Funny that this came up today. Last night I started re-watching the series after several years. Just this afternoon I was reflecting on how genuinely charismatic Lee Pace's Joe McMillen is.

You really feel it. Even when we know he's a manipulative sonuvabitch. It's mesmerizing. You have to admire his ability to spin shit into gold. The man has vision.

There's a sequence around S01E07 that I'm looking forward to reaching again, in which Joe is out on the front lawn with Donna's daughters during a hurricane and it's FEELS like magic. His performance feels earnest, and hypnotizing, and genuinely magical as he puts on a show for these young girls in the rain.

There's something intangible and hard to describe about the series. The writers have a way of making it transcend it's core drama and feel very different from just about any other show I can recall. Somehow it feels like pure creative expression that manages to defy outside expectations and tell a story that feels true to life and convey the ambitions of creative people who are fighting to make something beautiful.

Lee Pace is such a phenomenal actor. He really just transforms the roles he's in and makes something special out of each show he's in.

He's also fantastic in Apple TV's Foundation and it's been really impressive seeing his range put on display there.

If you like Lee Pace, check out The Fall (2006). It's my favorite film, incredibly ambitious and funny and yet virtually unknown to the public. Lee's performance is incredible, as is his young co-star's.

Sadly, Season 1 Joe is just incohesive. Like, you want there to be some structural reason behind his madness and there just isn't any, because there's too much of crazy. Season 2 tries to walk much of that back.

I haven't yet seen season 3 and beyond, but it's clear the OP blogger agrees:

> The best thing the show’s writers ever did was realize that Joe wasn’t the most interesting character.

Like, Lee is a good actor for sure, he was just given a poorly story crafted role.

"... what he's pretending to do on screen"

I remember seeing this discussed around the show The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, which is about a midcentury NYC divorcee getting into the world of stand up comedy. Overall it works and is a funny and enjoyable show, but there's definitely some of the standup routines depicted on-screen that are not actually as funny as the baked-in audience laughs might indicate. Because yeah... you can't really fake delivering good standup, even with a whole writer's room preparing the jokes and all the editing magic in the world, you still have to actually stand there and tell them in a funny way. That part can't be faked.

The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.

An absolute legendary performance.

He also stars in The Fall, one of my favorite movies ever.

Probably help him land Foundation. The narcissism is its own skill.

He also played Ronan in Guardians of the Galaxy and King Thranduil in Lord of the Rings!

Lee Pace is a first rate actor but I could not recognize him or indeed, most of the characters in this show, as representative of their roles. I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it. I still enjoyed it somewhat. Not Silicon Valley good but okay.

he reminds me of truly the best bosses

also something about him with a good engineer

reminds me of me and my boss, i hope lol

maybe some sales look like this but anyone who models themselves after this or madmen or whatever… good luck.

More recently, I loved how he killed it in Foundation. Another great casting for a great actor.

My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.

Season 1 is Soul of a New Machine-ish, but about personal computing, not minicomputers, and is set in Texas.

Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and Compuserve, and still in Texas.

Season 3 is about the early commercial Internet, same characters, SFBA.

Season 4 is about the Yahoo era of the Internet and about venture capital, also SFBA.

> And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.

I've only watched the first season and really don't see the link to Soul of a New Machine.

You just reminded me that I got about halfway through Soul of a New Machine. Maybe I'll pick it back up this week.

Patriot is amazing, more people should watch it, everyone I know who has was enthralled by it.

Counterpart was great but structure made it hard for to watch knowing it'd been cancelled.

Scavengers Reign was great; I couldn't get into Common Side Effects.

Evil is exactly the Catholic X-Files, which is an amazing concept, but by the end of the 2nd season it is all the way off the rails and hurtling into a canyon.

Given your list, you might dig Lodge 49, which is somewhere in the intersection of HACF, Evil, The Big Lebowski.

While it has many many amazing scenes, I think Patriot's "cover" of the Rockwell Retro Encabulator is absolutely top notch.

https://youtu.be/FFK7RHYdWCc?si=w8R0eO6W3uGgXt3R

I have seen two of your five shows and like them a lot, and heard of another and it’s already on my to-watch list. This is enough overlap to get the other ones added to the list (plus that pilot).

Given the agreement in taste so far, here’s a couple to try if you haven’t:

- Sweet Vicious — marred by getting cancelled after one season, but a fun season anyway. College sexual assault survivor becomes an anti-rapist vigilante. It’s, uh… more light-hearted than the premise sounds?

