Halt and Catch Fire: Season 4

1993. The Internet is just starting to take off. Gordon Clark and Joe MacMillan have formed an early Internet Service Provider, CalNect, to help people access the web but decide to sell it when much bigger companies muscle into the scene. Inspired by Gordon's daughter, Haley, they set up a new web directory service, Comet, which rapidly takes off to the chagrin of Gordon's now ex-wife Donna, whose competing service Rover struggles to compete. Cameron returns to the USA to work on a video game, but soon finds herself drawn back to Joe as all the characters get mixed up in the birth of the Internet Age.

Over the course of three previous seasons, Halt and Catch Fire explored the explosion of personal computing in the USA, the creation of the earliest online networks and the realisation of what a digital future could hold. In the fourth season the characters are, for once, ahead of the curve and predict the rise of the Internet, enjoying considerable success in the process before they are beaten back by the arrival of mega-players like AOL.

As with previous seasons, the show works because it doesn't posit that the characters made all the key discoveries of the period. Instead they are shown as being part of a wider tech movement, with success coming to those who navigate the rocks and shoals of the nascent worldwide web or, more frequently, are luckily in the right place at the right time.

The arc of the season - and arguably the whole series - is about connections, the literal computer connections that drive the businesses and also about the relationships the characters have forged with one another and how those relationships will proceed. Donna is cut off from the rest of the characters for most of the season and it's interesting to see how differently she behaves when removed from the company of those who really know her. Joe has gotten over his "monumental arsehole" schtick from Season 3 and is firmly on Gordon's side throughout the season, which is good to see. The time jump - Season 4 spans most of 1993 and 1994, picking up more than three years after the previous season ended - also allows Gordon and Donna's children to become more important characters, particularly Haley (a superb performance by Susanna Skaggs), and contribute much more to events whilst also discovering their own identities.

The season unfolds much as the first three have, with problems arising, the characters facing them down and then a late-season twist putting them on a different path. This time the twist is much more powerful and profound, and resets the board, allowing them to face the next challenge.

What that challenge is, we don't know because the fourth season of Halt and Catch Fire was deliberately designed as its last. It's not important what happens to the character next, only that we know they go on and keep succeeding and keep thriving whilst leading inextricably to the modern age. Halt and Catch Fire's position as the most underrated drama of the 2010s feel secured because it is a show that knows when to focus on the technical and business sides of the story and when to engage in the emotional side of the characters. It is gripping and rewarding.

The fourth and final season of Halt and Catch Fire (*****) may be the finest season of the entire series (although it's a close tie with Season 2) and is compelling, addictive television. The series is available to watch now on Amazon Prime in the UK and USA.

Halt and Catch Fire: Season 3

1986. Nascent online community and games network Mutiny has left Texas and moved to San Francisco to be closer to the heart of the action. Joe McMillan is also in town, having set up his own antivirus company. Mutiny enjoys tremendous success, but the shape of its future direction becomes hotly debated between anarchic founder Cameron and cooler-headed businesswoman Donna, with Gordon feeling caught in the middle. With new hardware on the horizon and a visionary engineer in Europe working on connecting the world's different networks together, it's a time of great opportunity...and risk.

Halt and Catch Fire is the slow-burning AMC drama that was designed - at least in part - to fill the void left behind by the end of Mad Men, swapping the 1960s for the 1980s and guys in suits smoking cigarettes for a more varied bunch of geeks laying the foundation of the digital world we all now exist in. It certainly didn't replace Mad Men in terms of cultural cachet and audience popularity, although it certainly matched it in terms of sheer critical acclaim, and exceeded it in terms of being leaner and more focused.

The third season of Halt and Catch Fire sees almost the entire cast relocate to San Francisco, the sort of plot movement that feels a little contrived but is also not entirely unrealistic. During the real computer boom of the mid-1980s, entire companies did up sticks and move to Silicon Valley to be closer to the centre of the action. The season retains its focus on our five regulars from the first two seasons (Joe, Cameron, Donna, Gordon and Bos) but adds new characters in the form of Ryan (Manish Dayal), a Mutiny software engineer who decamps to Joe's company, and Diane (Annabeth Gish), a potential investor in the company.

