

- Halt and catch fire season 1 professional#
- Halt and catch fire season 1 series#
- Halt and catch fire season 1 tv#
It’s rife with professional deceptions and ill-advised secrets and not-so-little tastes of workplace misogyny.

Billed as a prestige office drama set at the dawn of the age of personalized computing in the 1980s, the show features talented-but-troubled men in a male-dominated profession, an industry on the brink of monumental change, and a drab office enlivened by the hustle and bustle of its main players. When you watch the first season of AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, you can see why it’s no surprise that, early in its run, it drew multiple comparisons to Mad Men.
Halt and catch fire season 1 tv#
Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
Halt and catch fire season 1 series#
And he slips into the shadows once more.Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. In the final scene we learn that Joe’s Sputnik and football story is bunk. We’d found a motive maybe Joe really is moved by technical progress, by a desire to see through the logic of Moore’s Law. “We’re all unreasonable people and progressĭepends on our changing the world to fit us, mot the other way around,” he preaches.Ĭorny Joe got me at the end. Now he carries the scars of his misunderstood youth - and in Gordon and Cameron, he’s finally found two sympathetic souls. On the night of the greatest game ever played, his merciless classmatesĬhased him off a roof. Joe confesses that when he was a kid he cared about Sputnik, not football. This sets off an elaborate story in which Joe oozes geeky zeal. After Joe and Gordon scuffle, Joe’s shirt is conveniently ripped off, baring a torso covered in scars. This gets us to the penultimate scene, a three-way showdown of fisticuffs between Joe, Gordon and Cameron. He looks wounded by the idea that he doesn’t really care about what he’s building after all. But his face sinks when Cameron laughs off his passion as insincere. A computer that’s faster than IBM’s will let people accomplish more a computer that’s cheaper willīe used by more people. Joe makes a stab at explaining his rationale, and for a moment he looks taken with real passion. What other industry keeps improving its product As Gordon points out, when most products get better, they don’t also get cheaper. That serves to highlight the economic gall that animates the computer industry. In another scene, Joe outlines for Gordon and Cameron the machine he wants to build - a computer that’s twice as fast as the competition’s, but which sells for half the price. What happens when they find out what you really are.” Subtlety isn’t this show’s strong suit. When Joe refuses, his old colleague threatens, “let’s Let’s see Apparently IBM’s human resources reps aren’t sticklers, though, because the company offers him his job back. In a strange encounter he has with a former IBM colleague, we learn that Joe caused $2 million of damage to the company’s servers when he left theįirm. Just a salesman, as Cameron dismissively labels him? Or is he motivated by something other than money or the chance to get back at his former employer?Įvery answer we get in this episode only spawns more questions. Joe is no technical genius, and until the last few moments of the episode, there isn’t much evidence that he even cares about the technical capabilities of the device he’s building. Why is he so bent on copying IBM’s machine? Unlike Gordon and Cameron, These were scenes from a rote procedural if it feels like you’ve seen these characters before, it’s because you have.īut there’s an added layer here, a dollop of mystery that keeps the show from sinking into cliché. And Joe offersĪ hypey pitch for the company’s workers that concludes with a Steve Jobs-like ian plea to “put a ding in the universe.” A whiteboard capturing the insane scribblings of a mathematical breakthrough becomes a major turning point in the plot. Pizza and plays noisy punk as she tries to puzzle out a programming dilemma.
