alt Hacker NewsFunny 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.
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> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
[actors gathered] at Pace's house on weekends to prepare dinner, drink wine, and discuss the scripts and their characters.. "it was really nice, because you got to hear other people's point of views about your character." For the third season, Pace, Davis, and McNairy lived together in a rented house in Atlanta, with Toby Huss joining them for the fourth season..
Rogers called Lisco the duo's mentor, saying: "He.. showed us the ropes.. it was a master class in how to run a room, both in terms of getting a great story out of people, and.. being a really good and decent and fair person in what can sometimes be a brutal industry.." Between the second and third seasons, all of the series's writers departed to work on their own projects, requiring Cantwell and Rogers to build a new writing staff.What gets me about this show is how it nails the emotional cost of building things. Most tech dramas focus on the product or the money. HaCF focuses on what it does to the people. The relationships that get wrecked, the compromises you make, the way obsession eats everything around it. If you've ever been deep in a startup you feel it in your chest watching this show.
You're making me really want to start a rewatch.
It's shocking how few people have seen this show, let along watched it. Part of that probably has to do with how inaccessible it is on streaming. It's only readily available on AMC+. And no one has AMC+.
This is one of those shows that would likely shoot to the top if Netflix got the rights to it and even did a mild push. It's genuinely peak prestige TV.