(this is split from the general TV thread)
Halt and Catch Fire (the mostly fictitious story of the personal computer revolution of the mid-1980s) is fucking abysmal bullshit and I gave up on it after one episode.
Mister Smalls, June 04, 2014, 11:13:42 pm
I just watched the first episode of this last night and I have no idea what they're trying to do. Ostensibly it's a period piece of the PC revolution, except that's not what the first episode is about. The first episode is mainly about Discount Clive Owen pretending to be Ricky Roma from Glengarry/Glenn Ross except he is clearly shit at his job. There's also an engineer who spends the entire first episode sulking and refusing to participate in the show in any meaningful way except to abuse his ceaselessly supportive wife, and then Test Tube Patricia Arquette who is a computer genius in ways that are never demonstrated, because all she ever seems to do is play Centipede. Oh! Also, the whole thing takes place in Texas (which is why it's filmed in Georgia), and they made the rather bold decision to tell all the actors "Look, nobody in this show is allowed to speak in a Southern accent. So what I want you all to do, everybody here, I want everybody to collect the Southern accents you
would have used and give them all to Toby Huss. Every time he's on camera he'll have to deliver enough accent for the entire cast."
This was espcially shitty because I watched this the day after I watched the last episode of
Silicon Valley which is goddamn terrific and succeeds in so many ways that it's frankly embarassing to put it against Halt and Catch Fire. Silicon Valley uses words and concepts that are true to the world that it's in (GitHub, Tech Crunch Disrupt, compression rates, project forks). They don't come across as H4CK3RS style buzzwords because they're accurate to the tech that's being discussed. It's real and it's part of the language of the world they're broadcasting. Halt and Catch Fire has a scene where Discount Clive Owen goes into a garage with The Nonparticipating Actor and the two of them describe what "reverse engineering" means as they're reverse engineering a computer. It's like two gold miners go to the Yukon and strip mine a quartz quarry while explaining to each other that quartz and gold are often found in the same areas and also that it turns out that gold is an expensive mineral. Also one of the gold miners is a wedding ring salesman and therefore it's weird that he knows anything about gold mining in the first place. That metaphor might have sucked, but it's still a whole lot better than the first episode of Halt & Catch Fire.
But that's not all! Halt & Catch Fire also uses music to stay relevant to the time period! Not Patricia Arquette goes into an office far more buttoned down than she's used to, and the scene can't really get the point across, so they throw in "The Magnificent Seven" to give her some free punk rock credentials. That's bad, but it's an improvement over an earlier montage where the two men are sitting around depressed for 3 minutes, which isn't good television
unless you use XTC's
Complicated Game. Okay sure that song sounds like The Damned developed cerebral palsy, but it sets the mood! The mood that we're in 1984, so therefore everybody is listening to music from 1979 which is
waaaaaaaaaay more hip than the Hall & Oates shit these Texas hardware engineers would actually be listening to.
What I'm saying is (because I'm not sure I've got the point across yet) Halt & Catch Fire is awful. It's not quite "The Newsroom" level of awful, but that's a unique standard because Aaron Sorkin is a uniquely terrible writer. But Silicon Valley is a uniquely good show, and I really hope they get another season. If you haven't seen Silicon Valley yet, I can't recommend it enough, and if you get all the way to the last episode of Silicon Valley, you're rewarded with a math problem. I do mean that literally, there's a plot point in the last episode of Silicon Valley where the software team is trying to solve a particularly enjoyable math problem. I can't sell it any better than that.
