“ Halt and Catch Fire for us, both personally and what you see on screen, has been the story of learning to listen to your show and let it become what it wants to be, not what you thought it was going to be.” And thank God that sometimes those initial ideas we had about where it would go proved to not be the case,” Rogers reflects. “When you sell a pilot, they go, ‘Do you know where this will go?,’ and you smile as big as you can and you say, ‘Absolutely!’ But deep inside, you really don’t know. It’s a trajectory that was all but impossible for both viewers and the creators themselves to predict from Halt’s initial episodes. That strategy has led the show into something like benevolent mission creep over the years, expanding from a relatively unknown chapter in tech’s early history to a mini-history unto itself, made manageable by its specificity. Halt and Catch Fire is ostensibly about the computer industry, and key moments in that field’s early history have frequently dictated when and where the action takes place. And along with them, Halt has evolved from one of Mad Men’s many imitators into its only worthy successor, a workplace drama that gives the work epic stakes by driving home what it means to those doing it. With time and care, they’ve deepened into some of the most layered, believable people on TV. The Halt cast of today feels impossible to pigeonhole the way earlier versions of it easily could be, and were. More importantly, we’ve borne witness to the changes those seismic events have wrought on the people directly involved in them. Three years later, those of us who kept the faith have watched Halt’s core four endure nearly a decade’s worth of cross-country moves, accidental epiphanies, overnight successes, failed business ventures, marriage, infidelity, divorce, and depression. Nuances in all four archetypes emerged over the course of the season, but their first impressions didn’t offer much of an incentive to stick around. ![]() The other principals felt similarly typecast: rebellious programming prodigy Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) dweeby engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) Gordon’s wife, Donna (Kerry Bishé), equally knowledgeable but saddled with the additional burden of work-life balance. Its antihero, Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), was a blazer-clad, sports-car-driving, Gordon Gekko’d version of Don Draper. Halt’s pilot aired exactly a week after Mad Men’s midseason finale, even inheriting its prime, Sunday-night time slot. When Halt started, the show was criticized (or, as the ratings showed, simply overlooked) for how closely its setup hewed to an obvious template, made all the more obvious by the originator of that template still airing new episodes on the same network. Rewatching parts of the first season a few weeks ago, I was struck by how the early episodes’ weakest points have, over time, developed into the series’ greatest strengths. Yet knowing where Halt started is essential to understanding how far it’s come. No, you don’t have to watch the first season-but you should watch the next three, or else you’re missing out on a prime example of what happens when TV’s potential for long-term, character-driven storytelling is taken full advantage of. The story of the modern tech industry’s beginnings, told through the personal and professional lives of four hopelessly complicated people, is one of the best shows on television, full stop. ![]() In 2017, Halt’s success no longer comes with caveats. As Rogers points out, we’ve now had years to steep ourselves in the fully realized version of Halt: the story of messy, stubborn, ultimately sympathetic adults stumbling their way toward a changed world. On the eve of its home stretch, Halt and Catch Fire has long since outgrown the “copycat prestige turned groundbreaking television” narrative it’s been saddled with since 2015, when the period drama returned for Year 2 with a new setting, a reshuffled ensemble, and a reconsidered sensibility. I think the beautiful thing about the fourth season is, we know these guys now.” “The sense of having lived with these characters has let them become real for four seasons. Rogers says of Halt and Catch Fire, the drama he cocreated with Christopher Cantwell that returns for its fourth and final season this Saturday on AMC. “I think if you watch the show from the beginning, you can feel it morphing from what it starts as into what it ultimately becomes,” Christopher C.
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