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Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

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Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#211

Post by nonameiguess »

mikepurvis wrote: post #152
danielvaughn wrote: post #3

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 scree…

"... 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...…

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.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#213

Post by eurleif »

seanhunter wrote: post #212

"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...

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#214

Post by croon »

loevborg wrote: post #164
danielvaughn wrote: post #3

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 scree…

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.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#215

Post by seba_dos1 »

fdefitte wrote: post #138
Slow_Hand wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reach…

[dead]

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

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#216

Post by Nevermark »

shinycode wrote: post #168
rerdavies wrote: post #155

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 i…

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.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#218

Post by mchinen »

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...

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#219

Post by skerit »

tptacek wrote: post #119
caycecan wrote: post #84

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/tt2…

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…

Oh, so does "Counterpart" not have an ending?

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#220

Post by skerit »

bubblewand wrote: post #114
caycecan wrote: post #84

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/tt2…

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 vig…

> 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?)

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