I've watched that series 3 times. It is very good..one of my all time faves, actually.
> It's shocking how few people have seen this show, let along watched it
Huh?
I think they mean “seen” in the sense of “know it exists”, as in seeing it advertised on a billboard or the sea of thumbnails in a streaming service.
What gets me about this show is how it nails the emotional cost of building things. Most tech dramas focus on the product or the money. HaCF focuses on what it does to the people. The relationships that get wrecked, the compromises you make, the way obsession eats everything around it. If you've ever been deep in a startup you feel it in your chest watching this show.
I have watched the first two seasons a few years ago and didn't continue because I was getting so emotionally invested it was making me anxious, not just in front of the screen but also for quite some time afterwards. I'm looking forward to finishing it once I decide my skin has grown thick enough :D
Indeed. And not only do they focus on this but the execution is just so beautifully spot on.
As others have mentioned it might even get too spot on on occasion.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
Well said, I rewatch it every few years and few shows come close to making me feel the way this one does.
I have Lee Pace on the radar since Singh's The Fall.
Your assessment of movie magic is only partially correct. Obviously, a character has to be convincing by himself but the heavy lifting of the illusion is done by the peer characters acting as if they believe the role he plays.
"The king is always played by the others"
Not sure who is to credit for this quote but in my opinion it is one of the most important insights to understand how movies work and also why movie characters are never relevant role models.
He's also extraordinary in Apple's Foundation, some say he carries the show. I treasure The Fall and every frame of it, in this he's uniquely blended with other great actors and images.
Apparently part of The Fall's magic stems from the fact that the girl playing Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) somehow didn't really understand that she was playing in a movie. The director, as well as Pace, received some criticism for this manipulation. She also didn't really continue acting afterwards.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1942458/
IMO the plot of Apple's "The Foundation" is an infuriating insult to the original series. However, the production is great and Lee Pace is awesome as usual.
I think it's best appreciated as an original space opera that just happens to have the same name, especially given that so much of the show is genuinely original.
I kind of love it when movies/TV don't follow the books too closely. It means more content in a world I enjoy without repeating too much.
I generally agree, and also that it's impossible to take a book to video without change. I tend to try to think of it like this, imagine Bob and Jim watched a battle scene, but one from the west, the other from the east side. Bob wrote the book, Jim the movie.
Naturally, although it was the same battle, they'll have seen different things up close, and have different views on the battle overall.
Having said that...
It's like someone wrote the Foundation movie three generations after the book was written, turned into a play, and then told over the campfire for decades.
It literally has no more connection with Asimov's works, than Star Wars is like Star Trek. All of the technology is different, the size of the Empire is wildly different, literally almost nothing maps.
Is it good? Yes, sorta. But it's not Foundation, by any stretch. It's not even remotely in the same "world".
Last season's Brother Dude was awesome. I really felt sad for him. I have to say, however, my tolerance for manipulative sociopaths is very low - I'd totally punch McMillen in the face.
I was only aware of The Fall for its brilliant photography.
The Fall is a great movie but still more style than substance imo.
It's forgivable, as long as it has A LOT of style.
Even though Pushing Daisies ended too abruptly, I thought he was GREAT in that series as well.
Yeah, someone saw a love struck pie maker and thought: Ronan the Accuser.
He has range!
Often in movies you have the scrappy character that rises to the occasion by making a great speech, winning everybody over. I used to love those scenes.
Now, I've realized, in real life they wouldn't have let them finish their first sentence.
stuff like this. if i enjoy a movie but the script simply doesn't check out from a rational perspective (plot holes, implausible behavior, inconsistencies etc.) then i sometimes decide to switch to a fairy tale mental mode where those issues are excused magically. only works with some movies. kingdom of heaven comes to mind.
Project: Hail Mary, a fantasy world where geopolitics are trivially simple and every state in the world collectively agrees how great it would be to cede power and work together. (And therefore enable a genuinely fun and amazing science story which was the actual focus of the book to begin with, 10/10).
Lee Pace is such a phenomenal actor. He really just transforms the roles he's in and makes something special out of each show he's in.
He's also fantastic in Apple TV's Foundation and it's been really impressive seeing his range put on display there.
Dig up Wonderfalls, his first series, and Pushing Daisies. They form the Lee Pace Triumvirate (with Halt and Catch Fire) as far as I'm concerned.
"... what he's pretending to do on screen"
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.
It never occurred to me that the jokes were oversold. I think the show is genuinely funny, with a very high batting average. Easily one of the funniest shows on television.
I sure do miss 'Mrs. Maisel'. What a stellar series.
A stand up audience from the 1950s shouldn't be reacting to jokes the same way a 2020s audience would.
I think I really loved Barry for exactly the opposite of this reason. Seeing a truly great actor play a bad actor was both impressive and hilarious at the same time.
Hacks does it fairly well, or it may just be jean smart
Sadly, Season 1 Joe is just incohesive. Like, you want there to be some structural reason behind his madness and there just isn't any, because there's too much of crazy. Season 2 tries to walk much of that back.
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.
His character makes much more sense in later seasons.
If you like Lee Pace, check out The Fall (2006). It's my favorite film, incredibly ambitious and funny and yet virtually unknown to the public. Lee's performance is incredible, as is his young co-star's.
If you like Lee Pace, watch Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies.
Yeah, it's somewhat splintered in that you're unsure what movie you're watching between different parts, but I have a strong love for movies that dare, and that one certainly does.
I'll also second your comment about the kid, which is one of the best child performances I've seen.
I'll give that a shot. Found it it on torrent already.
Great show! Toby Huss is also good as the guy you underestimate. He had a great scene in Weapons last year.
Scoot McNary is good in lots of things-- Monsters is a favorite. Mackenzie Davis in Station 11!
Viewers may have missed the show but casting agents didn't.
It was easy to dismiss the show at the time because, though Pace’s performance was great from the beginning, it felt like he was a Temu Don Draper in an 80s Mad Men wannabe with ‘tech’ replacing ‘ads’.
The show is not at all that if you stick with it for even a short while.
Totally agree, he was incredibly good in that show.
He's also really great in the show Foundation, with a pretty different role. I watched Foundation much more recently and it took me a while to realize it was the same actor from Halt.
Are we watching the same clip? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
This is from the pilot and I watched it based on high recommendations, and I couldn't keep going because the character you're describing as so convincing and charismatic is so dramatically unlikeable!?
In this scene, he is:
* disrespectful and entitled with a coworker
* privileged and self-important about his background with a client
* then makes an admittedly pretty rousing speech, but TBH the show doesn't really trust us to understand that "this is meant to be inspirational" because it keeps cutting to the other character reacting "inspired", which is significant because
* he doesn't make the sale
* then proceeds to verbally scream abuse at the other character.
and then i'm supposed to be excited about watching the two of these start a computer company together? ..........why?
The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
An absolute legendary performance.
> The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
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.
