The friendship between the two powers the show’s final three seasons, and each season is better than the last for the ways they all examine this professional and personal partnership as it grows, frays, then rebuilds itself. When season two starts, it’s instantly one of the best TV shows of its era.Ī big reason for this dramatic shift was the show’s change of focus from Joe to its two main women characters, Cameron and Donna Clark (Kerry Bishé), who is a genius tech brain in her own right but also Gordon’s wife. By the show’s ninth episode - which ends with a reveal so good I won’t spoil it, even though it aired in 2014 - it’s clicking on all cylinders. Yet they’re also necessary for setting up the series’ larger idea, which is that Joe might think he’s a genius, but the thing he really needs is to be tempered and improved by the people around him. These early episodes struggled to stand out from the glut of other antihero dramas rattling around in the 2010s. He’s joined in this by two computer whizzes who can do the work while Joe offers the Steve Jobs-style bravado - Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis). Rogers and Christopher Cantwell originally set up the series as a conventional antihero drama about the sneering, self-proclaimed genius Joe Macmillan (Lee Pace), who hijacks a small Texas computer manufacturer in the early 1980s and tries to get it to build his dream machine. Like so many TV dramas of the 2010s, Halt and Catch Fire has some false starts. But as we watch them fail, we also see them become better people for having known each other - even if they frequently come into bitter conflict with one another. And because they live in our world, we know that they will fail to take out the Apples and Googles and Facebooks of the world. The characters on this show strive and strive and strive to build a better computer, then a better internet experience, and finally a better search engine. It also absolutely nails a tone that’s tricky to manage: optimism, tempered with a sense of how hard it is to accomplish anything with real meaning in this world. It’s a foolproof people-pleaser with a little bit of something for everyone. Invariably, the people I recommend the show to at least like it, and most of them come away loving it. In all the years I’ve been working as a TV critic, no show I’ve recommended has had more people end up digging it than Halt and Catch Fire, the ’80s- and ’90s-set tech world drama that aired on AMC from 2014-2017 that now can be watched in its entirety on Netflix.
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