- Review with Forrest MacNeil — A guy has a review show where he attempts to review… life. Takes viewer requests for what specifically to review in each episode. He takes his job very seriously. Avoid seeing episode counts if at all possible. Trust me on that part. Doesn’t ruin it if you do see them, but being blind to that does improve it.

Another that I’m not sure counts as under-watched as it’s more recent, but I rarely see it discussed in the wild: Dickinson, a magical realism biographical show about the poet, that mixes in humor and some modern pop culture (think: A Knight’s Tale).

Patriot is brilliant. Very surreal with pitch-black humor and rare horror. And piping! Lovely piping.

The showrunner/creator of Patriot has a new show launching in a couple of weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTF_St._Louis

Station Eleven. Wouldn't have made it past a few episodes if I didn't know how good Mackenzie Davis was from watching HCF 1000 times. I stuck through a few things I didn't care for at first, now it will probably remain my favorite show of all time.

Scavengers reign is from the same people as common side effects. Both shows are amazing.

- secret city

- Black Earth Rising

- Pine Gap

> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong.

Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!

It’s very hard to capture everything in such an era. Maybe they made other choices that aligned with the fiction they were writing. It’s not a documentary. And TV shows can’t capture as much as books. The show successfully gives enough to people to haven’t lived in that era. It’s an amazing show.

Carl Ledbetter (one of three technical advisors) interview, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057719

I hear you. After the first season, the tech and industry was just a backdrop, and I couldn't get into because the rest of it was pretty weak.

I had the same feeling but the opposite outcome with Silicon Valley. Growing up in Palo Alto, it took me a while to figure out if I was enjoying this show because it was genuinely funny or if it was just because it hit the absurdity of the time and place so well.

That's absolutely bitchun. You should definitely do so. What's actually in there? Ideally you'd have it done up as a set piece and mock up a connection to Mutiny on there ;)

when... how... who... how do i follow you so i don't miss it?!

Uh, no. You should do another auction. :)

This is cool.

YES! NOW!

A new The Terror? The one that came out some years ago was incredible, and very under-discussed I think.

By the end, the tech is just a plot device. The thing that gets us to the thing.

Hard disagree. The number of micro details it got right was insane. You’d have to be pedantic to think otherwise.

Right down to obscure LucasArts first online game.

Yess! Fav quote from the series.

Then you are the only one who haven't watched it. Go watch it now! It's fantastic (at least the first Compaq seasons)

I really liked it. Though I was sort of expecting an alternative Mac history at the time. Good Comdex show vibe for the time though.

It captured a bit the feeling of being at the start of the computer boom in 60s-70s. The partnernship between the 2 male protagonists was central till the end of show (evolving through different phases). The show was great, it went in very unexpected directions later on.

It has much earlier origins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...

I like how in the fourth season, the computer props are literally just cardboard boxes.

I like literally love it, not ironically, it makes it more like a stage play.

Feel like the flaws are what makes it special. I don't want Kubrick for a tv show about BBS'

Great read! Agree with the themes & tensions you identify.

Looks like @light_triad's blog.. new account?

love how deep you go

Same here. Silicon Valley did a great disservice by not having a character like her. We are often invisible.

"it's like what some writer thought things were and not how they actually were"

Doesn't that refer to a lot of pop culture? I can remember the 1980s and my memories of that period rarely bear much resemblance to the TV/films I see nowadays set in that period. I don't think it's just my personal experience. It goes deeper than that because many of the writers can't remember it well, or at all. That said I think the author of "Ready Player One" could remember the 1980s, just not my 1980s.

You're making an odd request, but I'll bite because it seems sincere. I'm younger! I didn't live through the period, and I'm not a statistician, but I have to ask if this kind of representation is really a gimmick?

For some, it's very meaningful. That character is bisexual, not gay, and it's pretty authentic representation. The reason why it's not so focused on is because people like this, especially at that time, often don't care much for labels. That scene you mention is with a closeted man. This is not unheard of. You may not have had this experience personally, but does that mean it didn't happen? The campy part? Okay. The show wasn't perfect. It did get canceled, after all. But it worries me that you singled this particular thing out because this is obviously a political topic, and you missed the fact that the scene did demonstrate some things about the character, like his recklessness, impulsiveness and opportunism.

He complicated something that could've been simpler, and he did this because he had a hard time separating his personal thoughts and feelings from his work. This is a theme that plays out a lot in his interactions, and I wonder if your understandable discomfort and lack of familiarity with the other aspects of the scene colored your perception here.