No, Joe wants to have substance and vision. The tragedy of his character is his slow realization that he just doesn't have it. Indeed it's the tragedy of all the main cast that each has some of what it takes to make something truly revolutionary, but they lack some key aspect. They each know that another has the missing piece they need, but they can't sustainably maintain a relationship with them.
He's basically supposed to be a Steve Jobs character - manipulative, with weak technical knowledge, but with high charisma. The part where he takes credit for Gordon's work is very much a reference to the Jobs/Wozniak relationship.
I dont know about substance, but possibly vision. Its an old pattern, he kept selling more until the technical reality caught up with him. And he would abuse the technical staff to try and squeeze more out, but mostly because his reputation was riding on having sold it.
He also stars in The Fall, one of my favorite movies ever.
And Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, two of my favorite shows ever.
I got really disappointed at the mainframe booting into PC-DOS with a CGA font on a 3278 terminal. The show made such an impeccable job at rebuilding the 3033 CPU and the 3278 terminal just to make such a horrible job depicting its boot process. A VM/SE banner or an MVS login screen would have been sufficient (if inaccurate, if we are looking at the operator console). Did the research point out mainframes don't run PC operating systems?
He also played Ronan in Guardians of the Galaxy and King Thranduil in Lord of the Rings!
how dare you mention Lee Pace and -not- mention his role in Foundation, he carried that entire show on his way too muscley back
It’s not cancelled, there’s a fourth season on the way.
But yes, him and Jared Harris are pretty much the primary reasons to watch. And given the limited Harris screentime, definitely Pace carries it.
People are using past tense, as David S. Goyer is leaving the show behind.
The articles I can find say he's staying on as a EP, just stepping down as the main show runner. That seems very different than leaving the show behind.
Yes, it could be there's no impact from any of it. I just remember seeing the headlines about the change.
oh no, this is how i found out my favorite show is dead wtf
Maybe I should watch a full episode but this clip doesn't sell -me- on it. Heavy handed and a bit phony. Great talent in these scenes, not directed or crafted for my tastes. I'm saying my feelings not downvoting!
Lee Pace is a first rate actor but I could not recognize him or indeed, most of the characters in this show, as representative of their roles. I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it. I still enjoyed it somewhat. Not Silicon Valley good but okay.
I'm always surprised Lee Pace doesn't get more recognition; I've loved a lot of his quirkier projects like Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but it's not like he hasn't also been in mainstream things like The Hobbit and Guardians of the Galaxy.
He's in very heavy makeup in Guardians of the Galaxy (and his blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Captain Marvel), and while you can get a good look at his face in The Hobbit, his character doesn't get much screentime and isn't especially prominent - and indeed I don't think the Hobbit trilogy really turned any actors into household names which weren't already.
I love Lee Pace but there really hasn't been a blockbuster where he's front and center.
That's fair. I think his starring moment was really Pushing Daisies, but that kind of thing is not for everyone; even just the hyperreal aesthetic would be a barrier for some.
Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film)
I really liked the show despite Lee Pace's performance.
Pace really nails the intense Jobs vibe, but having seen his other work, it seems like it might not be 100% acting. There's consistency to the off feeling he gives across roles.
Gordon's role was probably the most setting accurate, but I do feel the story would have suffered if the entire cast was realistic to 80s standards rather than translated into late-2010s sensibilities.
> I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it.
This! It's not a bad show but people calling it the Best Drama are wildly overselling it.
he reminds me of truly the best bosses
also something about him with a good engineer
reminds me of me and my boss, i hope lol
Probably help him land Foundation. The narcissism is its own skill.
More recently, I loved how he killed it in Foundation. Another great casting for a great actor.
foundation has an incredible cast but even among such talent he's a clear outlier
maybe some sales look like this but anyone who models themselves after this or madmen or whatever… good luck.
Anyone modeling themselves after someone, isn't going to have that electricity.
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.
And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.
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!
My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.
DG = data general a “large” computer company in Westboro mass. My mom worked there doing internationaliztion.
Soul of a new machine is a fantastic book. About DG going up against DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and their Vax machines.
> I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.
Please do! Ephemera like that can tell more sides of the story that didn't make it into the book, for whatever reason.
I got the sense that Kidders side was approximately equal to my father’s side, as my father said he provided a lot of information to the author through interviews and was happy with the account that ended up in the book. I’ll see what I can find though.
I ended up working for the lead of the competing team within DG (whose product lost to the book’s protagonist) for many years right after college at a different company he founded. I suspect he has a slightly different perspective on the whole thing, but I never asked.
Sadly my father and many of his contemporaries are no longer with us. But I’m really happy that this book exists as a durable & accurate snapshot of the period. The computer history museum also has a wonderful collection of interviews worth checking out, which includes several of the staff from DG [1]
1. https://computerhistory.org/oral-histories/
I joined DG in their last days, largely due to kidders book.
Also, I really liked DG/UX, for reasons I no longer recall.
amazing lore!
Season 1 is Soul of a New Machine-ish, but about personal computing, not minicomputers, and is set in Texas.
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 problem with it is that it is ahistorical enough in the tech that some things just don't work. The show tackles stuff about like a decade before it was actually relevant in market, and that has subtle problems that give the business stuff an uncanny-valley feel. Still a fun drama though.
I like the fact that it's the wrong years for the idea to succeed: Kind of like with the Newton, they are going into visionary ideas when the tech or the market isn't there. There's a lot of companies out there that fail because they go in too early to have good execution.
1000%. One of the big reasons I love Halt & Catch Fire is because their reach exceeds their grasp and they were too early for the ideas they dreamed of. I wrote a piece, partly inspired by the show, on category-defining products and how many factors have to line up for a product to become category-defining:
https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/
So many people have been there. Working to put something together, but with gaps that are hard to close. I have been there.
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.
And NeXT was the spiritual successor to Apple's internal "Big Mac" project which never even made it to market before it was killed. (The project leader Rich Page and others started phoning the already-fired Jobs, begghing him to step in, when Big Mac was deep-sixed.) The Mac had come after the Xerox Star, which failed commercially, and the Apple Lisa, which failed commerically: then it too nearly failed commercially, until the desktop-publishing market finally came together around it. And even then industry wiseacres like John C. Dvorak had years more fun mocking it (not completely without justification) as an extravagant toy and a market also-ran.
Yeah, agreed. Watching it as a drama, it’s fun. Watching it with any perspective on tech history it gets a little cringy.
The first season is semi-accurate if you just replace Compaq with their company. But it quickly goes off the rails.
Of course Compaq was Houston rather than DFW. The case design for the first portable was scribbled on the back of a paper placemat at the House of Pies diner on Westheimer.
They still could have had Donna working at TI, which has a presence there.
I lost interest in the second season. S1 was great, though.
S2 is the weakest season, and S1 isn't the strongest.
S2 was super fun though. The BBS period brought back nostalgia.
During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous.
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.
It also annoyed me that the Commodore 64s used for their online service were shown with DOS prompts. I think the set designers thought "Commodore 64s are old; old computers ran DOS; therefore Commodore 64s ran DOS"
Season 1 feels like its connecting back to Compaq, which made a competitor to IBM's PC platform. Founded by previous TI employees, reverse engineered IBM's BIOS, etc.
