AMC - Halt and Catch Fire

I'm a couple of episodes behind but I don't like the introduction of the coke addiction at all.

The two female leads are distractingly pretty.

when it happened i was like "well it's a period piece about the 80s, i'm amazed it took this long to have a plot about cocaine"

joe is gonna become john mcafee right?

idk if literally but when i realized what his turn meant i did smile. it would not be hard to imagine him setting up a jonestown though.

I can't believe this is in its third season

2 hour premiere tomorrow night

is this any good

I like it. It can be a bit silly though. First season was a bit too much "Mad Men in 80s silicon valley" at times but was still enjoyable especially if you like the setting/era. Second season was better.

it isn't perfect but it's very good, dan otm about s2 being better

Despite what some dude said up thread I skipped S1 completely and enjoyed S2 quite a bit.

tuesday night's episode, goddamn was it good.

That was one of the more intense things I've watched in the last while! Impressive for a show without a body count.

Seriously. Amazing that there's all this fascinating behind the scenes machinations involving Joe and Gordon and yet two women arguing about the direction of their company and their relationship makes for such intense tv.

this show is just enormously good and it's really too bad that abt a dozen people watch it

It started off pretty slow; I think a lot of people must have dropped out when things were still putting along midway through the first season. Now it is really cooking!

the first season was a bit of a drag until the last few episodes, not helped by the focus on joe's don draper-lite man-with-a-past stuff which was pretty cookie-cutter

second season was so much better - the characters really do get fleshed out nicely and the ebb and flow of the tensions between the four leads is great

i need to get around to getting up to speed with s3 asap, i totally missed it had even started up again...

i LOVE THIS SHOW!!!!

i love this show too but i did lol when they did the flash-forward in s3 and then slowly panned in on a computer screen to show the MICROSOFT OFFICE COPYRIGHT 1990 for a long time to say YES THIS IS A FLASH FORWARD IT'S 1990 NOW HEY HEY PAY ATTENTION

it's nice to watch a tv show about people who are all somewhat intelligent and competent and at least trying to be good people

yeah this show is a delight, and I like that there's no villain, really. (except maybe Shaggy from Scooby Doo but that's kinda silly).

Show has been wildly inconsistent with Joe McMillan, though. I get that they cut him down a peg but he goes from arrogant and scheming to permanently walking with his head hanging down, continuing to sulk years after the fact. That kind of massive personality shift just doesn't happen in real life. Every other character is fundamentally the same, even as situations change their goals and values, but they seem to rewrite the lead guy from scratch every season/half season.

god i love toby huss

he doesn't seem to do much dramatic work but he's so good and affecting in this

bump

watched 1.5 seasons so far and i am here to say that toby huss is the greatest

s2 def better with less focus on Admiral Eyebrows, character driven story def serves them better

Gordo is nuts, Donna is great but nuts, Cameron is nuts

MY PEOPLE

we're gonna try this, thanks ILX

Didn't even know there was a thread for this! My favourite show about people who are terrible and slowly learn to be less terrible.

(just like the show itself amirite)

I do enjoy what a cipher Joe is as a person. I know it gets bandied about a lot these days but his sociopathy feels very complete & deliberate as a character choice. The only time he’s anything close to being “himself” is when he’s getting over on someone in a sale or a pitch.
Pace does a really good job of making him a really weird unknowable guy.

And McNairy is so good at being the unhinged guy trying not to be completely unhinged. Gordo is just a bucketful of crazy crammed into a suit 24/7, like you can see the squirming twitchiness in his eyes constantly even when he’s not being outwardly bonkers. That’s hard to pull off acting-wise

otm about McNairy. I happened to see him smoking a cigarette outside a coffee shop in Austin a few months ago and it took me a few minutes to realize who it was because he was so relaxed and his body language wasn't so twitchy and high strung.

to the show's credit, the more it goes on the less they are caricatures. Even Joe makes sense as a real person eventually.

Cameron so far is the only character who still feels underbaked somehow. I get the 20’s thing where everything is a reaction or a statement & she’s still in the edges of idealism but it makes her so one-note, or two note, i guess. REACT!! RESIST!! PANIC ATTACK!! repeat
Maybe that’s the point, that she’s so much younger than the other characters

I was going to start a new H&CF watchers club thread but this one is pretty spoiler-free and short!

John might be the character that surprised me the most -- starts out seeming like this good ol' boy and you're waiting for him to do something that throws a monkey wrench in the works, but he just keeps being sympathetic

hoping it doesn't take forever for season 4 to hit netflix. probably be a while though.

now i'm wondering if there is some ps4 thing i can buy though...

Hope to make some S3 headway this weekend

nobody expected me to be that useful at work so I watched 2.5 episodes while poking around on a project at work, tell no one

this seems kind of h&cf-ish since I’m totally on that kind of project

how did I not know Toby Huss is a fellow Iowa boy?!?

so great, love his king of the hill work

I was loving this until halfway through season 2. That any of the protagonists would seriously contemplate going back into business with the sociopath was too much disbelief to suspend.

his season one characterization was an incredible misstep in the show and retooling him was the best thing they did, but I feel that

another thing I will say here (trying to avoid reading spoilers while posting) is that whoever chose Cameron's music selections knew what was up with early-80's Texas punk rock (Big Boys!), Bobby Soxx "Learn To Hate In The 80's" was especially inspired.

Really Red as well.

