Finally getting around to this one during the January doldrums. Halt and Catch Fire ran for four seasons on AMC, each of them just ten episodes long, and by the end of its run several critics were giving it the "under-hyped and underrated" treatment with some going as far as to say it's quietly one of the decade's best shows.
That's funny, because the same critics had all kinds of issues with the first season in 2014, calling it a Mad Men knockoff and a tonally inconsistent mess. The first season tells the story of four computer engineers and programmers in the 80s - three, really, plus an industry salesman who, okay yeah, really really feels like a poor man's Don Draper - and the work they're doing on reverse-engineering an IBM PC to try to build their own for a fictional struggling middle-tier company called Cardiff Electric.
I liked this just fine, consuming it in a few big binges over the course of a week. It's amazing just how much shorter made-for-broadcast dramas really are than the hour-long norm on premium and streaming. I've been dragging my feet to jump into Halt and Catch Fire for a while because four full seasons of an AMC drama felt like a lot to tackle. Au contraire, the entire series is only thirty hours long, which means if you're a skilled veteran dual-logger like I am, you can fire up Civiliazation VI on your Switch and bang the whole show out in like two weeks. (And what else is going on in January?)
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