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.
Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
11–20 of 408 posts
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#12Fantastic 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...
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#13It’s great but it ain’t no Mr. Robot.
I couldn’t get past all the drug scenes in Mr Robot.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#14The first seasons were excellent, the latter seasons not so much.
Objectively it was consistently good but not great.
https://www.ratingraph.com/tv-shows/halt-and-catch-fire-rati...
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#15And 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 under…
You just reminded me that I got about halfway through Soul of a New Machine. Maybe I'll pick it back up this week.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#16My dad kept trying to get me to watch this show and I never got around to it. Maybe I need to.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#17Lee 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 scree…
More recently, I loved how he killed it in Foundation. Another great casting for a great actor.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#18And 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 under…
> 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.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#19It'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.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#20Season 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.