AMC - Halt and Catch Fire

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.

Some of it seems to come out of nowhere when the series gets toward the end, especially when (not really major spoilers here) starts speaking to others about how women were continually marginalized in the computer field and unfortunately ended up playing against each other. But when you look back at the series and realize all of the in-house drama with her and Cameron has this much larger context the little lightbulb comes on

whoops, when *Donna* starts speaking, that is

yeah i should probably stay away from this thread until i've seen season 4.

i wonder if i should just pay for the fourth season instead of waiting for netflix. PS4 will probably sell it to me.

I bought it via Amazon

It's on the AMC streaming app if you have any sort of cable, but it has commercials and is kind of glitchy

bummed at how normcore Cameron is, fashionwise, by the end of s2

she's going to switch it up

Just finished season four after a month's binge and feel bereft :(

man that wedding scene in S2 with Bosworth and his kid was really well done

"your mother would combust"

Yeah - every character gets amazing material but Bos especially. What a show, though. It's been a particularly rough month of my life and watching this got me through a really fucked up November. It's such a privilege when a piece of art reaches you at exactly the right time in your life - a few years ago or a few years from now I might have been less moved, or given up.

:/

https://soundcloud.com/user-193544149/halt-and-catch-fire-gordons-tape

season 4 is on netflix! woo hoo! i'll come back after watching that.

I just finished this and I am gutted. I'm going to miss the hell out of these characters

I am about halfway through s4 and am not loving it as much as prior seasons. Should I hope for a turnaround?

100% stick around. You've made it this far, so even if the ending weren't outstanding I'd say stick it out, but those final four episodes really are beautiful

Some minor, minimally spoiler-y thoughts:

1. No show that reboots its main character so many times had any right to be this good
2. They gave Bos so much amazing material in the final season
3. Haley was an incredible character who turned out to be as engaging as any of the series principals. I hope that actress lands a series of her own one day.
4. I need a hug

Otm re: Haley. And amazingly, that was her first acting job

Also Bos leaving the doctor to Fanfare for the Common Man <3 <3

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.