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 screen.
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 reaching again, in which Joe is out on the front lawn with Donna's daughters during a hurricane and it's FEELS like magic. His performance feels earnest, and hypnotizing, and genuinely magical as he puts on a show for these young girls in the rain.
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. Somehow it feels like pure creative expression that manages to defy outside expectations and tell a story that feels true to life and convey the ambitions of creative people who are fighting to make something beautiful.
> 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.
[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.
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.
What gets me about this show is how it nails the emotional cost of building things. Most tech dramas focus on the product or the money. HaCF focuses on what it does to the people. The relationships that get wrecked, the compromises you make, the way obsession eats everything around it. If you've ever been deep in a startup you feel it in your chest watching this show.
Sadly, Season 1 Joe is just incohesive. Like, you want there to be some structural reason behind his madness and there just isn't any, because there's too much of crazy. Season 2 tries to walk much of that back.
I haven't yet seen season 3 and beyond, but it's clear the OP blogger agrees:
> The best thing the show’s writers ever did was realize that Joe wasn’t the most interesting character.
Like, Lee is a good actor for sure, he was just given a poorly story crafted role.
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.
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.
I'm always surprised Lee Pace doesn't get more recognition; I've loved a lot of his quirkier projects like Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but it's not like he hasn't also been in mainstream things like The Hobbit and Guardians of the Galaxy.
The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
> The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
The thing is, Joe is supposed to actually have substance and vision. He's not faking it. The difference is that all those sales guys are pretending to be someone like Joe.
I dont know about substance, but possibly vision. Its an old pattern, he kept selling more until the technical reality caught up with him. And he would abuse the technical staff to try and squeeze more out, but mostly because his reputation was riding on having sold it.
And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.
I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk.
Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season.
What's so great about it is:
- mushroom theory of management works
- trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible
- throw all the corporate bs away, just build
- competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works
- real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down
as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show!
My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.
The problem with it is that it is ahistorical enough in the tech that some things just don't work. The show tackles stuff about like a decade before it was actually relevant in market, and that has subtle problems that give the business stuff an uncanny-valley feel. Still a fun drama though.
During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous.
So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such.
I like the fact that it's the wrong years for the idea to succeed: Kind of like with the Newton, they are going into visionary ideas when the tech or the market isn't there. There's a lot of companies out there that fail because they go in too early to have good execution.
Season 1 feels like its connecting back to Compaq, which made a competitor to IBM's PC platform. Founded by previous TI employees, reverse engineered IBM's BIOS, etc.
It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!
PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating
Patriot is amazing, more people should watch it, everyone I know who has was enthralled by it.
Counterpart was great but structure made it hard for to watch knowing it'd been cancelled.
Scavengers Reign was great; I couldn't get into Common Side Effects.
Evil is exactly the Catholic X-Files, which is an amazing concept, but by the end of the 2nd season it is all the way off the rails and hurtling into a canyon.
Given your list, you might dig Lodge 49, which is somewhere in the intersection of HACF, Evil, The Big Lebowski.
Evil got cancelled with a 6 episode finish, which is unheard of when making TV. It wanders around, and has highlights in each season. The x-files got real sloppy near the end too.
Also in the running for great title sequences as well
I have seen two of your five shows and like them a lot, and heard of another and it’s already on my to-watch list. This is enough overlap to get the other ones added to the list (plus that pilot).
Given the agreement in taste so far, here’s a couple to try if you haven’t:
- Sweet Vicious — marred by getting cancelled after one season, but a fun season anyway. College sexual assault survivor becomes an anti-rapist vigilante. It’s, uh… more light-hearted than the premise sounds?
- Review with Forrest MacNeil — A guy has a review show where he attempts to review… life. Takes viewer requests for what specifically to review in each episode. He takes his job very seriously. Avoid seeing episode counts if at all possible. Trust me on that part. Doesn’t ruin it if you do see them, but being blind to that does improve it.
Another that I’m not sure counts as under-watched as it’s more recent, but I rarely see it discussed in the wild: Dickinson, a magical realism biographical show about the poet, that mixes in humor and some modern pop culture (think: A Knight’s Tale).
He has something to do with this show as well which was obtuse enough to keep me at a distance. It's an unhinged, detective story with puppets in a noir-laden city grit setting.
I need to get around to Perpetual Grace; I've watched the first 15 minutes of it like four times and always ended up bouncing off of it for one reason or another; but I know if I got into it, I'd probably really dig it.
Funny thing about watching Patriot for the first time: my sister in law showed up on it. We had no idea. Just all the sudden there she is on my TV. She's the mute cop, Sophie.
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....