> And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.
I've only watched the first season and really don't see the link to Soul of a New Machine.
You just reminded me that I got about halfway through Soul of a New Machine. Maybe I'll pick it back up this week.
HACF is a goodie but there's a lot of great shows no one's heard of.
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...
Patriot is amazing, more people should watch it, everyone I know who has was enthralled by it.
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.
Patriot is my single favorite show of all time. I absolutely adore it and every preposterous, absurd line.
So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.
So many phenomenal scenes. I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public but it was unafraid to take some serious and weird risks. But they pay off in spades for me!
Are you me? Patriot is amazing and I will never stop recommending it no matter how many dumbfounded looks I get.
I have a framed "Structural Dynamics of Flow" poster on my wall in my home office, visible on Teams calls. Only 1 person has ever recognized the reference.
Then, of course, you've seen L.G. Claret's website!
gosh, the scene where he stumbles into the lecture hall, almost late, and then delivers a flawless retro-encapulator-esque pitch... that had me giddy.
The preposterously long rock-paper-scissors scene had me laughing tears.
> So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.
My friends and I have found that Patriot phrases make excellent team names in pub trivia, even if no other teams get the references. (Also "double great", "disgraced veterinarians", "pin-flam-fastened pan traps", more I'm forgetting... clearly I need to rewatch the show yet again!)
> I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public
I suspect the show would have had a larger audience if it had a better title. That seems to be an instant negative whenever I try recommending it to someone. Hopefully Steven Conrad's new hbo show will raise his profile enough to let more people rediscover Patriot. It's an absolute gem.
If you like Patriot, you might enjoy Mr Inbetween. It's one of my favourite shows ever. Different story, same level of dark comedy, with a heaping dose of Aussie humour.
If you want something more American, the show for you is Barry.
Oh, so does "Counterpart" not have an ending?
It does, though it was obviously setting up a future season things wrap up well enough. I wouldn't be mad to watch it again.
It does actually wrap up well enough I reckon. It's not really a cliffhanger or whatever.
Adding it as well
Evil got cancelled with a 6 episode finish, which is unheard of when making TV. It wanders around, and has highlights in each season. The x-files got real sloppy near the end too.
Also in the running for great title sequences as well
HACF only has four seasons, but it features great character arcs and a beautiful ending. I don’t think it’s on the level of The Wire, but it’s way more than enough to stand apart.
> Scavengers Reign
For those curious, start by watching the 8 minute short which originated it all. If it hooks you, you’ll love the show.
https://vimeo.com/179779722
But be aware the show wasn’t renewed for a second season. Not enough people knew about it.
I've heard about the show on an episode of the podcast "Endless Thread", where the creator Joseph Bennett talked about how the show came to be and how his creative process worked.
It was very intriguing and I started watching it on the same day. This would have really deserved a renewal for another season, but sadly it got cancelled.
> an episode of the podcast
Mind sharing a link? I found the podcast but not the episode.
One of the few sci fi shows that makes an alien world truly feel alien. Where it clearly has its own evolution, ecosystems, rules, etc., but they are so... alien that it is barely comprehensible to the characters and audience.
I watched the first episode or so and that was it for me. I don't remember it being super grim but it was too depressing and ominous for me.
While it has many many amazing scenes, I think Patriot's "cover" of the Rockwell Retro Encabulator is absolutely top notch.
https://youtu.be/FFK7RHYdWCc?si=w8R0eO6W3uGgXt3R
The showrunner/creator of Patriot has a new show launching in a couple of weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTF_St._Louis
He has something to do with this show as well which was obtuse enough to keep me at a distance. It's an unhinged, detective story with puppets in a noir-laden city grit setting.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13148384/?ref_=ext_shr
Steven Conrad also did Perpetual Grace Ltd (he also wrote the screenplay for Pursuit of Happyness, which is the scariest movie I've ever seen).
I need to get around to Perpetual Grace; I've watched the first 15 minutes of it like four times and always ended up bouncing off of it for one reason or another; but I know if I got into it, I'd probably really dig it.
It's terrific. Just rewatched it for a third time.
Same!
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.
I tried Perpetual Grace and didn't get it. If it's a 4th-episode-it-gets-good show I'll dive back in.
If the first episode doesn’t draw you in, it’s probably not your kind of show. I’m not saying episode 1 is all it has to offer, but if you don’t enjoy episode 1 it’s doubtful you will enjoy the rest.
Also, if you loved Patriot, the creator has two podcasts stemming from it:
https://www.lgclaret.com/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-techniques-in-mode...
(And he's also done two bands: The Jones Sisters and Hoist the King.)
I have seen two of your five shows and like them a lot, and heard of another and it’s already on my to-watch list. This is enough overlap to get the other ones added to the list (plus that pilot).
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).
> Avoid seeing episode counts if at all possible
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?)
Rot-13 explanation:
Gur frevrf unf cbvagf vg zvtug raq, ohg qbrfa'g, naq gura qbrf noehcgyl raq abg irel sne vagb vgf ynfg frnfba. Gurer'f n yvggyr rkgen wbl gb or unq vs lbh qba'g xabj dhvgr jura vg jvyy or bire (frrvat gur rcvfbqr pbhag ba gung ynfg frnfba, va cnegvphyne, fcbvyf gung). Vg'f abg yvxr gung ehvaf gur fubj be nalguvat, ohg vg'f n yvggyr orggre vs lbh pna znantr gb erznva oyvaq gb vg.
My understanding was that if you know you're on the last episode then you'll expect things to be resolved or something like that. Similarly, you probably don't expect any twists on the second episode.
I've not heard of the series so I can't comment on it specifically but that was my take on their warning.
Adding yours to mine as well
I'll second Patriot and add Perpetual Grace Ltd. from the same creator.
I'd also add the two other legs of the Lee Pace Great Television stool: Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies.
Patriot is brilliant. Very surreal with pitch-black humor and rare horror. And piping! Lovely piping.
Scavengers reign is from the same people as common side effects. Both shows are amazing.
Scavengers Reign was easily my favorite sci-fi, in any media format, of the last decade+. So incredibly inventive with the alien biosphere.
Gotta add "Primal" to your list of must-watches ..
> Scavengers reign is from the same people as common side effects.
In case it matters to someone, the order is reverse. As in, Scavengers Reign came before. Also, be aware it wasn’t renewed for a second season. But it absolutely deserved it, just not enough people knew about it.
Joe Bennet, right?
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4497617/?ref_=ext_shr
I will binge anything he makes with the double bullseye of these shows
Counterpart is one of the best shows I've seen. JK Simmons is brilliant playing two roles. I can't imagine anyone doing a better job.
Rubicon I always add Rubicon to these types of lists. Amazing spy series.
Rubicon is excellent. I was disappointed at the time it only got one season, but in retrospect it worked out okay because it's one season done very very well.
Station Eleven. Wouldn't have made it past a few episodes if I didn't know how good Mackenzie Davis was from watching HCF 1000 times. I stuck through a few things I didn't care for at first, now it will probably remain my favorite show of all time.