The guy he kissed was gay, and immediately after Joe used it to sabotage the deal.

Never saw Orange is the New Black. Is it HCF for the prison adjacent crowd?

Consider just fast-forwarding past a scene you can't handle. Like many shows, it takes a few episodes before the actors truly understand their characters.

The feeling you're experiencing has a name: it's called "cringe". I can't watch Frasier for more than about half an episode because of it. Or I Love Lucy... same problem. But Seinfeld, which has plenty of the same humour mechanic, always seems to manage to stay just below the threshold for me.

Halt and Catch Fire is really, really good. Please trust us. Give it another shot. Skip forward a bit when you feel the need to. Skip the first episode entirely and just read a synopsis if you need to.

Had the exact same reaction to that exact scene. Just couldn't get past it. It wasn't as bad as when I tried to watch Big Bang Theory (which multiple people assured me that I'd love), but it was in that ballpark.

Cringe but persist. TV only has so much time to set stuff up. Think of those parts as a "tribute" to cheesy 80s movies.

One of the better CG title sequences. They don't belabour it, get the visual concept across and wham! Show starts.

I think you might enjoy Travelers

> They need to do more seasons, especially with modern day problems.

Silicon Valley, the insanity that it’s both a comedy and true to life

Absolutely. One of those shows where I went to check what the songs were playing in specific scene often, and ended up with lots of new tracks added to play lists. Whoever did their music selection was top notch.

You wont regret it

It's fairly well known to some of us. It's one of the few shows I own DVDs of.

One is a deeply human drama, the other is a spy thriller. Not sure why you'd even make the comparison.

I couldn’t get past all the drug scenes in Mr Robot.

The Americans is an easier watch in general because of its themes, but H+CF is worth viewing for anyone in tech.

There's only four seasons and they're all solid.

They have essentially nothing in common, other than the fact that both rapidly degrade over the seasons and both are nostalgic looks back at recent eras of America.

I always thought Joe MacMillan was Don Draper with a little Steve Jobs so that explains it.

S2 had a far more memorable depiction of hacker startups as we know it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJN2JN3_N_4

Strongly agree that Season 1 was by far the best, and the rest suffered for the changes.

Season 1 was just Mad Men but computers.

Seasons 2 through 4 were vastly more interesting. We've seen Joel a hundred times. Donna and Cameron and Gordon felt less worn, and Donna and Cameron's relationship vastly more interesting than Gordon (the skeptic) and Joel (the believer!) in Season 1.

If you prefer "great men" stuff, I can see preferring Season 1.

But it's not exactly a story you can't watch elsewhere.

Everything is like that on Prime. Makes me wonder what the point of a subscription is if you've got to pay for practically everything?

I've never heard of it, so maybe they're talking about me. (Joke.)

Yeah, I don't get it either. I made it through the first season which was okay, but I couldn't get myself to finish the second one, it was just bad. It is supposed to improve towards the end, but that is just too much to endure.

The first season is pretty taut, then the follow-up seasons suffer from every character being at the center of every big thing in tech for narrative purposes, which is to its detriment imo.

Interesting. Different strokes I suppose. I loved this show but in the beginning they put too much emphasis on Lee Pace's character for my taste. Just kind of "ooooh, what will the brooding. mysterious maverick in a suit with a dark past do next? So unpredictable" and it didn't really resonate with me like the later seasons did.

In the same way that the beginning of Parks and Rec feels like they were setting out to make a version of The Office before it really became its own thing, the first season of HaCF felt like "what if we had a Don Draper type but instead it was Texas in the 80s?"

Seasons 3 and 4 did a really good job of capturing what it was like being in the industry and in SFBA in the mid/late 1990s, better than anything I've seen. I worked at McAfee (then NETA) at the time and the MCAF-ish stuff was uncanny; the last gasp of cubicle culture in the software product industry.

I liked the storytelling in it, but, like I said earlier, it's pretty Six Feet Under-ish, in that as it progresses it is less and less about the original concept of the show and more about the relationships between characters built up over years of episodes. Whether that's a good or bad thing for you depends in part on how much fan service you want; it's why I find Mr. Robot completely unwatchable.

I really love season 1, because of its specific technical detail.

But the other seasons were great in their own ways too. Random PC revolution personalities showing up in dotcom startups was both disjointed and inspired.

Objectively it was consistently good but not great.

https://www.ratingraph.com/tv-shows/halt-and-catch-fire-rati...