That's absolutely bitchun. You should definitely do so. What's actually in there? Ideally you'd have it done up as a set piece and mock up a connection to Mutiny on there ;)
It'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 Show) that's premiering this year.
> This piece contains spoilers for Halt and Catch Fire.
I'm glad they put this at the top. I instantly closed the tab. On the off chance that the title is remotely true, I wouldn't want to have the show ruined for me before I even saw an episode.
For others who have never heard of this show, here's a little I picked up from carefully scanning over the wikipedia page:
It's a AMC period drama about the early days of PCs and the internet. It ran from June 1, 2014 – October 14, 2017, had four seasons, reviews are good (so it's not just this guy who liked it) and they got better as the show went on. Also "it was marketed as the first TV series to premiere on Tumblr and the first time AMC had partnered with a social media service to debut a new show." which is weird, but it does seem like it's worth checking out.
I genuinely enjoyed it and do recommend. As another commenter mentioned, Lee Pace's performance is stand out.
My only real critique is that it has the same problem as Mr. Robot.
The writers and script are clearly very tech-literate, but the spoken lines are stilted and awkwardly delivered with odd intonation because the actors clearly have no understanding of what the words they're saying mean.
This is one of those shows I've had in the rolling background rewatch queue for years, I love it and I try to recommend it to as many people as possible. Flawed, yes, but still special.
It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.
It captured a bit the feeling of being at the start of the computer boom in 60s-70s. The partnernship between the 2 male protagonists was central till the end of show (evolving through different phases). The show was great, it went in very unexpected directions later on.
I almost stopped at the first episode. I remember the IBM PC manuals, and the build in ROM Basic, they could have read the ROMs and dumped them to the printer in minutes, there wasn't any mystery to it.
I'm glad I stuck with it though, the rest of the series was much, much better.
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.
I've heard many great things but have not been able to make it past the classroom scene in the first episode. I love both of the actors in other media, but I find the dialogue in these opening scenes makes me feel..embarrassed? I have similar feelings about other shows and movies at times where I just have to turn them off because of the way the characters are behaving. I think it just ties directly into some anxiety I have.
Had the exact same reaction to that exact scene. Just couldn't get past it. It wasn't as bad as when I tried to watch Big Bang Theory (which multiple people assured me that I'd love), but it was in that ballpark.
Consider just fast-forwarding past a scene you can't handle. Like many shows, it takes a few episodes before the actors truly understand their characters.
The feeling you're experiencing has a name: it's called "cringe". I can't watch Frasier for more than about half an episode because of it. Or I Love Lucy... same problem. But Seinfeld, which has plenty of the same humour mechanic, always seems to manage to stay just below the threshold for me.
Halt and Catch Fire is really, really good. Please trust us. Give it another shot. Skip forward a bit when you feel the need to. Skip the first episode entirely and just read a synopsis if you need to.
Idk man, the entire second season gives me that feeling of embarrassment, I couldn't finish the show. The first season was alright, but honestly the second season is some of the cheesiest/worst storytelling/acting I've ever seen.
Interesting how this thread has people saying they love the acting and people saying they hate it. I can't say as I found the acting itself to be amazing outside of a few scenes, but I never found it cringe enough to not want to see more. It'd be cool to understand more about what triggers this differently for different folks.
A related thing I find difficult to watch is when characters are in impending danger too often. Breaking Bad, for instance, was a bit hard for me to get into because of the continual tension and risk of everything going sideways. I managed to watch it anyway and am glad of it, but definitely found Better Call Saul to be a more pleasurable watch.
It might be more of an issue with the story telling than the actors performance themselves. For instance the changes in Joe and Gordon's characters was confusing. Gordon goes from being shy nerd to reckless coke addict, like huh.. Joe kinda becomes a new age softy. The hacker house vibes were off, a bunch of 20-30 year old playing tag and having nerf gun wars.. okay, I guess. Its just very hard to suspend belief and get into the story. As someone else mentioned, it gives off Hackers vibes. It feels like the writers weren't really familiar early tech and were just going off what they thought it would be like.
Thank you! It's difficult to convey an environment where everyone wants to be right instead of finding the right answer, while the company accelerates towards a wall
It's got nothing to do with liking it or not. This is ChatGPT:
> The masterpiece quality of Halt and Catch Fire lies in how precisely it shows the zero-sum reflex at work.
> Disagreement becomes disrespect.
> Respect becomes status.
> Status becomes survival.
> When Cameron’s game doesn’t align with business strategy, it isn’t a tactical debate; it’s an assault on her identity. When Joe pivots the company without consensus, he isn’t merely decisive; he is declaring sovereignty. When Donna asserts operational control, it reads as treason to those who conflate ownership with authorship.
