Halt and Catch Fire is an American period drama television series created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers that aired on AMC from June 1, 2014, to October 14, 2017. Taking place over a period of ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized 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 show's title refers to computer machine code instruction HCF, the execution of which would cause the computer's central processing unit to stop working ("catch fire" was a humorous exaggeration).
In season one, entrepreneur Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) joins the company Cardiff Electric and leads them into the personal computing industry with computer engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and prodigy programmer Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis). Seasons two and three shift focus to an online community startup company, Mutiny, that is headed by Cameron and Gordon's wife Donna (Kerry Bishé), while Joe attempts to venture out on his own. The fourth and final season focuses on competing web search engines involving all the principal characters. Filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, the series is set in the Silicon Prairie of Dallas-Fort Worth for its first two seasons, and Silicon Valley for its latter two.
Though it experienced low viewership ratings throughout its run, Halt and Catch Fire debuted to generally favorable reviews and grew in acclaim in each subsequent season.
Video Halt and Catch Fire (TV series)
Production and development
Halt and Catch Fire was created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers. The two met while working at the Walt Disney Company. Cantwell's online movie company was acquired by Disney and he was moved into its marketing department, while Rogers was hired by Cantwell's team to manage Disney's editorial program for social media. After a year of working together, they learned that each had graduated from screenwriting programs in college--Cantwell from the University of Southern California as an undergraduate student, and Rogers from the University of California, Los Angeles as a graduate student. Rogers referred to himself and Cantwell as "dream-deferred writers". In August 2010, the two agreed to partner with each other on screenwriting, and their first script together, a pilot about the assassination of John F. Kennedy called The Knoll, landed on the Black List of unproduced screenplays. It also solidified the relationship with their talent agents, who urged them to work on another script that they could use as a staffing sample. Since it was unreasonable to expect a network to option a script from two first-time writers, the intent was to use the staffing sample to land them entry-level writing positions in the industry. Consequently, their agents advised them to write something they were personally invested in.
As Cantwell and Rogers brainstormed for their staffing sample, Cantwell recalled his childhood in Plano, Texas, where his father moved their family in 1982 to take a job as a systems software salesman. As a child, he had been unaware of Texas' role in the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, but after speaking to his father and researching the era with Rogers, they learned how the Silicon Prairie of Dallas-Fort Worth (in which Plano was located) became a secondary technology hub behind California's Silicon Valley. Companies in the Silicon Prairie included Texas Instruments, EDS, Tandy, and RadioShack, while elsewhere in Texas, Dell (in Austin) and Compaq (in Houston) also were prominent players in the PC industry. Executive producer Jonathan Lisco said, "[Texas] was viewed by a lot of people at the time, per our research, as sort of a catch basin for people who had not succeeded [in Silicon Valley]. On the other hand, there was a lot of wonderful tech going on here." Cantwell said that he and Rogers were intrigued by the lesser-known players and settings: "We wanted to find the place you didn't know. Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, IBM, Microsoft, all those stories and companies have been exploited dramatically to great effect." During their research, Cantwell and Rogers came across stories of computer engineers taking risks in attempting to reverse engineer the IBM PC. These stories informed their script for the Halt and Catch Fire pilot, which the two conceived in January 2011. As the duo wrote the pilot, Cantwell left Disney; Rogers remained until the future of their project was assured.
Cantwell's and Rogers' agents liked the script but were not optimistic about their chances of selling it. Nonetheless, they sent it to several television networks, leading to meetings with HBO and Showtime, none of which proved fruitful. In late 2011, the writers met with AMC; by that point, Cantwell had been out of work for five months and was quickly depleting his savings. He and Rogers were surprised to find that the AMC executives had a copy of their script on hand in the meeting. One of the executives, Ben Davis, said: "We were really interested in trying to tap into that world -- into the spirit of innovation, and the tech world specifically. I loved the idea that it took place in Dallas and that I didn't hear Steve Jobs' or Bill Gates' name. It approached it from the backdoor instead of straight ahead." After a second meeting to discuss how Cantwell and Rogers would flesh out their story, AMC ordered the pilot for Halt and Catch Fire in November 2012. Production began in April 2013 in Atlanta, Georgia. Halt and Catch Fire was Cantwell's and Rogers' first jobs in television; Cantwell said, "The first writers' room we walked into was our own."