Station Eleven is so beautiful and human. Great pick. Highly recommend The Leftovers if you liked that one. Its exploration of life and grief and humanity following a secular rapture is stunning, and the performances are outstanding.
I have (re)watched everything Patrick Somerville has worked on because of Station Eleven :) I rewatched The Leftovers last month. Maniac last week (this time I noticed a funny reference by Sally Field's character pitching something on the phone about a guy with special hugging powers).
None of that was my type of thing before, now it's all I want. I think the genre might be called absurdist fiction, but I'm not sure that covers the full vibe.
Dan Romer is an excellent composer too, I listen to his stuff a lot. I have the Station Eleven soundtrack in my car, now my kid randomly sings Wandering Under The Moon, and it's one of my favorite things in the world.
I like this list, thank you!
Task (2025)?
great recommndations, Patriot is amazing dark comedy with great atmosphere, SR is great semi-documentary about alien planet ecosystem, very peaceful, didn't like CSE and Counterpart though
I would suggest also Devs just for the visuals and Tales from the Loop for the most peaceful TV show I've ever seen
- secret city
- Black Earth Rising
- Pine Gap
As someone who lived through that era, I couldn't watch it. A deep sense of uncanny valley. The 97% that they got completely right was ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Often senslessly so. Stuff that a technical consultant would have caught in an instant.
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....
It is fiction. Not meant to be a documentary. You have liberties as an artist to tell a compelling story - and boy did they do it.
> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong.
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!
Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents.
So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip.
Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an 8KB EPROM chip if you do a web search) and plugs it into a breadboard and proceeds to dump out each byte of the chip with Joe (Lee Pace) writing down the address and data at that particular address on a pad of paper.
After writing the address and address contents for the first time, Joe asks Gordon how many times they have to do this procedure. Gordon replies 65536, which would imply a 64KB ROM chip - but the web search said the IBM PC used an 8KB EPROM for the BIOS.
After more dreary, repetitive work, they accomplish the dumping and transcribing of the IBM PC BIOS in one weekend.
But one could have used a short BASIC program to dump the IBM PC BIOS ROM - the IBM PC wasn't a locked down game console...
Maybe as a HW guy, writing a BASIC program to dump the BIOS would not come to mind.
For a legal clean-room implementation of the IBM PC BIOS, the actual contents of the IBM PC BIOS aren't needed.
You need the specs for each BIOS function (input/output parameters and description of what the BIOS function does).
The IBM PC Technical Reference Manual (which cost $99 back then) contains the BIOS assembly language listing.
One would need to type up the lines that list the input/output requirements for each BIOS function and their purpose and they'd be half-way to a clean-room PC BIOS.
But that'd be way less dramatic (and easier) than the way shown in the episode.
see https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/112846/halt-...
I lived through parts of the tech eras depicted and I thought it captured the culture of people really well. It would have been boring to get bogged down in the details of historical differences, I'm not expecting this to be a documentary. Many of the people I worked with referred to the mushroom farms referenced in Soul of a New Machine from first hand experience The show had to change things as the years passed on the show in order to have the same main cast of characters involved as technology changed. I read Soul of a New Machine recently and one really has to have the right mind set to appreciate it, there are a lot of very specific details to that time in Massachusetts, working for what feels like a small division of ponderous Data General, competing technically and politically with separate groups within Data General, where every main character is a man, almost incidentally competing with the other computer companies, it does convey the feeling of a startup within a bigger company, so I don't hold the book in nearly the same high regard as others.
It’s very hard to capture everything in such an era. Maybe they made other choices that aligned with the fiction they were writing. It’s not a documentary. And TV shows can’t capture as much as books. The show successfully gives enough to people to haven’t lived in that era. It’s an amazing show.
I view any historically based show as an alternate history. Nothing good comes from expecting too much consistency with our reality.
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.
Exactly. Chernobyl is an amazing show too, even if Ulana Khomyuk is a composite character instead of a real historical person.
Carl Ledbetter (one of three technical advisors) interview, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057719
I hear you. After the first season, the tech and industry was just a backdrop, and I couldn't get into because the rest of it was pretty weak.
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.
I didn't like SV (the show) because it made me feel like I was going to work on Sunday night.
I guess that's to its credit: it nailed the culture.
I've only visited Palo Alto, but I recognised way too many aspects of that series from various VC startups. Up to and including the startup I was apart of that had offices in a bedroom in a house in Atherton for a while, and the craziness around Techcrunch (which was incidentally started out of the bedroom next to "ours" in that house in Atherton).
There is a scene in the first season where they're all on a bus and Gilfoyle sees a middle aged woman on a bike waiting for a light. The soliloquy was so random and not even funny, but fit so well. That woman was basically every middle aged woman neighbor of mine.
I remember the writers of SV actually somehow had to tone down the ridiculousness of the SV setting. See this quote from The New Yorker [0]:
>“His [Teller, working for Google] message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’
>Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
I not only 100% believe this, but I'm not sure I'd be able to muster a snicker at it due to all the similarly ridiculous things I've experienced.
It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!
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
I just finished my third run through the series. There have been a lot of movies and shows about how tech "grew up" in the 80s and 90s, but this one feels closest to home for me. It was an incredible time to live through. Everybody was trying all kinds of stuff, fundamental stuff not stuff around the edges, and nobody knew what would hit and what wouldn't. Some kid in East Minnesota had the same shot as some guy in Stanford. There was very much a Wild West feel to it.
With apologies for going all old-guy, today it seems that whatever you do, you end up in some walled garden along a pre-programmed path. Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple? I don't know. It does not look like a worthwhile thing to spend my time on.
Everything you do today, it's like you automatically end up on some set of train tracks somebody else has made. Maybe they let your train run, maybe not. Maybe they like what you're doing and let your train run like the wind so that they can copy it all.
HCF reminded me that there was a time before all of this. Good memories.
Agentic coding may be an even bigger change, and it might kick off a new time like that. Too soon to tell. I sure hope so. I can't help but notice there are a lotta folks looking to get their hooks into the system.
> Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple?
Yes! I've spent much more time screwing around with linkers and search paths than I ever have App Store Connect. It's really not very difficult, it's always surprising to hear engineers expect it'd be something they'd sink time into.
Honestly, I think it's pretty remarkable you can distribute software to billions of devices with about as much clicking and form-filling as buying a plane ticket. Was there a time it was even easier?
I really don't know why this idea still persists that going through App Store review is this awful thing that takes forever and eats up all of your time. It really doesn't nowadays. I've shipped several apps in the last few years and the longest one of my apps has been in review has been maybe 3 days, and the average is between 1-2 days. That's usually for new apps. For updates, it's usually half a day to 1.5 days to get it reviewed.
It takes barely any time to manage the review process. I have had apps and updates rejected but it was easy enough to make some changes and re-submit.
I have the actual 'Cardiff Giant' laptop from the show. Got it in LA at a prop auction. Should I do a YouTube?
