AMC's computer industry period drama Halt and Catch Fire returns tomorrow for its second season, which Alan Sepinwall -- who I think is far and away the most important TV critic -- assures is significantly better than the first season.
In anticipation of that, my brief thoughts on that first season --
The initial premise is that business suit wildcard Joe (the normally great Lee Pace) and computer dude Gordon team up, along with punky college dropout Cameron, to ripoff the IBM PC by reverse engineering it (like Compaq did in real life).
My father has been in the personal computer industry for nearly as long as there's been one, having left his PhD program in the 60s in order to found a computer company with two of his friends. By the early 1980s, when this show takes place, I was around and certainly well aware of computers (my Christmas wishlists included the early "notebook computers" and 300-baud modems). And that's kind of my biggest problem with the show.
It's like when you're watching a western, and somehow none of the white people are ever racist unless they're bad guys. Except in this case, the history of the early personal computer industry is obscure enough that most of the audience isn't going to be tripped up, most of the time. But it's not history for me, you know? I can't help that so much of the show seems unreal to me.
That problem ties in with a less personal problem, which is the characters. Far and away the best is Donna, Gordon's wife, played by Kerry Bishe from the bizarrely well-cast final season of Scrubs (which also included Dave Franco and future comedy legend Eliza Coupe). Donna might be the brightest of the bunch, and one of the show's strengths is that it lets us realize this early on. Gordon and Donna had tried and failed to go into business for themselves, and now he has the more ambitious job so that she has time to tend the kids, though everyone's circumstances have changed -- for the narratively better -- by the end of the season. Perhaps because she is least central to the plot, Donna is also the most fully realized and nuanced character.
See, the other three -- especially Joe and Cameron -- are an unfortunate collection of Serious Cable Drama tics and cliches, without much consistency. Joe is an erratic wildcard. He's a wildcard, man! He might punch you or screw somebody he shouldn't screw! Whoooa. And Cameron, punky punkity punk punk Cameron, she doesn't design computers according to your RULES, man. Computers want to be FREE, man. She's a VISIONARY, man.
Cameron is an absolutely fucking shitty visionary. For most of the first season I can't stand Cameron.
This is the biggest area where my own experience of the computer industry becomes a stumbling block, but it's not Inside Baseball shit that's getting in my way. Anyone who was alive and using computers in the early 80s would have the same problem: Cameron never once sounds like a real computer person from the 20th century.
Joe is always vague about computers. He's realized the growth potential of the industry, but he's not someone who's going to put a system together in his garage. Gordon is practical enough that most of what he says sounds fine to my ear.
But Cameron is meant to be a visionary, and instead of making her sound like actual real-life visionaries from the computer industry, many of whom are still alive today or have written books, they make her sound like a 21st century audience member who is wandering around 1983 and pointing at computers and saying "we shouldn't make computers like this, we should make them do what they do in 2015." Some of the things that she throws tantrums about are features that were absolutely being discussed in the 80s, but in a "someday we'll be able to do this" kind of way, features that would require several technological revolutions to make possible. They aren't things you could just sit down with a couple people in your company and develop. They took the work of hundreds or thousands of people over many years.
That's my other problem. I'm a historian by training, and one of the most irritating fallacies is the idea that the way history turned out was the way it had to turn out -- the idea, in this case, that the computers we have now are an inevitable consequence of the computers of 1983: that there is a single path the development of the personal computer can take, and it will always transpire the same way. If history did work that way, foreseeing the future development of anything would just require being a little bit smart. No big whoop. You just think about something for a little bit, and it will become obvious to you which changes and improvements will be introduced in the future. Perhaps you'll be off on the timing -- there are funding considerations, after all -- but the broad shapes will be obvious.
Right?
No, not fucking right. There's a whole cottage industry of futurists and they're never fucking right. Pick up any issue of Mondo 2000 for heaven's sake, or an early issue of Wired, and tell me where our grape-sized watermelons are, because I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be the hottest new food of 1995. Futurists are awful at what they do because what they do is not a thing that can actually be done well.
That said, Mad Men may very well get a great deal wrong about advertising in the 1960s. Certainly some people have said so. Does it only not matter to me because it's not my personal experience being contradicted, or because the show had enough else to offer?
I genuinely think the latter. Cameron's insistence on the way computers need to be is a huge part of her inconsistently written character. It's not just a tic, and I often get the feeling that we're supposed to be on her side -- or at least recognize her genius. The ads for season two, for instance, have her demanding online gaming. In 1983. I was playing games online in 1993, a full decade after the show takes place, and as far as they had come in that time, they were:
a) nothing a gamer of today would recognize as a video game (they were entirely text-based)
b) apart from the MUDs and MUSHes that only a very small number of people with internet access could play, most of them were turn-based, and were barely more than adaptations of the play-by-mail games that most of you have never heard of.
Looking forward to a future of online gaming in 1983 is one thing, but trying to get a business off the ground that promises to service flying cars when everyone else is saving up for their first Model T doesn't make you a genius or a visionary. And it definitely doesn't help Cameron's case any when the writers so often make her petulant or frustrated at having to deal with how computers actually are in 1983. It just makes her seem like someone who doesn't actually want to work in the computer industry.
Sepinwall says it'll get better. He's right that there was a significant improvement at the end of the season. We'll see.
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