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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)

#341

Post by billbrown »

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'll second Patriot and add Perpetual Grace Ltd. from the same creator.

I'd also add the two other legs of the Lee Pace Great Television stool: Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies.

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

#342

Post by b112 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #324
anon84873628 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the plot of Apple's "The Foundation" is an infuriating insult to the original series. However, the production is great and Lee Pace is awesome as usual.

I kind of love it when movies/TV don't follow the books too closely. It means more content in a world I enjoy without repeating too much.

I generally agree, and also that it's impossible to take a book to video without change. I tend to try to think of it like this, imagine Bob and Jim watched a battle scene, but one from the west, the other from the east side. Bob wrote the book, Jim the movie.

Naturally, although it was the same battle, they'll have seen different things up close, and have different views on the battle overall.

Having said that...

It's like someone wrote the Foundation movie three generations after the book was written, turned into a play, and then told over the campfire for decades.

It literally has no more connection with Asimov's works, than Star Wars is like Star Trek. All of the technology is different, the size of the Empire is wildly different, literally almost nothing maps.

Is it good? Yes, sorta. But it's not Foundation, by any stretch. It's not even remotely in the same "world".

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

#343

Post by billbrown »

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…

Also, if you loved Patriot, the creator has two podcasts stemming from it:

https://www.lgclaret.com/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-techniques-in-mode...

(And he's also done two bands: The Jones Sisters and Hoist the King.)

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

#345

Post by rurp »

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…

Totally agree, he was incredibly good in that show.

He's also really great in the show Foundation, with a pretty different role. I watched Foundation much more recently and it took me a while to realize it was the same actor from Halt.

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

#346

Post by _boffin_ »

SquareWheel wrote: post #167
_boffin_ wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Many people will likely be watching this show for the first time based on this thread. Please don't spoil major plot events for them.

This thread is already filled with spoilers, so it feels odd that you're singling mine out and especially given how long the show's been out.

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

#347

Post by mrguyorama »

dakolli wrote: post #98

I 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.

It's "Ready Player One" for people who think SV is the most important thing in the world. It's very shallow and mostly just shoutouts to early computing history trivia.

It was engrossing as all hell, but it's one of the only shows I ever finished while really not liking it.

It feels so fake, and tries to keep your attention with gimmicks and artificial drama. When things are working out, characters sabotage things purposely to add drama back, as if it can't possibly be dramatic to succeed. The show basically ends up being a group of 4 or 5 assholes being assholes to each other for no reason.

No actually, 4 individuals are not solely responsible for 20 years of early computing history and making that so is absurd and kills my suspension of disbelief.

But it's short and self contained and there's enough character stuff to see that it's still worth experiencing.

I don't know how people say it's like "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracey Kidder. I read that book and there's just nothing comparable in the show. Soul of a new machine was a wonderful journey that was full of real people and real experiences, and maybe the first season of HaCF was like the McDonalds version of that.

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

#349

Post by stevenwoo »

haspok wrote: post #197
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…

> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!

I lived through parts of the tech eras depicted and I thought it captured the culture of people really well. It would have been boring to get bogged down in the details of historical differences, I'm not expecting this to be a documentary. Many of the people I worked with referred to the mushroom farms referenced in Soul of a New Machine from first hand experience The show had to change things as the years passed on the show in order to have the same main cast of characters involved as technology changed. I read Soul of a New Machine recently and one really has to have the right mind set to appreciate it, there are a lot of very specific details to that time in Massachusetts, working for what feels like a small division of ponderous Data General, competing technically and politically with separate groups within Data General, where every main character is a man, almost incidentally competing with the other computer companies, it does convey the feeling of a startup within a bigger company, so I don't hold the book in nearly the same high regard as others.

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

#350

Post by tronster »

I binge watched all four seasons in 2021; personally I felt Season 1 was the best with Season 2 doing a good job of building on it. But everything changed in Season 3, in terms of the characters, the feeling of the show, etc... And it wasn't that they had "grown" via their story arcs. They just felt - different.

It looks like some of the key writers changed halfway. This likely contributed to the change in characters, feeling, and everything that made the first two seasons so good. Jamie Pachino the executive story editor, was only there for the start. Also writers Jason Cahill, Dahvi Waller, and Jonathan Lisco only contributed to the first two seasons.

I can only imagine how the last two seasons would have felt if more of the early writers were still involved.

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