The main storyline this season follows Mutiny's troubles as it tries to adjust to an increasingly crowded marketplace and the increasing tension between Cameron's desire to stay true to the company's independent, punky roots and Donna's wish to make the company more successful through standard business practices, such as opening the company to investment and considering potential buyers. Gordon, who is now working at Mutiny as an engineer, is somewhat caught in the middle, whilst Bos tries to placate all sides. In a mostly separate storyline, Joe has given up on his more caring, forgiving outlook from last season and has gone all-in on his ruthless business side, pushing his company to the heights of success at the cost of trampling on all his friends in the way.

This multi-pronged approach separates the characters for huge parts of the season, but last-minute, unexpected plot reversals bring things crashing down and the gang eventually starts reuniting to face new challenges, helped by a time skip to the dawn of the internet age. In just ten episodes, Halt and Catch Fire packs a huge amount into the season and keeps each storyline moving along swiftly.

In terms of overall quality, I didn't enjoy this season quite as much as Season 2. The characters are a bit too separated and Joe's transformation into a semi-paranoid, ruthless businessman feels a little too cliche and a little too close to the real behaviour of John McAffee. There are also moments when the business storyline with Cameron and Donna bogs down a little for an episode or two, whilst the show deals with Gordon's illness from Season 2 by mostly ignoring it, which feels like an odd choice. The fact that this is really an eight-episode season with a two-episode coda does help it regain focus, however, and once the characters are firing on all cylinders again it becomes compulsive viewing

The third season of Halt and Catch Fire (****½) has a few minor stumbling blocks, but overall is gripping and compelling television of the highest order. The series is available to watch now on Amazon Prime in the UK and USA.

Halt and Catch Fire: Season 2

Mid-1985. After releasing two models of the Cardiff Giant computer, Cardiff Electric is sold off and Gordon Clark gets a big payday. Joe MacMillan gets nothing. Rather than being annoyed by this, Joe moves on with his life and joins his new girlfriend's father's oil company. Donna and Cameron have started a software business, Mutiny, specialising in online gaming. The gang are inadvertently reunited when Joe hits on the idea of using the oil company's mainframe to set up network servers for online computing, and stress-tests it with Mutiny's service. What seems to be an equitable arrangement for all involved is then tested when the oil company CEO realises how much money could be made from this new field.

Halt and Catch Fire may be the longest-running example of the "mundane drama," a type of drama where everyday, relatively standard situations are turned into gripping stories where the stakes feel much higher than they really are (HBO's Show Me a Hero, about housing zoning disputes in 1980s Yonkers, may be the ultimate example of how to take something that sounds dull as dishwater and turns it into sheer brilliance). The 1980s period setting and the stories revolving around the creation of the foundation of the computer systems and networks we all use today do give added relevance to the premise.

The first season of Halt and Catch Fire was solid, but suffered a little from being not sure what direction to take with the tone. The show sometimes played things straight and sometimes went a bit weird, veering towards being an "8-bit Mr. Robot" without fully committing to that level of strangeness. Season 2 lands exactly where it wants to be, more offbeat and stylised than the first season but without going as fully strange as Mr. Robot and remaining fully accessible.

Season 2 instead, refreshingly, focuses on a contrite Joe as he tries to make amends for the things he did to his supposed friends in the first season and ends up helping them out...only to have the decisions taken out of his hands by his decidedly money-grubbing boss, Jacob (James Cromwell making you wonder why we haven't seen him playing more villains in his career). Joe's attempts to try to make things right inevitably lead to more disasters. This makes the viewer more sympathetic to Joe than in the first season, when most of the problems resulted from his own arrogance, and Lee Pace carries off the shift in character marvellously.

The rest of the cast does sterling work, especially Kerry Bishe and Mackenzie Davies as their software business runs into rocky waters and they try to negotiate the needs of a business with Cameron's desire to to stay true to her punk socialist roots. Scoot McNairy as Gordon does feel a little isolated from the rest of the cast, as the writers didn't want to have everyone involved in the same storyline, so Gordon gets to go off and do some soul-searching and self-discovery which is good for the character but also the only moments in which the show threatens to be anything less than brilliant in this run.

Events intensify as the season continues and more things go wrong than you could possibly imagine, until the series gets its first outstanding moment of awesome (set to a particularly accomplished Joy Division cover) and the plotting and character arcs come together in a fusion of storytelling that is magnificent to behold.

