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With the possible exception of The Wire, I think Halt and Catch
Fire is the best modern TV drama I’ve watched. Created by Christopher
Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers, at first glance it looks a bit like a
Madmen knock off (which is quite possibly what it was intended as). It starts in the 80s, when maverick IT visionary Joe
MacMillan (Lee Pace), having left IBM under a mysterious cloud, arrives at Cardiff
Electrical, a small Texas electronics firm, and persuades them to try and
produce a portable computer. Into this project he draws punk
programming prodigy Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), and a young married couple, Donna and
Gordon Clark, (Kerry Bishé and Scoot McNairy) who once failed at a
similar project and are now nursing their wounds and raising their
daughters while Gordon works fairly sullenly as an engineer for Cardiff.
It may not sound like a promising dramatic situation, especially to
those of us who don’t know the first thing about technology, but as it
develops, Halt... becomes astonishingly compulsive viewing, and grows
from a story about the small lives of a few characters to a portrait of a whole industry
and the way it transformed our world. As season follows season and the
location shifts from Texas to San Francisco, our heroes move on from
their laptop computer to creating online communities, games, trading
sites, search engines. The internet is taking shape around them. They
never become zillionaires - this isn’t a story about the people who
create Google or Yahoo or Amazon. It’s about people who do all right for
themselves creating things that compete with those companies in their
early days before getting bought out by them, or rendered obsolete when
someone else comes up with a better idea.
Over the course of the four seasons, friendships, romances, and
marriages come and go, businesses thrive and fail, children grow up,
the eighties turns into the nineties, and dreams are realised (and usually turn out not to be all they were
cracked up to be). Joe starts out as an insufferable asshole - a
fictionalised version of one of those tech industry disruptors who go
around breaking things just to see what
happens with no regard for the grief he causes everyone else - but by the end, he’s older and wiser, and rather
sympathetic. Donna starts out as a harried housewife, and ends up as a
tough and pretty successful businesswoman (her tempestuous business partnership with Cameron has the intensity of a love story). A lot happens
in Halt and Catch Fire, which distinguishes it from
shows like Madmen, where the pace was often glacially slow. Halt...
burns through storylines with a rare energy, so eager to pack
more stuff in that it sometimes has to just skip a few years between
episodes.
It occasionally veers towards melodrama, but it can also be
surprisingly subtle. A divorce, and the death of a major character, both
happen offstage: the writers have laid the groundwork so they don’t come as a
surprise, but it understands that we don’t need to see them, it’s the
aftermath of the events that’s interesting. It’s tremendously good on
friendship, how it grows and how it ends; the ebbs and flows of
affection and respect between four people who know and work with each
other, falling out and getting back together, over a long
period. Five people, really, for Boz, the good ol’ boy Texas businessman
who gives Joe MacMillan the go ahead at the start of season one becomes
as important as any of them - as played by Toby Huss he’s a wonderful
character; a generation older than our heroes, he doesn’t really
understand what they’re doing, but he understands that it’s something
important. The father-daughter friendship that develops between him and
the angry, erratic Cameron is one of the sweetest things in the whole
show. (It's also very good at the sort of friendships between men and women which are common in real life but often get spiced up with sexual tension on screen; Cameron and Gordon's relationship is also a thing of beauty - they're complete opposites, but occasionally bond over a days-long gaming session.)
It’s hard to imagine something like Halt... being made in the UK.
Businessmen and entrepreneurs are distrusted in British culture, and
when you see them in dramas they are usually there to be mocked or
unmasked as villains. Halt... certainly doesn’t gloss over the more
troubling aspects of the industry - the warning at the end of season
three about the way the internet will come to infiltrate and dominate
our lives feels chillingly plausible, and plenty of double-crossing and
sharp practice goes on - but the show understands that having an idea
for a company and making it work is just as much a creative act as
writing a novel, or producing a TV show. One of the reasons I love it is
because it deals so well with the creative life. You think of an idea,
work for years to bring it into being, maybe have a little success with
it for a while, but more usually see it ignored or brushed aside by
something similar made by someone with more clout. You slink away in
defeat, vowing to get out of the game and leave it to the big boys, but
sooner or later another idea comes knocking...
I like TV shows, but there aren’t many which linger in my consciousness to this extent.
When it was over, I missed these people. I still think of them
sometimes, and wonder how they’re doing. Nowadays, when I read an
article about whatever the latest big idea out of Silicone Valley is, I
wonder what Joe MacMillan would do with it. And when I was last in Glasgow I saw a doughnut shop and thought, that is exactly what Cameron Howe would call her doughnut shop...
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Halt And Catch Fire is available on Amazon Prime in the UK, and perhaps elsewhere - I have no idea how TV works any more (Joe McMillan or one of his ilk has clearly been at it). It's well regarded, but I don't think it ever got as many viewers as it deserved, and often when I recommend it I find people haven't heard of it. But I assume there's a telly drought a-comin', because a lot of new shows and new seasons of current ones will be delayed by the pandemic, so hopefully some older things like Halt and Catch Fire might get a second chance...
Images: Jonathan Wynn, Tantrum Doughnuts.
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