AMC announced in July 2013 that it had ordered Halt and Catch Fire to a series of ten episodes. Jonathan Lisco was named as the series' showrunner, having just concluded three seasons as executive producer on the television drama series Southland. For research, the production staff and cast studied Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, Tracy Kidder's book The Soul of a New Machine, and Robert X. Cringely's documentary Triumph of the Nerds. Industry veteran Carl Ledbetter, who worked at IBM, AT&T Consumer Products, and Sun Microsystems, served as the show's technical adviser. In addition to reviewing early scripts for authenticity, Ledbetter helped operate props on set, controlling lights on a breadboard from underneath a table or hand feeding a printout through a dot matrix printer. At the series' onset, much of the vintage computer props were obtained on eBay or from private collectors. Many props were also borrowed from the Rhode Island Computer Museum. From season two onwards, the series' staff collaborated with the Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle to obtain vintage equipment. One prop that could not be sourced was an IBM 3033 mainframe computer, requiring a replica to be built in consultation with Living Computers using original plans from IBM's archives. Halt and Catch Fire premiered on June 1, 2014. The pilot episode was the only one distributed to critics for review, an uncommon practice for new series, which usually make multiple episodes available upon premiering.
The first season drew modest overall viewership; according to Nielsen data, the series averaged 1.3 million viewers per episode in live plus 7-day ratings when accounting for time shifting. In the 18-49 age demographic, the season averaged 606,000 viewers per episode, making it among the "most upscale dramas on ad-supported television" behind Mad Men and The Good Wife, according to AMC. Despite the ratings, AMC renewed the show in August 2014 for a second season of ten episodes. The network's president Charlie Collier said, "We have a history of demonstrating patience through the early seasons of new shows, betting on talent and building audience over time." Season two premiered on May 31, 2015, and concluded on August 2, 2015.
Despite the critical acclaim that season two garnered, viewership declined. Still, AMC renewed the series in October 2015 for a 10-episode third season. The network's president of original programming and development Joel Stillerman said, "The critical momentum was a big part of the decision." Lisco stepped down as showrunner after the second season, with Cantwell and Rogers taking over the role for the third season. The first episode of season three aired on August 21, 2016, ahead of the two-hour season premiere on August 23, 2016. AMC renewed Halt and Catch Fire for a fourth and final season of 10 episodes on October 10, 2016. The final season began with a two-hour premiere on August 19, 2017, and concluded with a two-hour series finale on October 14, 2017.
Maps Halt and Catch Fire (TV series)
Cast
Main cast
- Lee Pace as Joe MacMillan: A technology entrepreneur and former IBM sales executive. He joins Cardiff Electric where he provides the impetus for the IBM clone. Later in the series, he initiates projects involving time-sharing, NSFNET, antivirus software, a web browser and a search engine. He has limited technical expertise and has a difficult relationship with other characters, including a complicated romantic relationship with Cameron Howe, and he is estranged from his parents.
- Scoot McNairy as Gordon Clark: A computer engineer who is selected by Joe MacMillan to build the IBM clone in the first season after Joe reads an article Clark has written on open architecture. Motivated about the failure of Symphonic, a computer he created with his wife Donna, Gordon works with Joe to build the hardware for the new computer. He suffers from a degenerative brain disorder caused by toxic encephalopathy throughout the later seasons and the breakdown of his marriage.
- Mackenzie Davis as Cameron Howe (born Catherine Howe): A technology prodigy who is recruited from university by Joe MacMillian to write the BIOS for the IBM clone. She later forms her own gaming company Mutiny with Donna Clark and creates Space Bike, a successful video game series for Atari. Her father died in the Vietnam War and she has a difficult relationship with her mother.
- Kerry Bishé as Donna Clark (née Emerson): A computer engineer and wife of Gordon. She originally works for Texas Instruments, before joining Mutiny to support Cameron. After Mutiny, she becomes a partner in a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Donna is shown to put her own ambition above her relationships, particularly the one she has with Cameron.
- Toby Huss as John Bosworth: The senior VP of Cardiff Electric who hired Joe at Cardiff. At the end of the first season, he is incarcerated for illegally funding the PC project. He is shown to be a good salesman and in season 2 he works for Mutiny. He sees himself as a father figure to Cameron Howe.
- Aleksa Palladino as Sara Wheeler (season 2): A freelance journalist and Joe's girlfriend during season 2.
