Halt and Catch Fire Review

The first season is the problem and there is no point pretending otherwise. AMC sold it as Mad Men with circuit boards, Lee Pace plays Joe MacMillan as a man doing an impression of a mystery, and the reverse engineering plot at Cardiff Electric never decides whether it is a heist or a tragedy. Then the show does what almost no series manages: it looks hard at what is actually working and rebuilds around it.

From the second season the centre is Cameron Howe and Donna Clark, and Mackenzie Davis and Kerry Bishe turn a partnership that begins in a garage running an online community into the best written working friendship on television, competitive and tender in the same scene. Scoot McNairy gets the saddest and most ordinary arc in it, a competent engineer watching his own hands stop being enough, and Toby Huss walks off with every scene he is given.

The technology is right without being fussy, and the show grasps that the interesting part of a boom is the people who are early, wrong, and early again. It looks like standard cable drama, warm and unremarkable, and the dialogue turns speechy whenever somebody has to explain the future out loud. Hardly anyone watched. The last two seasons, and the finale above all, repay the rough start several times over.