The Best TV Drama You Didn’t Watch Is on Netflix
In the age of “prestige TV,” it can feel almost impossible to miss a great show. Even if you wanted to avoid watching Game of Thrones or The Handmaid’s Tale, every website you go to has recaps and your social media feeds are full of spoilers. But, judging by the dismal ratings, there’s a good chance that you missed Halt and Catch Fire, a truly excellent show about computer programmers and engineers in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that recently finished its four season run on AMC. Luckily for you, the whole thing is streaming on Netflix.
The follow-up to the most ambitious nature documentary ever is now streaming.
Halt and Catch Fire stretches from about the introduction of the Macintosh in 1983 to the launch of Yahoo! In 1994. It follows four characters who are at the forefront of the emerging fields of personal computing, video games, and internet browsing. (The somewhat odd name of the show is a reference to early computer code that shut down CPUs.) Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) is a Steve Jobs-style visionary, Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) is the wiz kid coder, and Gordon (Scoot McNairy) and Donna Clark (Kerry Bishé) are talented engineers. But Halt and Catch Fire doesn’t insert its characters Forrest Gump style into the past, having them simply create the technologies we use today. Instead, the genius of the show is in evoking the exciting atmosphere of these fields while showing how even brilliant and forward-thinking people can fail. This makes the show feel accurate both accurate to its subject matter (most startups fail, better tech loses out to market share, etc.), but true to, well, life.
If there is a little snag with Halt and Catch Fire, it’s that the first season is easily the weakest. It’s not bad by any means, but the show is still finding its footing and the focus on early personal computer hardware isn’t as interesting as the later seasons focus on online gaming, chat rooms, and the birth of the world wide web. The first may feel like the show is trying to be “Mad Men, but with computers” while the later seasons program something new. But this also means that Halt and Catch Fire is one of those rare shows that gets better and better every season.
Another reason the show takes off in the second season is that it shifts focus from the two men to the two women. Clark and Howe are the most fascinating characters, and their partnership and struggles anchor the show in the final three seasons (it also provides a nice contrast to the how male the tech world is typically portrayed). All four of the leads are fantastic, especially in the last three seasons, as is the surrounding cast that includes Toby Huss, James Cromwell, and Annabeth Gish. Halt and Catch Fire may be a show about technology, but the focus is on the characters. Each of the four leads grows and deepens with each season, and if you stick to the end you’ll be sad to see them go.