Recurring cast
Episodes
Distribution
The pilot was screened at the South by Southwest festival on March 8, 2014. It was also made available online for streaming on AMC's Tumblr page beginning May 19, 2014, making it the first TV series to premiere on Tumblr.
Home media
The first season was released on DVD and Blu-ray in region 1 on May 5, 2015. The second season was released on DVD in region 1 on August 9, 2016.
Season 1 was released on Netflix and AMC.com for home streaming on April 8, 2015, for a limited time. It is also available on Amazon Video in the UK and Germany. As of December 2017, all four seasons are streaming on Netflix.
International
The series premiered in Australia on June 23, 2015, on Showcase. The series also appears on AMC's international channels in Asia, Europe and Latin America.
Reception
Critical response
The first season received favorable reviews from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the first season received an average score of 69, based on 31 reviews. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the first season a 78% rating with an average score of 7.27 out of 10 based on 40 reviews; the site's consensus said, "A refreshingly well-acted period drama, Halt and Catch Fire convincingly portrays the not-too-distant past." Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe said the series premiere showed promise, writing: "it's easy to see why the network chose it. Set in Dallas in 1983, it has a distinctive visual style... it digs into material that has not already been done to death elsewhere on TV. And with a pair of unfamiliar and interesting lead actors, the show might be able to delve beneath the surface of its milieu." Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter called the opening episode a "triumphant pilot with excellent writing, impressive acting and a noteworthy cinematic visual style". Although cautious about how the show would evolve beyond its premiere, Goodman said, "It's a premise with possibilities and could be AMC's best offering of the post-classics (Breaking Bad, Mad Men) era." Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times said that although the pilot "doesn't hit the gloriously high bar set by the opening episode of Mad Men, it is provocative and promising nonetheless." Reviewing several episodes, Chris Cabin of Slant Magazine said "the show's creators choose to tailor the series to focus on the enigmatic MacMillan, which might explain why Halt and Catch Fire comes off as overtly coy and more than a little aimless". The review concluded by calling the show "a hungry anticipation for what machines can and will do, but it only has a cursory interest in the complex humans that built them." Alan Sepinwall of Uproxx believed the series was derivative of others and made an analogy to its plotline of reverse engineering the IBM PC, calling Halt and Catch Fire "a series that has not only been reverse-engineered from past cable drama hits, but that seems acutely aware of that fact." Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club echoed these sentiments, writing that the pilot "feels like the network trying to reverse engineer... its success with Mad Men". VanDerWerff, though, said that "the pilot moves with a kind of confidence that's hard to fake" and that it has "some intriguing direction from Juan José Campanella that turns both the human face and circuit boards into things to be broken down into component parts and understood."
The second season received generally positive reviews, with some critics noting the series had improved since the first season. On Metacritic, the season has a score of 73 out of 100 based on 8 reviews. Rotten Tomatoes gave the second season a 90% rating with an average score of 8.32 out of 10, based on 20 reviews, with the critical consensus noting "Halt and Catch Fire version 2.0 has received some upgrades and improvements, including a welcome focus on its female leads." Sepinwall gave it a very positive review, calling the performances "terrific" and wrote that "those who stayed patient with Halt season 1, or those who come to the show now that the quality has gone up significantly, will be rewarded." Willa Paskin of Slate wrote that the series has "become a different, better show". James Poniewozik of Time also gave it a positive review, writing that the series has improved in many ways.
The third season received critical acclaim. On Metacritic, the season has a score of 83 out of 100 based on 12 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Rotten Tomatoes gave the third season a 96% rating with an average score of 8.62 out of 10, based on 23 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads "Halt and Catch Fire finds its footing in an optimistic third season that builds on the fascinating relationship between a pair of emerging protagonists."
The fourth season received the strongest reviews of any season of the series. On Metacritic, the season has a score of 92 out of 100 based on 8 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 100% approval rating with an average score 9.53 out of 10 based on 24 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads, "Halt and Catch Fire's character-driven drama culminates in an optimistic ode to the early internet age that's bound to stand the test of time." Many publications ranked the fourth season among the best television series of 2017 on their end-of-year lists; The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Vox Media shortlisted it on their lists of best TV shows, while two critics at Variety included it in their top five, Uproxx ranked it third-best, The A.V. Club and Forbes fifth-best, IndieWire seventh-best, Paste ninth-best, Rolling Stone 13th-best, and The Guardian 39th-best.
Accolades
Viewership ratings
References
External links
- Official website
- Halt and Catch Fire on IMDb
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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