That's absolutely bitchun. You should definitely do so. What's actually in there? Ideally you'd have it done up as a set piece and mock up a connection to Mutiny on there ;)
That ranks up there with the Oric Atmos from The IT Crowd as one of the most intriguing nerd props around ..
This is cool.
when... how... who... how do i follow you so i don't miss it?!
YES! NOW!
Uh, no. You should do another auction. :)
“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” -- Joe MacMillan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeY_5n75zPM
Yess! Fav quote from the series.
It's quite good, but it gets very Six Feet Under by the end, and you have to suspend a lot of disbelief about technology; it's a little like Hackers in the sense that it's trying to communicate a feeling about operating in specific eras of computing, but not so much trying to realistically depict what it was like.
Christopher Cantwell, the showrunner, is also doing the new series of The Terror (aka North Pole Bear Show) that's premiering this year.
I think the problem is that you can't really communicate that feeling without taking a lot of liberties, because it will seem boring and tedious to those not as invested, because it's hard to convey the excitement of a little box that can hold a small number of page-equivalents of text to someone who didn't know what it was like before.
I was a child during the early parts of that era, and so for that part I got most from reading books and seeing the public announcements, but I started my first company during the era depicted towards the end - an ISP - and I feel they got that balance roughly right.
But, sure, there were annoying deviation that is obvious to those of us who know how things happened. I don't think that was avoidable.
A new The Terror? The one that came out some years ago was incredible, and very under-discussed I think.
The first one, the one based on the book, was great and did fly a good deal under the radar. But definitely one of those ones with a core fanbase that evangelized for it and good critical notices. Elsewhere in this discussion Jared Harris's role in Foundation has been mentioned; he's a major, consistent, and excellent fixture in The Terror.
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.
By the end, the tech is just a plot device. The thing that gets us to the thing.
Hard disagree. The number of micro details it got right was insane. You’d have to be pedantic to think otherwise.
Right down to obscure LucasArts first online game.
It’s funny, I’d say the details are right, but the overall picture is still wrong.
It tries to cram too many things into this one show. Like a medley of computing history.
Yeah, the the characters kind of feel like Doonesbury characters, where they just slot in wherever they're needed at a particular moment in history. Each season's story by itself feels authentic, but when you watch their character arcs from start to finish, each person involved would have to be a generational talent.
And it's not like that kind of thing never happens, like look at General Magic and its through-lines through the tech industry up until 2015 or so, but it just happens too conveniently in the show. Particularly Bosworth's role seems far-fetched to me. He's already at the end of his career in season 1, and somehow he remains relevant through the internet age?
The "Phoenix" monologue in the last episode evokes nostalgia for everything Donna and Cameron have been through, but it also breaks suspension of disbelief by pointing out just how much of history these two people have been involved with firsthand.
Take a look at the careers of Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, Larry Wall, James Gosling, Kirk McCusick, Allen Holub, Al Aho, Marvin Minsky, Daniel Friedman, Gerald Sussman, Lance Leventhal, John Carmack, John Romero, Paul Graham, Guy Steele, Christopher Date, Bill Joy, Eric Raymond, Douglas Comer, Andrew Tanenbaum, David Patterson, Jeffrey Ullman, Fred Brooks, or Jim Keller.
> This piece contains spoilers for Halt and Catch Fire.
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.
Then you are the only one who haven't watched it. Go watch it now! It's fantastic (at least the first Compaq seasons)
I haven't watched it nor have I heard of it prior to this post, but based on the comments here, it seems like required watching for a techie! Adding it to the never ending list of things to watch :)
(I also haven't seen Silicon Valley which, as I understand it, is simultaneously required watching and required avoidance for HN people...)
I binge watched all four seasons in 2021; personally I felt Season 1 was the best with Season 2 doing a good job of building on it. But everything changed in Season 3, in terms of the characters, the feeling of the show, etc... And it wasn't that they had "grown" via their story arcs. They just felt - different.
It looks like some of the key writers changed halfway. This likely contributed to the change in characters, feeling, and everything that made the first two seasons so good. Jamie Pachino the executive story editor, was only there for the start. Also writers Jason Cahill, Dahvi Waller, and Jonathan Lisco only contributed to the first two seasons.
I can only imagine how the last two seasons would have felt if more of the early writers were still involved.
I don't disagree but I also don't think it's a bad thing. This is a show that stuck the landing. You never know, it could have felt stale with a singular writing team
Syllabus:
https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/
This is cool, are there similar things for other tv shows?
Carl Ledbetter interview (2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-k8p0dbB4
I genuinely enjoyed it and do recommend. As another commenter mentioned, Lee Pace's performance is stand out.
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 really liked it. Though I was sort of expecting an alternative Mac history at the time. Good Comdex show vibe for the time though.
That's honestly an ridiculous criticism. The idea that a simple thing like intonation was not well considered in a show with that level of detail...
You need to do yourself a favor and drop whatever you think you know and re-binge.
This is one of the vanishingly small instances of actually representing the tech industry well in media, even if there's a lot of exaggeration and they elide the boring stuff. There are so many scenes in that gave me deja vu. Everyone gets treated even handedly, no 2 dimensional heroes and villains, just a load of people trying to build something while their egos get in the way. I'd give it the highest recommendation possible, representation is important!
It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.
Totally worth a watch.
It captured a bit the feeling of being at the start of the computer boom in 60s-70s. The partnernship between the 2 male protagonists was central till the end of show (evolving through different phases). The show was great, it went in very unexpected directions later on.
I started watching this and was genuinely interested, but I kinda got tired of all the drama around the stuff I actually found interesting. I know that for a general audience, you need to pad technical stuff with scenes of the tech screwing the business guy, but I just wanted the computers!
I started my tech career in Dallas in the mid-80s. I had friends and relatives who worked for TI while I was at a startup. The story seems to be a mish-mash of early PC and networking companies, but the vibe is spot on.
Donna's experiences at TI mirror those friends related to me. The club the gang visited felt just like the Starck Club. Engineers at Cardiff "felt" just like the engineers I worked with.
Add to that the excellent performances by the whole cast... I love this show, especially the first season that started with a PC and ended with the Mac.
Fantastic show! Just wrote an analysis of the conflicts between the characters and how every disagreement turns into a zero sum game:
https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/halt-and-catch-fire-the-tra...
Great read! Agree with the themes & tensions you identify.
Thank you! It's difficult to convey an environment where everyone wants to be right instead of finding the right answer, while the company accelerates towards a wall
Looks like @light_triad's blog.. new account?
Indeed, not trying to circumvent your rules. Just want to contribute to the conversation. I just love this website.
love how deep you go
Thanks it's an attempt to describe interactions observed in startups, which the show portrays so well
it's slop
Sorry you didn't like it. I can assure you it describes real battle scars from startups. Good luck with inboard!
It's got nothing to do with liking it or not. This is ChatGPT:
> 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.
Whether something sounds like a human, a book, or a language model doesn’t really affect whether the behavior it describes exists.
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?