Look I love the show but it does feel like a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. In order to get more moments in the story itself took a backseat. Lots of cool moments if you love tech history but as a stand alone drama it was kind of a let down.
I did look up the name when I watched the show. The characters and plot are the fictionalized early days of computing made entertaining. Definitely worth a watch.
Absolutely. One of those shows where I went to check what the songs were playing in specific scene often, and ended up with lots of new tracks added to play lists. Whoever did their music selection was top notch.
They have essentially nothing in common, other than the fact that both rapidly degrade over the seasons and both are nostalgic looks back at recent eras of America.
Season 1 was wonderful. The showrunner had initially written the pilot to get a job on Mad Men. It was eviscerated by critics for being too male, too masculine and seasons 2 onward pivoted into a girlboss series with Lee Pace's character taking a backseat and Scooter's character becoming a stay at home house husband. But if you like Breaking Bad and Sopranos, S1 is very well written.
Seasons 2 through 4 were vastly more interesting. We've seen Joel a hundred times. Donna and Cameron and Gordon felt less worn, and Donna and Cameron's relationship vastly more interesting than Gordon (the skeptic) and Joel (the believer!) in Season 1.
If you prefer "great men" stuff, I can see preferring Season 1.
But it's not exactly a story you can't watch elsewhere.
I've heard of Season 1 described as "Don Draper teaming up with Walter White", which makes it sound far more juicy than it is. The entire show gets way into the melodrama of the characters' personal lives, but S1 is no better than the rest in terms of that; it's strongest when the personal melodrama is rooted in the tech, like Joe's self-sabotage of their COMDEX demo followed by the fateful realization in the hotel room of their doom. There's a really great article in Grantland about HCF, Silicon Valley, and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland which points out that these characters are not great men, because they are but footnotes of history:
> The story twists again: Joe loses his nerve. The Giant goes to market as a regular old fast/cheap PC. Then, in a Comdex hotel room darkened as if for a séance, Joe comes face-to-face with his first Macintosh, and realizes he’s made the wrong call: “It speaks,” he says, his voice full of wonder and dread. We realize we’ve spent the better part of a season watching these characters fail — that Gordon and Joe aren’t going to become the Jobs and Wozniak of this world because Jobs and Wozniak are the Jobs and Wozniak of this world.
Cameron is just sort of an unstable tortured genius with a lot of baggage, and while Donna ends up being the responsible "den mother", it is really far from girlbossing, and rather trivializes those seasons and the characters to put it in such a way. And Joe does not take a backseat at all! He ends up being the main foil for most of the show, which is a really interesting turn for the character!
I do think Gordon gets sidelined (with a debilitating disease, no less!) far too easily. But then he's also sort of doomed to be a footnote, his fate is just all the more tragic for it.
The main character suffers from DID. From trauma that happened when he was little. Maybe you didn't watch the whole thing, that seems pretty "human drama"-ey to me.
Interesting. Different strokes I suppose. I loved this show but in the beginning they put too much emphasis on Lee Pace's character for my taste. Just kind of "ooooh, what will the brooding. mysterious maverick in a suit with a dark past do next? So unpredictable" and it didn't really resonate with me like the later seasons did.
In the same way that the beginning of Parks and Rec feels like they were setting out to make a version of The Office before it really became its own thing, the first season of HaCF felt like "what if we had a Don Draper type but instead it was Texas in the 80s?"
I really love season 1, because of its specific technical detail.
But the other seasons were great in their own ways too. Random PC revolution personalities showing up in dotcom startups was both disjointed and inspired.
Seasons 3 and 4 did a really good job of capturing what it was like being in the industry and in SFBA in the mid/late 1990s, better than anything I've seen. I worked at McAfee (then NETA) at the time and the MCAF-ish stuff was uncanny; the last gasp of cubicle culture in the software product industry.
I liked the storytelling in it, but, like I said earlier, it's pretty Six Feet Under-ish, in that as it progresses it is less and less about the original concept of the show and more about the relationships between characters built up over years of episodes. Whether that's a good or bad thing for you depends in part on how much fan service you want; it's why I find Mr. Robot completely unwatchable.
Except that Mr Robot was always planned that way, you can go back and see references to what's revealed in the final episodes as early as the pilot. Things are revealed at the end of S1 that make you have to re-evaluate what you've seen so far. The same is probably even more true for S4.
Maybe that's a challenge for the audience to stay with it, but it's definitely worth it for the payoff.
And those s04 episode titles matching http error codes? That might be the most masterful thing I've ever seen pulled off from a TV show.
