I Watched HALT AND CATCH FIRE For The First Time and I Was Completely Blown Away
I honestly don’t know why I didn’t watch Halt and Catch Fire on AMC while it was airing from 2014 to 2017, but I finally started watching it while I’ve been in self-quarantine, and I kind of hate myself for not watching it earlier! The show completely blew me away. The story, the writing, the acting, everything about this show was top-notch work and after having just finished it, I will say it’s probably one of my favorite shows of all time.
The series takes place over the course of more than ten years and it depicts a fictional insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and later the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.
The title of the show refers to computer machine code instruction Halt and Catch Fire (HCF), the execution of which would cause the computer's central processing unit to stop working.
The series wasn’t a big hit while it was airing on AMC, it received a good amount of acclaim but the viewership was low. I’m sure glad that the show got at least four seasons to tell its story! It was created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers and the story was inspired by Cantwell's childhood in the Silicon Prairie of Dallas–Fort Worth, where his father worked as a software salesman along with the research they put into Texas's role in personal computing innovations of the 1980s.
I loved the characters the series introduced me to, and the actors who played them including Lee Pace as Joe MacMillan, Scoot McNairy as Gordon Clark, Mackenzie Davis as Cameron Howe, and Kerry Bishe as Donna Clark.
Season 1 focused on the company Cardiff Electric which makes its first foray into personal computing with the building of an IBM PC clone. Season 2 and 3 centered on a startup company called Mutiny which was building an online community. The fourth and final season focuses on competing for web search engines.
The series filled me with nostalgia, but more importantly, the story that was told with these characters was intense, moving, and simply beautiful.
When talking about the series writing, Rogers explained to AV Club that “the writers strove to use up [their] story fast rather than save the most dramatic moments for later.” Rogers explained that the uncertainty of the series's fate from season to season "reinforced a hold-nothing-back mindset in the storytelling". They wanted to advance the plot quickly enough that it would not be predictable. Rogers described their approach saying, "We want to put ourselves into corners and ask ourselves to write out of them." It was also explained that to “avoid depicting binary relationships between the characters of either getting along or fighting, the writers took different approaches to changing the dynamics between characters, such as creating new pairings.”
What they did totally worked and they ended up turning out a brilliant series. I especially loved how the story arcs for these characters played out.
If you haven’t watched Halt and Catch Fire yet, this is a series you’ve got to watch, especially if you’re into gaming and tech. If you have watched the series already, let us know what you thought about it below!