Halt and Catch Fire's second season (*****) is compelling, brilliantly-written and acted television. It does leave the question about where the series can go next, with the answer feeling perhaps a little contrived, but the series has certainly earned the viewer's trust in seeing if it can pull it off. The series is available to watch now on Amazon Prime in the UK and USA.

Halt and Catch Fire: Season 1

May, 1983. Ex-IBM sales executive Joe MacMillan joins Cardiff Electric, a software development company based in Austin, Texas. MacMillan has a remarkable ambition, to develop a PC that is a direct competitor to IBM. He recruits hardware engineer Gordon Clark and BIOS programmer Cameron Howe to help in the project, which soon involves cloning IBM's software (risking legal action in the process) and developing sophisticated and expensive new technology which threatens to bankrupt the business. But Joe's ambition will not be thwarted by costs or practicalities.

Halt and Catch Fire is almost certainly the most underrated drama series of the 2010s. Airing to small audiences on AMC, it completed its four season run by dint of being relatively cheap to make and to the critical kudos it picked up during its run, from 2014 to 2017. In the years since it went off the air, the show has picked up a lot more critical retrorespect but still hasn't quite permeated the audience consciousness even in the same way as, say, The Americans or Atlanta.

The show's relatively dull-sounding premise doesn't really help it. This is a period piece about the early (ish) days of the computer business, which doesn't really sound like the most exciting basis for an ongoing TV show. The cast is perhaps a bit more interesting. Lee Pace, hot off the press of playing Thranduil in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy and Ronan the Accuser in Guardians of the Galaxy and poised for a big Hollywood movie career, signed up to Halt and Catch Fire after working on those projects, a sign of his regard for the scripts. Mackenzie Davis was less well-known before working on the show, but it certainly helped her career develop, with roles in Blade Runner 2049, Terminator: Dark Fate and arguably Black Mirror's most popular episode, San Junipero, all following.

The first season of Halt and Catch Fire starts off feeling a bit more like Mad Men but in the 1980s with more computers and less advertising, with Pace's smooth advertising exec Joe MacMillan coming across like Don Draper with added bisexuality. The show rapidly moves away from that, instead leaning into more of a slightly offbeat tone that gets more pronounced and more interesting through the show's run, becoming a bit more of an 8-bit Mr. Robot. It never goes as full intense-weird as that show though, remaining grounded throughout its run. It's this tone of being a traditional drama but with one tone in the oddball, accessible but occasionally weird, that makes the show interesting.

The performances of the four leads make the show work. Joe is smooth, slicked back and confident, but masks a more troubled family background and issues with commitment. Pace finds additional layers of the character which make him more relatable although not always sympathetic: Joe is a seriously damaged human being and it's to both the writers and Pace's credit that they avoid slipping into cliche. Scoot McNairy provides an able foil in the role of Gordon, a more hands-on practical engineer and family man who lacks Joe's big picture vision as he is more of a details guy. Kerry Bishé provides excellent support as Gordon's wife Donna (the two re-teaming as a husband-and-wife couple from the movie Argo), whose character rapidly expands from that of supporting character to co-lead. The show flirts with traditional relationship drama when delving into their marriage but expertly finds new ways of exploring the oldest of relationship ideas in the show. The central quartet is rounded out by Mackenzie Davis's Cameron, a loose cannon genius programmer with commitment and addiction issues who at first might make the viewer wince due to being a walking bag of tropes, but rapidly becomes a far more interesting character thanks again to the writers and Davis finding extra depths in the role.

At just ten episodes, the first season moves relatively quickly and presents our protagonists with fresh challenges every week. The stakes feel kind of low overall - at no point in the series is anyone's life in danger, for example - but the financial implications for the company and the people who work there are ramped up and the show makes it clear that the livelihoods of hundreds of people are on the line.

Events come together and it feels like the ending might be a little too neat, probably a result of renewal not being seen as certain (or even likely, for such a niche premise). But fortunately Halt and Catch Fire did gets its later seasons, which number among some of the finest of the decade. This first season (****) is a slow burner but rewards the patient viewer. It is available to watch now on Amazon Prime in the UK and USA.