Halt and Catch Fire

[An] entertaining, engaging start.

During the first two years, Halt and Catch Fire has smoldered, sometimes frustratingly so, but has always been engaging, often thanks to the performances of Bishé and Davis. Judging by five episodes of season three, it looks like the show is finally catching fire.

Though the pilot of Halt and Catch Fire, AMC's latest character-driven drama premiering Sunday, doesn't hit the gloriously high bar set by the opening episode of "Mad Men," it is provocative and promising nonetheless.

It all adds up to a promising, surprisingly lively and fast-paced drama that humanizes those early computer geeks.

A stellar Toby Huss portrays the hard-driving Bosworth, a commanding presence. There are more than a few of these in Halt and Catch Fire, a drama set in Texas, filmed in Georgia--and from the available evidence an immensely seductive enterprise.

It’s not quite as nuanced as "Mad Men," but it could be before the end of the season.

The good news is that Halt and Catch Fire is a triumphant pilot with excellent writing, impressive acting and a noteworthy cinematic visual style. ... But ultimately that means nothing until we see the next episode. And the one after that. And the one after that. So take this early praise with that caveat.

Halt and Catch Fire’s operating system is solid, crafty and cunning. Boot it up.

The drawback to Catch Fire is that we aren't yet interested enough in the backup characters. For now Pace is reason enough to watch this on whatever TV, laptop or mobile screen you prefer in the digital age. [9 Jun 2014, p.33]

So far it’s promising without being riveting, with the potential to be Facebook--or Myspace.

The premiere flags a bit when we get to the actual business at hand; Pace and McNairy hole up in the latter’s garage, furiously soldering wires and reading off columns of numbers. It’s not the stuff of great drama.... Things pick up as Joe takes a calculated risk by outing their project to the competition, putting his bosses in a no-win position that demands they fund the build.

Halt And Catch Fire has a great cast, a neat title, a solid pilot script from Chris Cantwell and Chris Rogers, and some intriguing direction from Juan José Campanella that turns both the human face and circuit boards into things to be broken down into component parts and understood. But it lacks a suggestion that it will reassemble the parts of better dramas that it has gathered into something uniquely its own, instead of a mostly functional knockoff.

Halt is wise enough to play this out against Gordon’s stress over providing for his family, Joe’s mysterious background and Cameron’s cute pixie haircut. The ad men in “Mad Men” changed a great deal; the people who put a computer in every home changed everything. And that keeps Halt and Catch Fire interesting.

The action unfurls a mere 30 years ago, but it may as well be the Dark Ages when viewed through today’s technology-dependent lens. That’s a big part of what makes the show such fun.

There's a tentativeness to Halt's first hour--it doesn't end especially strongly--but overall, the drama has a mostly credible pilot and lead actors who will probably be able take the show in compelling directions.

You don't need to speak geek to watch Halt and Catch Fire, any more than you need to know corporate law to love "Suits."

Sunday’s premiere doesn’t give a great sense of what the show will be on a weekly basis--a business drama with a side of humanity about following one’s passion, perhaps?--though it definitely leaves viewers curious about what comes next.

With the relationships among MacMillan, Clark, and Howe in the foreground, Halt and Catch Fire makes impressive use of its time period without treating it as an elbow-to-the-ribs joke.

First impression is that Halt is fresh and fraught with calculated promise, but whether that's enough to catch fire remains to be seen.

While Halt and Catch Fire captures the professional and financial excitement and mystery of those days, before we knew computers would change the world, it also takes on the complex personalities involved.

There are still quite a few good reasons to watch this flawed show. The pilot features some clever twists that I won’t ruin here. The dialogue can be highly quotable, in an engrave-this-mantra-on-your-iPad way. (“Computers aren’t the thing–they’re the thing that gets us to the thing!”) And McNairy is fantastic, simmering with quiet intensity that suggests that there’s much more to Gordon than we’re privy to in the pilot.

With little exception, MacMillan is the sole character given scenes that seek to bring out his antic inner life, the most memorable of which being his meltdown in an electronics store, where he tries to find a hold of his ambition in a torrent of comingled rhythms emanating from various speakers.

The plot takes a few satisfyingly clever twists, some of them possibly even fact-based. The period touches seem well-observed, and the acting is fine throughout--with Pace a standout for the way he allows anger and doubt to be just barely visible below a calm, confident shell. Yet too often the writing lets the actors down.

The pilot, moreover, is not easy to follow. Somewhat like “Turn,” an AMC show about spies during the American Revolution, this new series is a little too opaque at the outset.

So how is the Halt and Catch Fire pilot? Surprisingly good in some ways—and fairly typical in others. Surprisingly good in some ways--and fairly typical in others.

There are certainly enough moving parts here (pardon the expression) to merit further attention, but there’s also a feeling that the whole thing is running in mud (or at least sand).

Halt and Catch Fire suffers from a common case of style over substance.

The problem is, once you get past the initial shock of a fresh premise and start watching the pilot, the show starts to seem more formulaic, with stock characters (mostly female, alas) and what sounds like placeholder dialogue that was supposed to filled in with good stuff later but wasn't.

Due to faulty programming, it's a mixed bag of delights and drawbacks. The performances are exceptional. The dialogue is ham-fisted and stilted. The dark, grim tone is intriguing. The pace is choppy.