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.
The first season is pretty taut, then the follow-up seasons suffer from every character being at the center of every big thing in tech for narrative purposes, which is to its detriment imo.
[delayed]
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 screen.
edit - a great example and one of my favorite scenes from the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc
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 reaching again, in which Joe is out on the front lawn with Donna's daughters during a hurricane and it's FEELS like magic. His performance feels earnest, and hypnotizing, and genuinely magical as he puts on a show for these young girls in the rain.
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. Somehow it feels like pure creative expression that manages to defy outside expectations and tell a story that feels true to life and convey the ambitions of creative people who are fighting to make something beautiful.
> 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...
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.
40-episode box set is $30 ($16 today) on Apple TV.
What gets me about this show is how it nails the emotional cost of building things. Most tech dramas focus on the product or the money. HaCF focuses on what it does to the people. The relationships that get wrecked, the compromises you make, the way obsession eats everything around it. If you've ever been deep in a startup you feel it in your chest watching this show.
Sadly, Season 1 Joe is just incohesive. Like, you want there to be some structural reason behind his madness and there just isn't any, because there's too much of crazy. Season 2 tries to walk much of that back.
I haven't yet seen season 3 and beyond, but it's clear the OP blogger agrees:
> The best thing the show’s writers ever did was realize that Joe wasn’t the most interesting character.
Like, Lee is a good actor for sure, he was just given a poorly story crafted role.
His character makes much more sense in later seasons.
"... 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.
Hacks does it fairly well, or it may just be jean smart
Lee Pace is such a phenomenal actor. He really just transforms the roles he's in and makes something special out of each show he's in.
He's also fantastic in Apple TV's Foundation and it's been really impressive seeing his range put on display there.
He also stars in The Fall, one of my favorite movies ever.
He also played Ronan in Guardians of the Galaxy and King Thranduil in Lord of the Rings!
how dare you mention Lee Pace and -not- mention his role in Foundation, he carried that entire show on his way too muscley back
It’s not cancelled, there’s a fourth season on the way.
But yes, him and Jared Harris are pretty much the primary reasons to watch. And given the limited Harris screentime, definitely Pace carries it.
People are using past tense, as David S. Goyer is leaving the show behind.
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.
I'm always surprised Lee Pace doesn't get more recognition; I've loved a lot of his quirkier projects like Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but it's not like he hasn't also been in mainstream things like The Hobbit and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film)
The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
An absolute legendary performance.
> The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
The thing is, Joe is supposed to actually have substance and vision. He's not faking it. The difference is that all those sales guys are pretending to be someone like Joe.
I dont know about substance, but possibly vision. Its an old pattern, he kept selling more until the technical reality caught up with him. And he would abuse the technical staff to try and squeeze more out, but mostly because his reputation was riding on having sold it.
Probably help him land Foundation. The narcissism is its own skill.
he reminds me of truly the best bosses
also something about him with a good engineer
reminds me of me and my boss, i hope lol
More recently, I loved how he killed it in Foundation. Another great casting for a great actor.
foundation has an incredible cast but even among such talent he's a clear outlier
maybe some sales look like this but anyone who models themselves after this or madmen or whatever… good luck.
And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.
I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk.
Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season.
What's so great about it is:
- mushroom theory of management works - trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible - throw all the corporate bs away, just build - competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works - real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down
as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show!
My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.
DG = data general a “large” computer company in Westboro mass. My mom worked there doing internationaliztion.
Soul of a new machine is a fantastic book. About DG going up against DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and their Vax machines.
I joined DG in their last days, largely due to kidders book.
Also, I really liked DG/UX, for reasons I no longer recall.
amazing lore!
Season 1 is Soul of a New Machine-ish, but about personal computing, not minicomputers, and is set in Texas.
Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and Compuserve, and still in Texas.
Season 3 is about the early commercial Internet, same characters, SFBA.
Season 4 is about the Yahoo era of the Internet and about venture capital, also SFBA.
The problem with it is that it is ahistorical enough in the tech that some things just don't work. The show tackles stuff about like a decade before it was actually relevant in market, and that has subtle problems that give the business stuff an uncanny-valley feel. Still a fun drama though.
During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous.
So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such.
Yeah, agreed. Watching it as a drama, it’s fun. Watching it with any perspective on tech history it gets a little cringy.
The first season is semi-accurate if you just replace Compaq with their company. But it quickly goes off the rails.
I lost interest in the second season. S1 was great, though.
S2 is the weakest season, and S1 isn't the strongest.
