Start Watching Halt and Catch Fire??It??s Actually Good Now
Source: K.M. McFarland
A few years back, AMC began rather plainly attempting to recapture the buzz of its two flagship original series― Mad Men and Breaking Bad―before both shows went off the air. That meant the final half-season premiere of Bad was followed by Low Winter Sun, a Detroit-set adaptation of a British crime miniseries, and the first half of Mad Men’s final season aired alongside the 1980s-set Halt and Catch Fire. Low Winter Sun didn’t attract many viewers; Halt and Catch Fire did even worse.
But despite those low ratings, there was enough promise in what initially appeared to be a Mad Men clone set in Texas’ Silicon Prairie during the personal computing boom that AMC ordered a second season. It’s a rare thing for a network to double down on a moderately-praised show and give it time to grow, or to even shift dramatically. That’s exactly what happened to Halt and Catch Fire, which took the extra season and ramped up significantly, to the point where, in this brief interregnum between HBO cycles, it is one of the best dramas on television.
In the wake of Mad Men’s massive cultural proliferation, other networks attempted (and failed miserably) to capitalize on that cable network success. The two highest-profile failures were ABC’s Pan Am and NBC’s The Playboy Club, which tanked disastrously during the 2011 television season. Halt and Catch Fire, however, debuted to the assumption that it was merely borrowing the skeleton of Mad and transplanting it to a different decade and industry. The first episodes mostly confirmed those fears, despite garnering largely positive reviews. But the second season has pointedly abandoned Cardiff Electric, the central computer company that employed the main characters, and opted to focus on Cameron’s fledgling gaming company Mutiny and how the rest of the characters orbit around that startup.
A Hard Reset to the Premise
As if to jettison the staid first season from memory, the promo video AMC circulated online from the Season 2 premiere is a nearly four-minute long take through the Mutiny headquarters, every bit the depiction of a chaotic tech startup viewers have come to expect. It’s the polar opposite of the first season, focused on engineers in a bland office building creating a portable computer, and more an extension of the most exciting sequence from the pilot, a delirious montage of a weekend spent reverse-engineering an IBM PC from scratch.
Leaving behind the personal computing angle for one more concerned with online gaming and connectivity in general is important. Instead of trying to impress upon viewers how revolutionary breaking into the computer wars would have been for a software company in the ’80s―it’s essentially the origin story of Compaq―the altered emphasis creates tragic irony.
Building a revolutionary personal computer felt locked into the ’80s and comparatively quaint to what’s going on in the tech industry today. Mutiny as a fledgling online gaming company, and Joe’s forays into bandwidth experiments under his father-in-law’s nose, are genuinely incredible ideas, but over a decade too early to properly capitalize on them. Knowing that these characters have years to go before there’s even a ground floor to get in on creates some more compelling stakes than the legal concerns that hung over the first season.
The Women Are Still the Best Characters
That bravura long-take scene also rather effortlessly conveys the most interesting developing relationship of the season between Cameron (Mackenzie Davis, still the most transfixing character on the show) and former Texas Instruments programmer Donna (Kerry Bishé). The visual message is clear: Cameron enjoys sitting on the throne and receiving compliments for her one great idea, but wants to delegate all the unglamorous work to Donna. And while their conflict has ventured into the age-old battle between building a career and building a family, it hasn’t singled out either woman as stereotypical of either world. Cameron suffers panic attacks when her work is threatened, but writes letters to a potential father figure in prison and shares that her father fought (and presumably died) in Vietnam. Donna takes care of her kids and occasionally feels trapped by the shackles of her marriage, but she threw away a stable job at TI to go in with a startup because it got her hands dirty programming again―and she’s innovating online chat while supposed genius Cameron can’t fathom its potential.
One of the most highly-praised aspects of the Mad Men finale was the way it teased a potential business partnership between Joan and Peggy. Halt and Catch Fire follows through on the promise of a female-led trailblazing business, as they run the show themselves. Both of them make catastrophic mistakes, trusting the wrong person (usually Scoot McNairy’s Gordon) or flubbing something as simple as chatroom mechanics (the dreaded Reply All embarrassment rears its ugly head at one point), but by and large they’re leading the way.
Rehabbing a Don Draper Clone
Mysterious, deliberately misleading proto-visionary Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) was every bit of a Don Draper carbon copy early on. Pace delivered wannabe Steve Jobs monologues that were half Draper Pitch and half Winger Speech, lacking the emotional connection of the former and the wit of the latter. He provided what everyone thought was the Mad Men formula: suave business man at the top of his game while enjoying the fruits of his labor in a time period ripe for cultural nostalgia. That generic feel, especially how the obnoxious origin story of his physical scars mirrored the Dick Whitman twist, soured his character development.
But so far in the second season, he’s been humbled, licking his wounds after professional sabotage in Austin, and is in a seemingly stable relationship with Sara Wheeler (Aleksa Palladino), a magazine writer and daughter of an oil magnate. Most notable on television for playing Angela, the wife of Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) on Boardwalk Empire, Palladino brings out a demure side of Pace, more coldly calculating as he figures out how to find a business he likes within the confines of a happy relationship. All of this could be setup for a massive personality explosion later in the season if Joe tries to rope everyone else back into another one of his schemes, but so far the show has succeeded by limiting Joe’s significance to the plot.
Mad Men was at its best when it felt like a collection of linked short stories focusing on characters in the same spheres of influence. Halt and Catch Fire is beginning to understand that as well, exemplified by its renewed interest in John Bosworth (Toby Huss), Cardiff’s former SVP of sales who did a prison stint between seasons. He’s the eminent salesman who doesn’t understand anything about Cameron, Gordon, or Joe’s competing visions for the potential of the tech industry. He’s the dinosaur, cruelly ridiculed by Mutiny’s programmers. Whereas the first season made Joe the sun and everyone else tiny planets around him, the second season has leveled the importance of each character, linked them to each other in different ways, and taken a step back to observe a few of them at a time.
Many Spinning Plates
Halt and Catch Fire now has its hands in several aspects of the tech boom that still have significant implications today, from online gaming to Internet connectivity, audience data analytics to venture capital gender dynamics. It’s riding tenuously on a razor’s edge between Mad Men’s fourth season, when the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency struck out on its own, and Silicon Valley’s recently-concluded second season, as a promising tech startup hits several hiccups along the way to viability.
Moreover, the show is finding a way to make all of its disparate characters fit together in a meaningful fashion, even as they have individual plots confined only to those characters in a way that doesn’t affect the overall company narrative―just like Mad Men. And this Sunday’s episode (the last of four sent out to critics before the season began) even teases another foray into a genre revolutionary to the 1980s that still holds incredible financial sway in today’s market. (No spoilers, you’ll have to watch and see―but you’ll be glad you did.) Perhaps a second season of fledgling ratings will force AMC to shut it down for good. But for now, the hard reboot has the old machine up and running like new.
| }
|