Hm it's on amazon but you gotta pay for the secondary sub. Did look interesting but oh well.
Everything is like that on Prime. Makes me wonder what the point of a subscription is if you've got to pay for practically everything?
Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
231–240 of 408 posts
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#232I despised this show. The acting, writing and (probably) direction was poor at best and, as someone else here mentioned, it's like what some writer thought things were and not how they actually were. And please don't downvote my comment based on any political or social thoughts one might have. Based on the story line alone, I quit when, for no apparent reason, during a tense moment in the story, the lead sales guy ha…
"it's like what some writer thought things were and not how they actually were"
Doesn't that refer to a lot of pop culture? I can remember the 1980s and my memories of that period rarely bear much resemblance to the TV/films I see nowadays set in that period. I don't think it's just my personal experience. It goes deeper than that because many of the writers can't remember it well, or at all. That said I think the author of "Ready Player One" could remember the 1980s, just not my 1980s.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#233I mistakenly posted that it's free on Samsung TV Plus. It isn't but you can watch it on Prime if you add AMC+. Sorry for the gaffe.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#234As 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…
I hear you. After the first season, the tech and industry was just a backdrop, and I couldn't get into because the rest of it was pretty weak. I had the same feeling but the opposite outcome with Silicon Valley. Growing up in Palo Alto, it took me a while to figure out if I was enjoying this show because it was genuinely funny or if it was just because it hit the absurdity of the time and place so well.
I've only visited Palo Alto, but I recognised way too many aspects of that series from various VC startups. Up to and including the startup I was apart of that had offices in a bedroom in a house in Atherton for a while, and the craziness around Techcrunch (which was incidentally started out of the bedroom next to "ours" in that house in Atherton).
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, the the characters kind of feel like Doonesbury characters, where they just slot in wherever they're needed at a particular moment in history. Each season's story by itself feels authentic, but when you watch their character arcs from start to finish, each person involved would have to be a generational talent.
And it's not like that kind of thing never happens, like look at General Magic and its through-lines through the tech industry up until 2015 or so, but it just happens too conveniently in the show. Particularly Bosworth's role seems far-fetched to me. He's already at the end of his career in season 1, and somehow he remains relevant through the internet age?
The "Phoenix" monologue in the last episode evokes nostalgia for everything Donna and Cameron have been through, but it also breaks suspension of disbelief by pointing out just how much of history these two people have been involved with firsthand.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#236It'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…
I think the problem is that you can't really communicate that feeling without taking a lot of liberties, because it will seem boring and tedious to those not as invested, because it's hard to convey the excitement of a little box that can hold a small number of page-equivalents of text to someone who didn't know what it was like before.
I was a child during the early parts of that era, and so for that part I got most from reading books and seeing the public announcements, but I started my first company during the era depicted towards the end - an ISP - and I feel they got that balance roughly right.
But, sure, there were annoying deviation that is obvious to those of us who know how things happened. I don't think that was avoidable.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scavengers reign is from the same people as common side effects. Both shows are amazing.
Scavengers Reign was easily my favorite sci-fi, in any media format, of the last decade+. So incredibly inventive with the alien biosphere.
Gotta add "Primal" to your list of must-watches ..
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#238I have the actual 'Cardiff Giant' laptop from the show. Got it in LA at a prop auction. Should I do a YouTube?
That ranks up there with the Oric Atmos from The IT Crowd as one of the most intriguing nerd props around ..
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#239As 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…
I hear you. After the first season, the tech and industry was just a backdrop, and I couldn't get into because the rest of it was pretty weak. I had the same feeling but the opposite outcome with Silicon Valley. Growing up in Palo Alto, it took me a while to figure out if I was enjoying this show because it was genuinely funny or if it was just because it hit the absurdity of the time and place so well.
I remember the writers of SV actually somehow had to tone down the ridiculousness of the SV setting. See this quote from The New Yorker [0]:
>“His [Teller, working for Google] message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’
>Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making me really want to start a rewatch. It's shocking how few people have seen this show, let along watched it. Part of that probably has to do with how inaccessible it is on streaming. It's only readily available on AMC+. And no one has AMC+. This is one of those shows that would likely shoot to the top if Netflix got the rights to it and even did a mild push. It's genuinely peak prestige TV.
> It's shocking how few people have seen this show, let along watched it Huh?
I think they mean “seen” in the sense of “know it exists”, as in seeing it advertised on a billboard or the sea of thumbnails in a streaming service.