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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)

#151

Post by walterbell »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #65
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…

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…

> 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...

  [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.

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

#152

Post by mikepurvis »

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... 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.

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

#155

Post by rerdavies »

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....

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

#157

Post by CephalopodMD »

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.

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

#158

Post by IncreasePosts »

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...…

Hacks does it fairly well, or it may just be jean smart

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

#160

Post by unmole »

esafak wrote: post #64
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…

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 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.

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