When Gordon died... :'(
I like the fact that it's the wrong years for the idea to succeed: Kind of like with the Newton, they are going into visionary ideas when the tech or the market isn't there. There's a lot of companies out there that fail because they go in too early to have good execution.
Season 1 feels like its connecting back to Compaq, which made a competitor to IBM's PC platform. Founded by previous TI employees, reverse engineered IBM's BIOS, etc.
> And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.
I've only watched the first season and really don't see the link to Soul of a New Machine.
You just reminded me that I got about halfway through Soul of a New Machine. Maybe I'll pick it back up this week.
It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!
PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating
PPS - ATX TV did a 10 year anniversary interview with a handful of the cast and crew that's worth watching if you're a fan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6L1suN-mGE
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/tt21056886/
Common Side Effects - cops, robbers, magic mushrooms, corporate bad guys and the cure for everything. imdb.com/title/tt28093628
Evil - x-files meets Catholic mysticism. imdb.com/title/tt9055008/
The Heat Vision and Jack pilot episode - Jack Black, Owen Wilson and a script by Dan Harmon. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6lWgXDOAJ5s&pp=ygUUaGVhdCB2aXN...
Patriot is amazing, more people should watch it, everyone I know who has was enthralled by it.
Counterpart was great but structure made it hard for to watch knowing it'd been cancelled.
Scavengers Reign was great; I couldn't get into Common Side Effects.
Evil is exactly the Catholic X-Files, which is an amazing concept, but by the end of the 2nd season it is all the way off the rails and hurtling into a canyon.
Given your list, you might dig Lodge 49, which is somewhere in the intersection of HACF, Evil, The Big Lebowski.
Adding it as well
Evil got cancelled with a 6 episode finish, which is unheard of when making TV. It wanders around, and has highlights in each season. The x-files got real sloppy near the end too.
Also in the running for great title sequences as well
I have seen two of your five shows and like them a lot, and heard of another and it’s already on my to-watch list. This is enough overlap to get the other ones added to the list (plus that pilot).
Given the agreement in taste so far, here’s a couple to try if you haven’t:
- Sweet Vicious — marred by getting cancelled after one season, but a fun season anyway. College sexual assault survivor becomes an anti-rapist vigilante. It’s, uh… more light-hearted than the premise sounds?
- Review with Forrest MacNeil — A guy has a review show where he attempts to review… life. Takes viewer requests for what specifically to review in each episode. He takes his job very seriously. Avoid seeing episode counts if at all possible. Trust me on that part. Doesn’t ruin it if you do see them, but being blind to that does improve it.
Another that I’m not sure counts as under-watched as it’s more recent, but I rarely see it discussed in the wild: Dickinson, a magical realism biographical show about the poet, that mixes in humor and some modern pop culture (think: A Knight’s Tale).
Adding yours to mine as well
The showrunner/creator of Patriot has a new show launching in a couple of weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTF_St._Louis
He has something to do with this show as well which was obtuse enough to keep me at a distance. It's an unhinged, detective story with puppets in a noir-laden city grit setting.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13148384/?ref_=ext_shr
Steven Conrad also did Perpetual Grace Ltd (he also wrote the screenplay for Pursuit of Happyness, which is the scariest movie I've ever seen).
I need to get around to Perpetual Grace; I've watched the first 15 minutes of it like four times and always ended up bouncing off of it for one reason or another; but I know if I got into it, I'd probably really dig it.
Same!
Funny thing about watching Patriot for the first time: my sister in law showed up on it. We had no idea. Just all the sudden there she is on my TV. She's the mute cop, Sophie.
I tried Perpetual Grace and didn't get it. If it's a 4th-episode-it-gets-good show I'll dive back in.
Patriot is brilliant. Very surreal with pitch-black humor and rare horror. And piping! Lovely piping.
Scavengers reign is from the same people as common side effects. Both shows are amazing.
Joe Bennet, right?
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4497617/?ref_=ext_shr
I will binge anything he makes with the double bullseye of these shows
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....
I have the actual 'Cardiff Giant' laptop from the show. Got it in LA at a prop auction. Should I do a YouTube?
That's absolutely bitchun. You should definitely do so. What's actually in there? Ideally you'd have it done up as a set piece and mock up a connection to Mutiny on there ;)
This is cool.
YES! NOW!
It'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 Show) that's premiering this year.
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.
“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” -- Joe MacMillan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeY_5n75zPM
Syllabus:
https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/
> This piece contains spoilers for Halt and Catch Fire.
I'm glad they put this at the top. I instantly closed the tab. On the off chance that the title is remotely true, I wouldn't want to have the show ruined for me before I even saw an episode.