Amazing music supervision and not just deep knowledge of Texas punk. Tiny meaningless spoiler but when Joe goes to the Stark Club they nailed the music.

yeah the music supervision stays good through the rest of the show

watching the final season a couple days after attending a funeral for a relative was emotionally wearying

his season one characterization was an incredible misstep in the show and retooling him was the best thing they did

Maybe the thing for the viewer to do is pretend it's a different character entirely. After season one, Pyro Joe died on the way back to his home planet, please welcome Believable Joe?

for some reason that i have not analyzed it gives me great pleasure to see the look on someone's face when they GET AN IDEA on this show. it happens about 5 times an episode. hey, that picture of a hacker on the magazine cover....THAT GIVES ME AN IDEA.

i just really love it.

i'm watching the whole first 3 seasons again with maria. she didn't watch them with me the first time around.

The one thing that this show did well that is seldom done in television is having characters decide to do things off camera and just kind of report later "oh I did that" or "I changed my mind". As if there are things going on in the world, some of them important to their lives, and we're not seeing all of it.

i love when episodes start and time has obviously passed but they don't really make a big deal about it.

i also don't think i remembered that when joe goes and gets his check at the start of season two that almost two years have gone by. 20 months i think it says at the beginning. that's a long time.

i don't remember most of the show being computers computers computers. i think that's mostly s1.

the show becomes much more of a character drama as it goes on

Excellent

Yeah, the industry is still what it revolves around, but it gets more backgrounded over time. The details I had the most trouble following involved all the various buyouts, mergers and general vc stuff.

Yeah, to my mind it's mostly a show both about a specific set of characters and more broadly about the conflicts between creativity and commerce.

I think it may have come off as heavy-handed, but the way things circle back with Cameron and Donna at the end to make explicit how women in this male-heavy industry sometimes frustrate and sabotage each other

S1 got better as it went on but I’m about halfway through S2 and realizing it’s just a soap opera with some lipstick on. The various relationship temptations and transgressions and moral and ethical failings seem really familiar. Not sure what I expect from a tv show, probably too much.

Halfway through Season 3 and enjoying it very much, apart from Joe's 'selling' monologues (that got old very quickly) but the music is impossibly manicured and nerdy, it's kinda annoying, like some 40-year-old music supervisor's wet dream.

By all accounts at least 20 mins of each episode should be devoted to Cameron in her local record store shooting the shit with the employees about Big Drill Car seven inches.

the music supervision worked on me. I geeked out so hard at "pink turns to blue"

I was down from the beginning when they played Really Red. A few seasons later having Joe go to the Stark club to dance to Bronski Beat and Viscious Pink, a+ music supervision.

I also loved the soundtrack choices. In fact, discovered a few great songs through watching

Just finished watching this today. Some thoughts:

- This has maybe my favorite opening-credits sequence/music of any show. It just gets me so EXCITED and it's also really funny that the whole thing is a dramatic rendering of an LED switching on. It seems to fit the show's tone less as time goes on, though, especially in S4, where the characters are so much more grounded.

- Which reminds me: it really is kind of incredible what a *different* show it is by S4 compared to where it started. At points the last season maybe a bit too soap-y, but the characters are all so great I didn't mind it so much.

- I like the music choices too, but I agree they do get a bit "wanna hear some of my records?" And some of them are just way too on-the-nose, especially ending the finale with Solisbury Hill, which actually kinda worked, but still.

- This show could easily have sucked without such good performances. I can't pick a favorite character or actor, but the way Scoot McNairy portrays Gordon's arc from catatonia to mania to fear to eventual equanimity was really personally affecting.

- Watching this brought up a lot of my own anxieties about life and whether I am spending it wisely. I have this strong desire to *create something* the way the characters in this show do, but I still haven't really figured out what that means yet. And it can really gnaw on me sometimes. But I'm feeling motivated to pick back up some projects that I'd put aside for a while.

Yeah the opening sequence is great. It bugged me for a while because it sounded like a ripoff of a specific Trentemøller song until I found out the theme song was actually... Trentemøller

It bears a strong resemblance to "Still on Fire," but I figure artists are quite welcome to steal from themselves

Since it’s the last day of the year I finally want to settle something.

Joe MacMillan was killed in an isolated Y2K incident that caused an elevator he was in to fall 48 stories.

He was the only casualty of the 2000 computer bug and became famous worldwide.

Happy New Year.

— Christopher Cantwell (@ifyoucantwell) December 31, 2020

typical!

Guess I can blame JK Rowling for this, right?

just finished watching the whole series. fantastic show, very sad to see it end. A+ acting, hope all the leads get new roles as worthy as the characters they played here.

lee pace didn't just play joe mcmillan, he IS joe mcmillan

VAXXED pic.twitter.com/gdtSb0TncT

— Lee Pace (@leepace) May 16, 2021

IDK, I can't really picture Joe rocking camo

just re-watched the whole thing ... awesome the second time through. knowing the key plot points deepens the experience. rip gordon.

The first episode is hilarious and bad - the computer nerd who isn't just uncool but is a loser and deadbeat dad, the stupendously hot and cool and rebellious and talented female coder, and the glengarry salesmen - who gets to fuck the coder. But we stuck with it and yeah it gets better. Midway through S2 now, still good but seems to be trying a bit too hard to generate suspense - the legendary engineer just happens to write a devastating virus by accident? The games company that goes two years without even coming up with a single idea for a new game? And I don't quite get the timeshare idea, the mainframe is only available out of office hours so how can they use it during the day?

The scene in the first season where Lee Pace stands on the office roof, rips his shirt off, and screams into the rain, is really one of the worst things ever filmed (topless Lee Pace aside). It’s amazing how good it got later on.

when i re-watched with the family we started at S1E7 (at the LV convention) since the first eps were pretty ropy. really is amazing how good the show became.