> Whether something sounds like a human, a book, or a language model doesn’t really affect whether the behavior it describes exists.
It matters.
> the hardest thing to scale is not software. It is trust.
For example: Is this your sincerely held belief, the conclusion of all of the preceding words, and the point you were trying to express?
Because it reads, superficially, like shallow self-help pablum.
If you want your readers to differentiate these words from those words, you at least owe them the assurance that you've thought this through, and are willing to defend this idea.
If this is your own idea, it might be worth some consideration beyond its superficial presentation. If this is the output of an LLM trained on shallow observations and presentation style, it is not worth consideration.
Why, and for whom, do you publish?
Is it AI generated though?
If the claim is simple, why didn't you just state that, what is the AI Generated nonsense prose adding to anything? Prompting an LLM with 'Write me an essay linking Halt and Catch Fire to the idea that in creative orgs disagreements often escalate into identity conflicts because people map ideas to self-worth.' then pasting that into a substack is low-effort slop, embarrassing to post; embarassing to read.
The post is about people turning disagreement into a status fight. Your reply is mostly a status fight about the existence of the post. Kind of strengthens the thesis.
You can debate the argument: what’s embarrassing is feeling the need to announce to strangers that they’re wrong on the internet.
Someone named Ashley Blewer did such a deep dive on this show that she produced a full online course and syllabus centered around it.
https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/
It allows people to form a "watch club" around the show, similar to a book club, and have plenty of extra reading materials to understand the different tech eras covered in the show.
I think this show -- combined with the documentary "General Magic" and the book "Fire in the Valley" -- is a great way to be immersed in the techno-optimism of the early tech industry around the time of the desktop PC revolution and early internet.
For me, that sort of techno-optimism has stuck with me even if modern tech has more dystopian elements with which one has to grapple. It is still an amazing industry, all things considered.
p.s. total aside that Apple TV sells a digital "box set" of this show for a pretty low price these days. I am usually not a fan of "buying" a show from a streaming service but might be worth it in this case since it's around $16 USD for every episode across its 4 seasons, Apple has a good track record honoring digital purchases, and watching the show is a commitment.
This is one of those shows I've had in the rolling background rewatch queue for years, I love it and I try to recommend it to as many people as possible. Flawed, yes, but still special.
I like how in the fourth season, the computer props are literally just cardboard boxes.
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'
This series is great at multiple levels:
- 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!
A great watch if you are nostalgic for the early BBS days or early WWW days. The post 2000 generation may not get it.
I wrote a bit about how the kind of tech culture in HACF feels more relevant in light of the LLMs even 2 years back before I heard of mourning a craft. Here's an excerpt:
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...
I enjoyed the actual entrepreneurial endeavoring in the show, but I would have preferred if it was a bit drier. Would be interesting to see a series based on Skunk Works.
Good show but wouldn't want my hypothetical kid to look up to the main woman character thinking it's cool to be perpetually high-strung, antisocial, with a highly unregulated nervous system/unhealthy habits just because she is 'cool' and 'brilliant'
I've watched through the show and I enjoyed season 1 a lot, but I found it eventually ran into the issue lots of shows do where it's just meandering and you realize it won't go anywhere because if they write towards a conclusion they can't make more seasons.
I was pretty bored by the time it got into browser wars stuff. And the ending of the show was kinda baffling and cringe-inducing.
One of the best shows I have ever watched. It evokes the early history (though fictional) of the personal computing revolution.
The character of Cameron Howe resonated with me greatly.
What a fantastic show.
Same here. Silicon Valley did a great disservice by not having a character like her. We are often invisible.
Does the show change after season 1? I've heard it gets much better, but I had a hard time paying that upfront cost and stopped halfway through.
Yes, and yes.
I've heard many great things but have not been able to make it past the classroom scene in the first episode. I love both of the actors in other media, but I find the dialogue in these opening scenes makes me feel..embarrassed? I have similar feelings about other shows and movies at times where I just have to turn them off because of the way the characters are behaving. I think it just ties directly into some anxiety I have.
Consider just fast-forwarding past a scene you can't handle. Like many shows, it takes a few episodes before the actors truly understand their characters.
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.
Idk man, the entire second season gives me that feeling of embarrassment, I couldn't finish the show. The first season was alright, but honestly the second season is some of the cheesiest/worst storytelling/acting I've ever seen.
Interesting how this thread has people saying they love the acting and people saying they hate it. I can't say as I found the acting itself to be amazing outside of a few scenes, but I never found it cringe enough to not want to see more. It'd be cool to understand more about what triggers this differently for different folks.
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.
It might be more of an issue with the story telling than the actors performance themselves. For instance the changes in Joe and Gordon's characters was confusing. Gordon goes from being shy nerd to reckless coke addict, like huh.. Joe kinda becomes a new age softy. The hacker house vibes were off, a bunch of 20-30 year old playing tag and having nerf gun wars.. okay, I guess. Its just very hard to suspend belief and get into the story. As someone else mentioned, it gives off Hackers vibes. It feels like the writers weren't really familiar early tech and were just going off what they thought it would be like.
We're in the minority, but I'm with you. It felt like in the first season, the tech and era took center stage to the point it was accurate enough to be an enjoyable element of the show. After that, they just wanted to rush and touch on different eras and the tech and eras were no longer the center stage. However, the stories were too cringey and couldn't carry it. And I'm just not a fan of Lee Pace. His deliver is one-dimensional.
You and others are both right: the first season is better in the "tech authenticity" dimension but worse as a script (literary dimension); with seasons 2+3 it's the other way round.
Had the exact same reaction to that exact scene. Just couldn't get past it. It wasn't as bad as when I tried to watch Big Bang Theory (which multiple people assured me that I'd love), but it was in that ballpark.
Cringe but persist. TV only has so much time to set stuff up. Think of those parts as a "tribute" to cheesy 80s movies.
This show started to get so strong into season 1 and season 2, then completely lost it for me and went full soap opera. Seems super-common for new series; they (rightfully) don't put a lot of effort into future episodes of a show that's unlikely to last beyond the first, and run out of the motivating material. In the 80's/90's sitcom this was the "have a baby" storyline; on the grittier cable series it's focus on the broken characters and lots of sex.
I tried to get my (techie) gf at the time to watch it a few years back but she couldn't get past the Cameron x Joe relationship from the beginning episode, it icked her out. I've been keen for a rewatch and my wife might actually like it though so thanks for the reminder, I'll add it to the queue.
For those who want to take a trip down memory lane about Cameron, here you go: http://www.thehoweofitall.com/
The opening of this show feels very relevant today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucSUs3adMQ8
One of the better CG title sequences. They don't belabour it, get the visual concept across and wham! Show starts.
Yeah. I'll watch it every time.
I mistakenly posted that it's free on Samsung TV Plus. It isn't but you can watch it on Prime if you add AMC+. Sorry for the gaffe.
Yes, hands down the best show! They need to do more seasons, especially with modern day problems.
Other thoughtful and well made shows: Dark Matter, For All Mankind, Foundation (also Lee Pace and also stellar).