For others who have never heard of this show, here's a little I picked up from carefully scanning over the wikipedia page:
It's a AMC period drama about the early days of PCs and the internet. It ran from June 1, 2014 – October 14, 2017, had four seasons, reviews are good (so it's not just this guy who liked it) and they got better as the show went on. Also "it was marketed as the first TV series to premiere on Tumblr and the first time AMC had partnered with a social media service to debut a new show." which is weird, but it does seem like it's worth checking out.
Then you are the only one who haven't watched it. Go watch it now! It's fantastic (at least the first Compaq seasons)
I genuinely enjoyed it and do recommend. As another commenter mentioned, Lee Pace's performance is stand out.
My only real critique is that it has the same problem as Mr. Robot. The writers and script are clearly very tech-literate, but the spoken lines are stilted and awkwardly delivered with odd intonation because the actors clearly have no understanding of what the words they're saying mean.
I really liked it. Though I was sort of expecting an alternative Mac history at the time. Good Comdex show vibe for the time though.
This is one of those shows I've had in the rolling background rewatch queue for years, I love it and I try to recommend it to as many people as possible. Flawed, yes, but still special.
I like how in the fourth season, the computer props are literally just cardboard boxes.
I like literally love it, not ironically, it makes it more like a stage play.
Feel like the flaws are what makes it special. I don't want Kubrick for a tv show about BBS'
It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.
Totally worth a watch.
It captured a bit the feeling of being at the start of the computer boom in 60s-70s. The partnernship between the 2 male protagonists was central till the end of show (evolving through different phases). The show was great, it went in very unexpected directions later on.
This series is great at multiple levels:
- the archetype characters and their motivations to do what they do (100% valid today)
- struggles and exhilaration of startups
- as a pseudo-documentary of the early years of personal computing
Highly recommend it!
I almost stopped at the first episode. I remember the IBM PC manuals, and the build in ROM Basic, they could have read the ROMs and dumped them to the printer in minutes, there wasn't any mystery to it.
I'm glad I stuck with it though, the rest of the series was much, much better.
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.
A great watch if you are nostalgic for the early BBS days or early WWW days. The post 2000 generation may not get it.
I've heard many great things but have not been able to make it past the classroom scene in the first episode. I love both of the actors in other media, but I find the dialogue in these opening scenes makes me feel..embarrassed? I have similar feelings about other shows and movies at times where I just have to turn them off because of the way the characters are behaving. I think it just ties directly into some anxiety I have.
Had the exact same reaction to that exact scene. Just couldn't get past it. It wasn't as bad as when I tried to watch Big Bang Theory (which multiple people assured me that I'd love), but it was in that ballpark.
Consider just fast-forwarding past a scene you can't handle. Like many shows, it takes a few episodes before the actors truly understand their characters.
The feeling you're experiencing has a name: it's called "cringe". I can't watch Frasier for more than about half an episode because of it. Or I Love Lucy... same problem. But Seinfeld, which has plenty of the same humour mechanic, always seems to manage to stay just below the threshold for me.
Halt and Catch Fire is really, really good. Please trust us. Give it another shot. Skip forward a bit when you feel the need to. Skip the first episode entirely and just read a synopsis if you need to.
Idk man, the entire second season gives me that feeling of embarrassment, I couldn't finish the show. The first season was alright, but honestly the second season is some of the cheesiest/worst storytelling/acting I've ever seen.
Interesting how this thread has people saying they love the acting and people saying they hate it. I can't say as I found the acting itself to be amazing outside of a few scenes, but I never found it cringe enough to not want to see more. It'd be cool to understand more about what triggers this differently for different folks.
A related thing I find difficult to watch is when characters are in impending danger too often. Breaking Bad, for instance, was a bit hard for me to get into because of the continual tension and risk of everything going sideways. I managed to watch it anyway and am glad of it, but definitely found Better Call Saul to be a more pleasurable watch.
It might be more of an issue with the story telling than the actors performance themselves. For instance the changes in Joe and Gordon's characters was confusing. Gordon goes from being shy nerd to reckless coke addict, like huh.. Joe kinda becomes a new age softy. The hacker house vibes were off, a bunch of 20-30 year old playing tag and having nerf gun wars.. okay, I guess. Its just very hard to suspend belief and get into the story. As someone else mentioned, it gives off Hackers vibes. It feels like the writers weren't really familiar early tech and were just going off what they thought it would be like.
Fantastic show! Just wrote an analysis of the conflicts between the characters and how every disagreement turns into a zero sum game:
https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/halt-and-catch-fire-the-tra...
Great read! Agree with the themes & tensions you identify.
Thank you! It's difficult to convey an environment where everyone wants to be right instead of finding the right answer, while the company accelerates towards a wall
Looks like @light_triad's blog.. new account?
