5 ms·

First time I'm hearing about it. According to Wikipedia the show is well loved but just didn't get much viewership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catc

• Barrin92 6y ago
  fantastic show. For people who like the 80s/90s tech setting as well as just a plain good drama.
• fossuser 6y ago
  It's really great and one of the rare ones that's great until the end, and it ends purposefully and well. My only comment about it is the first handful of episodes are the weakest. After the first half of the first season they tone down the Joe MacMillan character to be less of a kind of over the top trope anti-hero and more of a real character with depth and things get better. They're not bad early on, but you'd probably notice that and it's worth watching anyway.
  • tompagenet2 6y ago
    I totally agree with this, and it marks the first series for me a bit. The setting and concept are great, but Joe is a pastiche and until they calm his character down he's not very believable. He gets too much screen time and the expense of other, better characters. As you say, it's not bad, just it hasn't grown into itself. The last series is both excellent and poignant. The group always being just a bit too early with their ideas creates a sense of innovation but it's also tinged with failure which I think really works.
    • itsoktocry 6y ago
      >Joe is a pastiche and until they calm his character down he's not very believable Whether is was intentional or not, I think the way Joe moves into a more "believable" role worked well from a character development standpoint. Like, the cookie-cutter sales person isn't going to fly in SV (or Texas), and he was fooling himself anyway.
  • allenu 6y ago
    Thanks for the info about the Joe MacMillan character. I watched a few episodes of the first season and could not get past him. His character just rubbed me the wrong way. I'll give the show another try.
• imagica 6y ago
  It is a captivating show but after watching the first series I had to give up halfway through the second. Modern TV shows are cool but take too much, I wish I could watch the compressed version. After the first series the tropes become quite unpredictable and things start taking turns just because they need filler. I grew up in the 80s and this show brought back some memories and filled in some gaps. I'd definitely recommend the first series.
  • whoisthemachine 6y ago
    Highly recommend continuing to watch it, in my mind it really only improves over the course of the four seasons, though I'm sure there were some ups and downs. The last couple of episodes of the final season did strike me as being bizarrely out of touch technologically (for the show, which generally got things pretty close to right), but I figured the writers were spending more time wrapping up the human elements of the show than focusing on getting the technology right.
    • imagica 6y ago
      Thanks, I'll give it a try next time I'm binging.
  • rhino369 6y ago
    I'll give an opposite impression. I thought the first season was sort of a paint by numbers Mad Men rip off focused on tech rather than adverting. S2 gets its own story that is very enjoyable.
    • hellotomyrars 6y ago
      You're pretty much spot on, by the writers own admission. At first, "What matters?" was a question the show's creators themselves couldn't answer. When Cantwell and Chris Rogers wrote the pilot for Halt and Catch Fire, they had little in mind but jumping on board one of the shows they already liked. "We're both in our early 30s, so the shows that made us wanna do this were the great 'difficult men' shows: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire," Rogers says. "We wrote the pilot in a way that was set up to ape them: Joe McMillan is a traditional antihero, and the world is organized around him in that way." But when the pilot was bought by AMC for production, rather than simply used as a staffing script to land "The Chrises" (as Halt's cast and crew universally call them) in a writers' room for a preexisting series, things changed. "As we got in there and started doing it, we had a writers' groove. We figured out what was our voice, as opposed to the voice that felt like it was emulating the shows we liked." https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a47905/halt-and-catch-fire-season-three-amc/ https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a47905/halt-and-cat... In many ways it's the opposite of what I feel like happens to most shows where they have extensively planned and worked on their first season because it's a multi-year effort in the making and then when they get renewed (if they get renewed) they have to figure out where to take it in a fraction of a time that they'd never really planned for.
• TuringNYC 6y ago
  Highly recommend watching it all the way thru. I think it is great drama, but to deeply appreciate it, you have to be in the industry or know about it -- to realize how accurate the show is, and that is a smaller market of viewers. And w/r/t accuracy, I dont mean technical accuracy but rather the characters types, the ups-and-downs of startups, the failures, etc.
• Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  Wonder if the show was an experiment in hyperfocused advertising delivery. What would it be worth to certain advertisers to know that Steve Woznick and a dozen other billionaire tech geeks would see their ads? The viewership numbers weren't great and I was happily surprised to see it renewed each season, wondering how AMC could justify the budget for something with such low viewership. But maybe the rates they charged advertisers were high due to the show being narrowly targeted to a particular demographic that's wealthy. The rest of us got to come along on the ride mostly for free. I seem to remember the show having more advertisements for luxury goods than usual for an AMC show.
• Bayart 6y ago
  It got just about the running time it needed. Not too short, not too long. In that respect it's a success.