I think you might enjoy Travelers
> They need to do more seasons, especially with modern day problems.
Silicon Valley, the insanity that it’s both a comedy and true to life
Absolutely. If you weren't there for it, watch this. If you really want to understand AI, here it is. Hilarious. "Nobody ever got fired for AI".
That is one of those shows where disaster strikes just when it's getting interesting.
"Halt and catch fire" is an instruction in the ic10 programming language used by the player to build automations in the game "stationeers".
https://stationeers-wiki.com/IC10/instructions#hcf
It has much earlier origins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...
Oh I know. Just thought people might enjoy this in particular.
Binge watched it. I think the first 2 seasons were great.
Lee Pace did an awesome performance recently in Asimov's Foundation. Mackenzie Davis, another lead in the show, demonstrated good potential but she seems not to get much afterward (Terminator, Station 11 etc)
Station Eleven is, all around, the best thing ever created. Every aspect of it is perfect.
I watched this show when it first came out in the 2010's. Very enjoyable, having lived through the BBS and early Internet age, worked for early ISPs that reminded me a bit of "Mutiny."
Great show and fantastic music. This show and Driver were two soundtracks that captured that early/mid 2010s vibe for me personally.
Absolutely. One of those shows where I went to check what the songs were playing in specific scene often, and ended up with lots of new tracks added to play lists. Whoever did their music selection was top notch.
What are people's thoughts on Season 2+? I only watched season 1 and heard the show changed from 1->2 and never got around to watching it.
Oh I've definitely heard of it. It's the Orange is the New Black for the HN adjacent crowd.
Never saw Orange is the New Black. Is it HCF for the prison adjacent crowd?
Uuuuh kinda? It's late '10's premium TV that's really more of a telenovela aimed for specific audience with a diminished level of self-awareness (not the one that's serving a sentence). HCF is kinda like that - very good if you're into the whole fantasy of tech entrepreneurship of the 80's/90's, but kinda corny when you think about it.
My all-time favorite. Compaq had a compelling story, and I liked where the writers went after the first season.
It’s great but it ain’t no Mr. Robot.
One is a deeply human drama, the other is a spy thriller. Not sure why you'd even make the comparison.
I'm assuming Mr Robot is the spy thriller? It feels like more of a deeply human drama to me.
You have a very different perception of 'human' than I do!
The main character suffers from DID. From trauma that happened when he was little. Maybe you didn't watch the whole thing, that seems pretty "human drama"-ey to me.
That's not human drama. That's a sensationalized depiction of a really rare disorder that 99% of the audience has no experience with and cannot relate directly to.
They ran contemporaneously and tended to come up on the same lunch table conversations.
It didn't peak before the end of season one?
I couldn’t get past all the drug scenes in Mr Robot.
Look I love the show but it does feel like a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. In order to get more moments in the story itself took a backseat. Lots of cool moments if you love tech history but as a stand alone drama it was kind of a let down.
I learned of that from On the Metal podcast. Was a big favourite. Definitely a great watch.
Somewhat mysteriously, the Linux ISOs for this show have seen a sudden spike in activity.
Huge fan of the show, but I have no clue what you're referring to. Torrents of the DVDs or something like that?
Amazing, highly recommended. I have watched all seasons ~4 times. It has just some magical feeling, because tech is in the end about people and their interactions/dynamics.
I really enjoyed that show. The last line of dialogue in the last episode is the same as the first line in the first episode IIRC.
One of my all time favorite series - add my upvote to the pile!
Such a fantastic show, I re-watch this one constantly. Even did a re-watch from when they move to the Bay Area when I first moved out here!
Loved it! It was an effective blend of different tech origin stories. Lee Pace was also excellent in "Foundation".
season 2 only $2499.99 on amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G6AS40K
Literally this is the best show I’ve ever seen. If I’m ever burnt out at work I rewatch it
Yeah this is a gem of a show worth a rewatch every few years. Especially once it finds its legs after S1. Criminally underrated.
I thought Halt and Catch Fire was fairly well known, especially in the tech world.
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.
It's fairly well known to some of us. It's one of the few shows I own DVDs of.
Where can one even find the seasons? I only found season 1 on Blu-ray.
Apple TV, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057601
The pilot episode was so lame I almost skipped this, but the rest is just stellar.
Very underrated show and I hope your post gets more people to view it.
I have been trying to find that opcode ever since I discovered the show. :)
My dad kept trying to get me to watch this show and I never got around to it. Maybe I need to.
You wont regret it
"HCF":
The series is a memorable instance of what any self-respecting geek ought to have watched. It's better than "Silicon Valley", although the latter has pulled one scientific stunt regarding scientific advisory that is unique in film.What other films/series are "must watch" material for geeks?
- War Games
- Silicon Valley
- The Social Network
- The Intern
- Mr. Robot
- Black Mirror
- Hackers
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- ...?
The net?
I've not seen that since the 90s so it might not be a classic but if you've ever seen an unexpected pi symbol (look on the bottom right of old.reddit.com) in software then they're probably referencing that movie.
Sneakers
- Sneakers
- Pirates of Silicon Valley
- Snowden
- The IT Crowd
- Real Genius
- The Great Hack
- Virtuosity
- The Conversation
- Who Am I
- Anon
- Ghost in the Shell (Anime)
- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
- The Accountant & The Accountant 2
- Office Space
- The Imitation Game
- I Am Mother
- Eye in the Sky
- The Circle
- 1984
- Elysium
- Minority Report
I almost stopped at the first episode. I remember the IBM PC manuals, and the build in ROM Basic, they could have read the ROMs and dumped them to the printer in minutes, there wasn't any mystery to it.
I'm glad I stuck with it though, the rest of the series was much, much better.
I have the Cardiff Giant. Like the actual computer from the show.
I despised this show. The acting, writing and (probably) direction was poor at best and, as someone else here mentioned, it's like what some writer thought things were and not how they actually were.
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.
> 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.
1. "Kissing session," "kissed," etc. Funny stuff. I hope you don't really think they were just looking for wine when they were off camera.
2. He's bi. We meet an ex boyfriend in a later episode, although the fact of his ahem "kissing session" would seem to be evidence enough.
3. The reason is obvious enough if you watch through the end of the dinner.
The lead guy is bisexual, and it is a very important part of his character throughout the story.
The guy he kissed was gay, and immediately after Joe used it to sabotage the deal.
You're making an odd request, but I'll bite because it seems sincere. I'm younger! I didn't live through the period, and I'm not a statistician, but I have to ask if this kind of representation is really a gimmick?
For some, it's very meaningful. That character is bisexual, not gay, and it's pretty authentic representation. The reason why it's not so focused on is because people like this, especially at that time, often don't care much for labels. That scene you mention is with a closeted man. This is not unheard of. You may not have had this experience personally, but does that mean it didn't happen? The campy part? Okay. The show wasn't perfect. It did get canceled, after all. But it worries me that you singled this particular thing out because this is obviously a political topic, and you missed the fact that the scene did demonstrate some things about the character, like his recklessness, impulsiveness and opportunism.