Indeed, not trying to circumvent your rules. Just want to contribute to the conversation. I just love this website.
love how deep you go
Thanks it's an attempt to describe interactions observed in startups, which the show portrays so well
it's slop
Sorry you didn't like it. I can assure you it describes real battle scars from startups. Good luck with inboard!
It's got nothing to do with liking it or not. This is ChatGPT:
> The masterpiece quality of Halt and Catch Fire lies in how precisely it shows the zero-sum reflex at work.
> Disagreement becomes disrespect.
> Respect becomes status.
> Status becomes survival.
> When Cameron’s game doesn’t align with business strategy, it isn’t a tactical debate; it’s an assault on her identity. When Joe pivots the company without consensus, he isn’t merely decisive; he is declaring sovereignty. When Donna asserts operational control, it reads as treason to those who conflate ownership with authorship.
Look I love the show but it does feel like a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. In order to get more moments in the story itself took a backseat. Lots of cool moments if you love tech history but as a stand alone drama it was kind of a let down.
Loved this series, totally up HN’s alley.
Absolutely. If you weren't there for it, watch this. If you really want to understand AI, here it is. Hilarious. "Nobody ever got fired for AI".
My all-time favorite. Compaq had a compelling story, and I liked where the writers went after the first season.
Hm it's on amazon but you gotta pay for the secondary sub. Did look interesting but oh well.
Apple TV, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057601
I learned of that from On the Metal podcast. Was a big favourite. Definitely a great watch.
The opening of this show feels very relevant today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucSUs3adMQ8
One of the better CG title sequences. They don't belabour it, get the visual concept across and wham! Show starts.
Yeah. I'll watch it every time.
Yeah this is a gem of a show worth a rewatch every few years. Especially once it finds its legs after S1. Criminally underrated.
I found the last season a little rushed...
Yes, hands down the best show! They need to do more seasons, especially with modern day problems.
Other thoughtful and well made shows: Dark Matter, For All Mankind, Foundation (also Lee Pace and also stellar).
I think you might enjoy Travelers
> They need to do more seasons, especially with modern day problems.
Silicon Valley, the insanity that it’s both a comedy and true to life
Somewhat mysteriously, the Linux ISOs for this show have seen a sudden spike in activity.
One of my all time favorite series - add my upvote to the pile!
I have the Cardiff Giant. Like the actual computer from the show.
I did look up the name when I watched the show. The characters and plot are the fictionalized early days of computing made entertaining. Definitely worth a watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...
Great show and fantastic music. This show and Driver were two soundtracks that captured that early/mid 2010s vibe for me personally.
Absolutely. One of those shows where I went to check what the songs were playing in specific scene often, and ended up with lots of new tracks added to play lists. Whoever did their music selection was top notch.
My dad kept trying to get me to watch this show and I never got around to it. Maybe I need to.
How does it compare to The Americans?
The Americans is an easier watch in general because of its themes, but H+CF is worth viewing for anyone in tech.
There's only four seasons and they're all solid.
They have essentially nothing in common, other than the fact that both rapidly degrade over the seasons and both are nostalgic looks back at recent eras of America.
I thought Halt and Catch Fire was fairly well known, especially in the tech world.
Season 1 was absolutely killer. I like that they tried to capture different eras per season, but subsequent seasons got progressively weaker.
I still think Gordon's final scene is one of the best pieces of writing in TV drama history. Took my breath away the first time I saw it.
It's fairly well known to some of us. It's one of the few shows I own DVDs of.
Where can one even find the seasons? I only found season 1 on Blu-ray.
Apple TV, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057601
LOVE H&CF, so good
one of my favorite shows of all time!
This is on my bucket list to finish. Watched one or two episodes and it reminded me of a dead serious Silicon Valley.
The show captured the sublime transcendence of ambitious failure like no other form of art ever has.
It is an all timer.
The best. Not unheard of around here. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007414)
This article? Not so much. Is OP one of the one's discovering it?
Season 1 was wonderful. The showrunner had initially written the pilot to get a job on Mad Men. It was eviscerated by critics for being too male, too masculine and seasons 2 onward pivoted into a girlboss series with Lee Pace's character taking a backseat and Scooter's character becoming a stay at home house husband. But if you like Breaking Bad and Sopranos, S1 is very well written.
I always thought Joe MacMillan was Don Draper with a little Steve Jobs so that explains it.
S2 had a far more memorable depiction of hacker startups as we know it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJN2JN3_N_4
Season 1 was just Mad Men but computers.
