I learned of that from On the Metal podcast. Was a big favourite. Definitely a great watch.
Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
101–110 of 408 posts
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#102I 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 ;)
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#103I 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.
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.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#104I'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…
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 jus…
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.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#105I 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.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#106The first seasons were excellent, the latter seasons not so much.
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…
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.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#108And 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…
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.
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.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#109My all-time favorite. Compaq had a compelling story, and I liked where the writers went after the first season.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#110Season 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.
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.