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.
"it's like what some writer thought things were and not how they actually were"
Doesn't that refer to a lot of pop culture? I can remember the 1980s and my memories of that period rarely bear much resemblance to the TV/films I see nowadays set in that period. I don't think it's just my personal experience. It goes deeper than that because many of the writers can't remember it well, or at all. That said I think the author of "Ready Player One" could remember the 1980s, just not my 1980s.
One of my all time fav shows.
This is one of my favorite shows. I love it.
This is on my bucket list to finish. Watched one or two episodes and it reminded me of a dead serious Silicon Valley.
Loved this series, totally up HN’s alley.
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halt and catch fire is so good. one of the best things i've watched as a tv series.
Netflix... thanks, I'll pass.
It's an AMC show. It's not currently even on Netflix as far as I can tell, at least in the US. mullvad cough cough yarrr.
watched it many times - one of the best series on this subject.
I found the last season a little rushed...
I did look up the name when I watched the show. The characters and plot are the fictionalized early days of computing made entertaining. Definitely worth a watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...
It's a very good show and I did enjoy it (at least Seasons 1,2; never saw 3). But "best TV drama" is a stretch. BSG is a better drama IMO (sci-fi, yes, but essentially a drama about humanity).
LOVE H&CF, so good
I just tried to watch this show because someone told me its the next best tech show after Silicon Valley, and the second season is by far some of the worst storytelling and acting I've ever seen on a screen, I don't think I'll be finishing the show. I really don't understand why people are so into it.
Yeah, I don't get it either. I made it through the first season which was okay, but I couldn't get myself to finish the second one, it was just bad. It is supposed to improve towards the end, but that is just too much to endure.
The first season is pretty taut, then the follow-up seasons suffer from every character being at the center of every big thing in tech for narrative purposes, which is to its detriment imo.
This is my opinion too. I loved the first season, but after that it felt silly making the same people invent basically everything in the computer world.
However it seems most people liked it the other way around.
It's "Ready Player One" for people who think SV is the most important thing in the world. It's very shallow and mostly just shoutouts to early computing history trivia.
It was engrossing as all hell, but it's one of the only shows I ever finished while really not liking it.
It feels so fake, and tries to keep your attention with gimmicks and artificial drama. When things are working out, characters sabotage things purposely to add drama back, as if it can't possibly be dramatic to succeed. The show basically ends up being a group of 4 or 5 assholes being assholes to each other for no reason.
No actually, 4 individuals are not solely responsible for 20 years of early computing history and making that so is absurd and kills my suspension of disbelief.
But it's short and self contained and there's enough character stuff to see that it's still worth experiencing.
I don't know how people say it's like "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracey Kidder. I read that book and there's just nothing comparable in the show. Soul of a new machine was a wonderful journey that was full of real people and real experiences, and maybe the first season of HaCF was like the McDonalds version of that.
Probably the best example of what life is like as a technical person mostly working in startups and bleeding edge technology.
Sensational show
I remember a scene in this show which felt like many real meetings I've had in my life. The big hot shot CEO guy pulls everyone into a meeting to share his big idea. The idea? Let's sell a computer that's "twice the speed, half the price!"
...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.
one of my favorite shows of all time!
Hm it's on amazon but you gotta pay for the secondary sub. Did look interesting but oh well.
Everything is like that on Prime. Makes me wonder what the point of a subscription is if you've got to pay for practically everything?
It's gotten so ridiculous, my wife was in tears trying to get at a show a few days ago and we have like all the subscriptions. Now that it's cross-services subs to services within subs, some hosted by the top level, some a separate app/site/login even though you signed up somewhere else, it's a friggin' nightmare!
It's a total mess. I pay a sub to gain access and not have adverts. Awful.
Season 1 was great. 2 is meh. 3 is probably the last one I'll watch, as I'm losing interest. The Joe MacMillan dude basically carries the show.
The show captured the sublime transcendence of ambitious failure like no other form of art ever has.
It is an all timer.
The best. Not unheard of around here. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007414)
This article? Not so much. Is OP one of the one's discovering it?
I've never heard of it, so maybe they're talking about me. (Joke.)
How does it compare to The Americans?
The Americans is an easier watch in general because of its themes, but H+CF is worth viewing for anyone in tech.
There's only four seasons and they're all solid.
They have essentially nothing in common, other than the fact that both rapidly degrade over the seasons and both are nostalgic looks back at recent eras of America.
So good
The first seasons were excellent, the latter seasons not so much.
Interesting. Different strokes I suppose. I loved this show but in the beginning they put too much emphasis on Lee Pace's character for my taste. Just kind of "ooooh, what will the brooding. mysterious maverick in a suit with a dark past do next? So unpredictable" and it didn't really resonate with me like the later seasons did.
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?"
The latter seasons have memorable thought-provoking moments but they are sparse.
They could have compressed those into fewer episodes and it would have been more watchable.
You must be young.
Seasons 3 and 4 did a really good job of capturing what it was like being in the industry and in SFBA in the mid/late 1990s, better than anything I've seen. I worked at McAfee (then NETA) at the time and the MCAF-ish stuff was uncanny; the last gasp of cubicle culture in the software product industry.
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.
Except that Mr Robot was always planned that way, you can go back and see references to what's revealed in the final episodes as early as the pilot. Things are revealed at the end of S1 that make you have to re-evaluate what you've seen so far. The same is probably even more true for S4.
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.
I really love season 1, because of its specific technical detail.
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.
Objectively it was consistently good but not great.
https://www.ratingraph.com/tv-shows/halt-and-catch-fire-rati...
The first season was the best season, and it's probably a good stopping point.
Season 1 was wonderful. The showrunner had initially written the pilot to get a job on Mad Men. It was eviscerated by critics for being too male, too masculine and seasons 2 onward pivoted into a girlboss series with Lee Pace's character taking a backseat and Scooter's character becoming a stay at home house husband. But if you like Breaking Bad and Sopranos, S1 is very well written.
I always thought Joe MacMillan was Don Draper with a little Steve Jobs so that explains it.
Season 1 was just Mad Men but computers.
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.
I've heard of Season 1 described as "Don Draper teaming up with Walter White", which makes it sound far more juicy than it is. The entire show gets way into the melodrama of the characters' personal lives, but S1 is no better than the rest in terms of that; it's strongest when the personal melodrama is rooted in the tech, like Joe's self-sabotage of their COMDEX demo followed by the fateful realization in the hotel room of their doom. There's a really great article in Grantland about HCF, Silicon Valley, and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland which points out that these characters are not great men, because they are but footnotes of history:
> 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.
There just wasn't much for Gordon. He existed as a foil, or a mirror, for the other, richer characters.
I get why the writers ended up just sort of shrugging their shoulders and excluding him so often.
S2 had a far more memorable depiction of hacker startups as we know it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJN2JN3_N_4
Strongly agree that Season 1 was by far the best, and the rest suffered for the changes.
Really enjoyed this show. Not sure why it is so unknown. Highly recommend.