Seasons 2 through 4 were vastly more interesting. We've seen Joel a hundred times. Donna and Cameron and Gordon felt less worn, and Donna and Cameron's relationship vastly more interesting than Gordon (the skeptic) and Joel (the believer!) in Season 1.
If you prefer "great men" stuff, I can see preferring Season 1.
But it's not exactly a story you can't watch elsewhere.
I've heard of Season 1 described as "Don Draper teaming up with Walter White", which makes it sound far more juicy than it is. The entire show gets way into the melodrama of the characters' personal lives, but S1 is no better than the rest in terms of that; it's strongest when the personal melodrama is rooted in the tech, like Joe's self-sabotage of their COMDEX demo followed by the fateful realization in the hotel room of their doom. There's a really great article in Grantland about HCF, Silicon Valley, and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland which points out that these characters are not great men, because they are but footnotes of history:
> The story twists again: Joe loses his nerve. The Giant goes to market as a regular old fast/cheap PC. Then, in a Comdex hotel room darkened as if for a séance, Joe comes face-to-face with his first Macintosh, and realizes he’s made the wrong call: “It speaks,” he says, his voice full of wonder and dread. We realize we’ve spent the better part of a season watching these characters fail — that Gordon and Joe aren’t going to become the Jobs and Wozniak of this world because Jobs and Wozniak are the Jobs and Wozniak of this world.
https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-ha...
Cameron is just sort of an unstable tortured genius with a lot of baggage, and while Donna ends up being the responsible "den mother", it is really far from girlbossing, and rather trivializes those seasons and the characters to put it in such a way. And Joe does not take a backseat at all! He ends up being the main foil for most of the show, which is a really interesting turn for the character!
I do think Gordon gets sidelined (with a debilitating disease, no less!) far too easily. But then he's also sort of doomed to be a footnote, his fate is just all the more tragic for it.
Strongly agree that Season 1 was by far the best, and the rest suffered for the changes.
It’s great but it ain’t no Mr. Robot.
One is a deeply human drama, the other is a spy thriller. Not sure why you'd even make the comparison.
I'm assuming Mr Robot is the spy thriller? It feels like more of a deeply human drama to me.
You have a very different perception of 'human' than I do!
The main character suffers from DID. From trauma that happened when he was little. Maybe you didn't watch the whole thing, that seems pretty "human drama"-ey to me.
They ran contemporaneously and tended to come up on the same lunch table conversations.
I couldn’t get past all the drug scenes in Mr Robot.
So good
The first seasons were excellent, the latter seasons not so much.
Interesting. Different strokes I suppose. I loved this show but in the beginning they put too much emphasis on Lee Pace's character for my taste. Just kind of "ooooh, what will the brooding. mysterious maverick in a suit with a dark past do next? So unpredictable" and it didn't really resonate with me like the later seasons did.
In the same way that the beginning of Parks and Rec feels like they were setting out to make a version of The Office before it really became its own thing, the first season of HaCF felt like "what if we had a Don Draper type but instead it was Texas in the 80s?"
The latter seasons have memorable thought-provoking moments but they are sparse.
They could have compressed those into fewer episodes and it would have been more watchable.
You must be young.
I really love season 1, because of its specific technical detail.
But the other seasons were great in their own ways too. Random PC revolution personalities showing up in dotcom startups was both disjointed and inspired.
Seasons 3 and 4 did a really good job of capturing what it was like being in the industry and in SFBA in the mid/late 1990s, better than anything I've seen. I worked at McAfee (then NETA) at the time and the MCAF-ish stuff was uncanny; the last gasp of cubicle culture in the software product industry.
I liked the storytelling in it, but, like I said earlier, it's pretty Six Feet Under-ish, in that as it progresses it is less and less about the original concept of the show and more about the relationships between characters built up over years of episodes. Whether that's a good or bad thing for you depends in part on how much fan service you want; it's why I find Mr. Robot completely unwatchable.
Except that Mr Robot was always planned that way, you can go back and see references to what's revealed in the final episodes as early as the pilot. Things are revealed at the end of S1 that make you have to re-evaluate what you've seen so far. The same is probably even more true for S4.
Maybe that's a challenge for the audience to stay with it, but it's definitely worth it for the payoff.
And those s04 episode titles matching http error codes? That might be the most masterful thing I've ever seen pulled off from a TV show.
Objectively it was consistently good but not great.
https://www.ratingraph.com/tv-shows/halt-and-catch-fire-rati...
The first season was the best season, and it's probably a good stopping point.
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.
The first season is pretty taut, then the follow-up seasons suffer from every character being at the center of every big thing in tech for narrative purposes, which is to its detriment imo.