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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)

#111

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.

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

#112

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 brilliant. Very surreal with pitch-black humor and rare horror. And piping! Lovely piping.

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

#113
post #19

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 Sh…

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.

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

#114

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 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).

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

#115

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…

The showrunner/creator of Patriot has a new show launching in a couple of weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTF_St._Louis

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

#116
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#117

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…

maybe some sales look like this but anyone who models themselves after this or madmen or whatever… good luck.

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

#118

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…

Adding yours to mine as well

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

#119

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 your list, you might dig Lodge 49, which is somewhere in the intersection of HACF, Evil, The Big Lebowski.

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

#120
post #115

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…

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

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