Halt and Catch Fire

I'm just getting started on this, up to the 5th episode I think, and finding it thoroughly mediocre. Some promise to start but just getting really boring and predictable. Punk girl is awful, Mr. Slick is pretty bad. Gordon is fine, he's not wildly overplaying the role like the other two.

Plus the neighbor's Matthew McConaughey impression is distracting.

I did "eenie meanie minie moe" between this show and Fargo on my DVR when deciding what to watch.

I think I lost.





Not really fair. It's not a bad show. Just....disappointing.

I love it as a period drama and as a pseudo history of the PC industry. I kinda hope they reel in more of the actual history and less of the groany wife/overgrown emokid thing tho. I get that the angsty judd-nelson-in-breakfast-club character is EXACTLY as 80's as cans of Tab, but can they keep to maybe 5 mins of each episode MAX? For a while there the engineer wife was one of my favorite characters until they decided to have her raise the bitter feminist battleflag and start cuckolding Gordon.

Definitely needs more computer focus, less stupid personal drama. Hoping the Comdex trip can redeem the season.

This is a weird show. I really don't care at all about the characters but watch it for the computer shit. Every time I see the guy who plays the CEO all I can see is this.

Seriously? I just assumed everyone saw the same thing as me.



Nobody beats me...I'm the Wiz!

So this show isn't really worth the time? I've got every episode downloaded so far, but haven't gotten around to watching. I may just take it off my auto-download for now.

Compared to what's airing right now? It's better than Leftovers and True Blood so yeah it's actually not bad. It's reasonably smart and it's obviously targetted at folks who remember fights breaking out over cabbage patch kids, people smashing up Toshibas at anti-japanese rallies, and New Wave synthpop bands. If you were born after 1985 it would probably just irritate you.

My dad was an army contractor and had produced one of the very first flight simulators on an IBM 8086 with a cga graphics card and a turbo button to boost it to 4 mhz I think lol. So for me the show kind of brings back some nostalgia from my early days using MS-Dos and copying basic code out of magazines, the power of my 300 baud modem and hacking a local BBS and having the owner call and complain to my parents about it. Good times.

The problem is it's based around something inherently boring to watch, programming and PC hardware stuff. So the characters and story have to be really interesting to carry it. But the programmer girl is just so so bad...

And the random inspiration epiphany shit. Which is a staple of dramas but it's just so out of nowhere stupid random. "Oh, you named your flashlights? PUNK GIRL WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE OS NEEDING TO BEHAVE LIKE A PERSON!"

Silicon Valley did pretty well despite being based around programming. Then again, it went the comedy angle.

The big epiphany in Silicon Valley was Optimal Tip to Tip Efficiency. The best TV epiphany of all time.

See, that's a great example. Silicon Valley would be less interesting to folks who don't get valley-culture corporate cults, videogame references and stupid techcrunch San Francisco antics. But it's pretty much a lock for everyone who's got this forum on their browser history.

I actually caught on this show in a Game of Thrones viewing at a bar. It aired right after the episode and most folks actually sat and watched as opposed to go home or just revert to usual bar behavior--but you can literally spot the tech folks from the crowd since there were awkward silences in most jokes but the two or three neckbearded ruby nerds who got them would fall off their stools laughing.

I get the same sense with Halt and Catch fire... the human drama isn't interesting enough to people who would be captivated by better offerings but the attention to period detail around the era of the garage tech scene is pretty cool for folks who lived through it.

No, Silicon Valley is just hilarious. You don't need a some kind of degree to laugh at Erlich slapping the shit out of a kid or the group of them earnestly debating optimal handjob technique. I used those 2 scenes to get plenty of people in to the show who are miles out of the imaginary group who can enjoy it. If you have to be deeply embedded in the culture of a show to "like" it, the show is shit or so niche it should be on a special channel dedicated to that.

I was thinking about it and I decided maybe the biggest problem with Halt and Catch Fire is that it's almost completely devoid of humor.Everyinteraction is so deadly serious and weighty, the show is just so far up it's own ass. Maybe the most memorable scene for me was the one genuine funny scene so far, when Bosworth called all the coders in to his office all angry sounding and it was just to help him get out of the cave in the text adventure game they installed. Funny. You need that, a show can't just be deadly serious all the time. Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Justified, on and on the list goes of dramatic shows that had plenty of humor in them.

My lady friend absolutely loves Silicon Valley. And she's as far away from being part of the "core demographic" for that show as possible. I think you underestimate the general funnies it delivers, khorum.

This ending after one season would be fine IMO unless they went with completely new characters for season two as the current cast is fairly played out by this point.

It IS kinda hard where they'd go after the mac.... maybe they DO go to palo alto and next season is about a fake Sun Microsystems-like company? Maybe they watch Jobs get fired and join him in Next. Hard to imagine a show built around the Unix wars tho haha.

Maybe they'll end up running old school BBSs and end up starting one of the early ISPs.... they did kinda hint about that in the pilot when Joe asked Cameron where she thought computers were going.