AMC’s Mad Men finale left a void in its’ programming but the network’s new show, Halt and Catch Fire, has swooped into to offer us a new retrospective drama. From the alarm clocks to the coffee pots to a colourful set of encyclopaedias, the Halt and Catch Fire aesthetic showcases the big metal boats our parents drove. It harkens to a simpler time before America discovered the power of a personal computer and hooked it up to a phone line. With its backdrop in the mid-80s, anyone in their early thirties to mid-forties will feel at home in this series about revolutionary techies who are driving the change towards the information age. It is a story about the journey of the silicon pioneers who pave their way in uncharted territory, pushing the boundaries of both the tech and business worlds.

The series kicks off in 1983 when Joe MacMillan arrives in Dallas after years of work at the giant IBM which, at the time, has a strong hold in the computer market. He convinces Gordon Clark (the Steve Wozniak to his Steve Jobs) not to sit passively at his Corporate Sales job but to re-explore the Open Architecture model of computing he had been inspired to write about as a student at Berkeley. Together with a post-punk female computer programming student named Cameron Howe, they set out to clone an IBM personal computer and remake it in revolutionary ways. Whether the geeky world of computer programmers is for you, the counter-culture of the time at odds with the corporate demands of a go to market plan should be enough to keep you engaged for the first ten episodes.
In season two, the future is now, and the story enthrals us. Cameron and a group of programmers have gone rogue and are unwittingly building the infrastructure of  websites while organizing around what they love – games, sci-fi and post-punk music. The soundtrack is a different post altogether. ‘Mutiny’ will face another corporate Goliath who wants to swallow all the work their young company has put into building its user base. What is interesting in the second season is seeing how early tech companies come together around a shared purpose, working together for a collective goal. Anyone who has worked at a startup or a growing company knows the emphasis placed on culture and HCF shows us why.
It is not just the visuals that we recognise ourselves in but the characters, who help embody the changing times through the navigation of relationships outside the nuclear family and an America that is betrothed to corporate culture. We start to appreciate how the tinkerers and experimenters of the time created portable computers while giving birth to peer-to-peer network connections; the precursor to the technology that let me watch this series by streaming it over fiber optic cables. Unlike Mad Men where the Alpha Male reigned, Halt and Catch Fire shows two strong women in the workforce. The series explores the toll this change takes on the family, and on relationship dynamics. The female characters have seemingly left behind any guilt complex they have for choosing a career but that doesn’t mean they are not expected to manage the majority of the child rearing and house work.
The show is not perfect. Sometimes characters come across as archetypal (especially in the first season) and there are definitely some run away story lines but if you can survive that, you will ‘Halt and Catch Fire‘ and binge watch the two seasons to get up to date.  It has the potential to be much more than a guilty pleasure. AMC manages to create believable characters who you root for despite their short-comings. It is a recipe they’ve cooked up before but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t indulge.

 

Watch Halt and Catch Fire.