![]() The other principals felt similarly typecast: rebellious programming prodigy Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) dweeby engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) Gordon’s wife, Donna (Kerry Bishé), equally knowledgeable but saddled with the additional burden of work-life balance. Its antihero, Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), was a blazer-clad, sports-car-driving, Gordon Gekko’d version of Don Draper. Halt’s pilot aired exactly a week after Mad Men’s midseason finale, even inheriting its prime, Sunday-night time slot. When Halt started, the show was criticized (or, as the ratings showed, simply overlooked) for how closely its setup hewed to an obvious template, made all the more obvious by the originator of that template still airing new episodes on the same network. Rewatching parts of the first season a few weeks ago, I was struck by how the early episodes’ weakest points have, over time, developed into the series’ greatest strengths. Yet knowing where Halt started is essential to understanding how far it’s come. No, you don’t have to watch the first season-but you should watch the next three, or else you’re missing out on a prime example of what happens when TV’s potential for long-term, character-driven storytelling is taken full advantage of. The story of the modern tech industry’s beginnings, told through the personal and professional lives of four hopelessly complicated people, is one of the best shows on television, full stop. In 2017, Halt’s success no longer comes with caveats. As Rogers points out, we’ve now had years to steep ourselves in the fully realized version of Halt: the story of messy, stubborn, ultimately sympathetic adults stumbling their way toward a changed world. On the eve of its home stretch, Halt and Catch Fire has long since outgrown the “copycat prestige turned groundbreaking television” narrative it’s been saddled with since 2015, when the period drama returned for Year 2 with a new setting, a reshuffled ensemble, and a reconsidered sensibility. I think the beautiful thing about the fourth season is, we know these guys now.” “The sense of having lived with these characters has let them become real for four seasons. Rogers says of Halt and Catch Fire, the drama he cocreated with Christopher Cantwell that returns for its fourth and final season this Saturday on AMC. During their search, they’ll struggle with the dark side of the human ego, the destructive power of ambition, and the often thin line separating genius from delusion.“I think if you watch the show from the beginning, you can feel it morphing from what it starts as into what it ultimately becomes,” Christopher C. Rather, it’s about people at war with themselves as they search for something bigger. ![]() The show is not just about the ruthless rise of the computer business, or the obsessive striving for competitive advantage in the marketplace. MacMillan, Gordon and Cameron form an alliance at the smaller (fictional) tech company, Cardiff Giant, infiltrating it from within and using its people and resources to revolutionize the computer, shake up the competition and redeem their past personal failures. IBM has released the first PC and is seemingly dominating the cutthroat field. The series begins in the early 80s in Dallas, aka The Silicon Prairie, during the boom of the computer industry. Tensions build within the group as they tread the line between visionary and fraud, genius and delusion, as their drive to do something that matters runs up against their ability to truly innovate. At the dawn of the PC era, 3 unlikely “cowboys,” Joe MacMillan, Gordon Clark and Cameron Howe, take personal and professional risks in the race to build a breakthrough computer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |