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Comment by monsterofcookie | Hacker News Reader

Both started strong and finished weird

Halt & Catch Fire seemed weird to me from the start; I couldn't figure out what kind of show it was trying to be and gave up after the second episode.

Yeah this is a clickbait title for sure. Halt & Catch Fire season 1 was setting it up to be an amazing show. And then the Netflix-ization of the show happened. We have to make the super hacker a hot chick and the leading male has to be secretly gay and oh yeah the real brains behind it all is the lead devs wife...and so the show was ruined.

Dunno, the first season had a weird mashup of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, a little, with Joe being a slick talker Don Draper and Gordon being frustrated scientific genius Walter White (which was exacerbated when they also gave him a disease). Also Joe wasn't gay, he was bisexual.

The seasons with Mutiny were a real treat, great hacker startup energy and a really fun exploration into the new tech frontiers that were opening up at the time. The overall story did end up weird, but it's one of those shows where you're free to just view the characters as vehicles into a compelling world.

It is true that many shows only "find their feet" and "come into their own" after starting, typically in the second season.

This is IMHO true of H&CF.

It is also true that part of this was the pivot to foreground the female characters (1)

The idea that the show was "ruined" by not portraying them as just "hot chick" and "wife" is a) extremely gross and b) a statement that's really only about the person making it.

1) https://slate.com/culture/2015/05/amcs-halt-and-catch-fire-s...

It does a disservice to the people that actually were there at the forefront making shit happen. All so we can "check some boxes".

The people at the forefront making it happen weren't really like Joe or Gordon, gender and jobs aside. From the first episode both of them had a lot of dramatized character traits.

Right, it's a TV drama, and should be judged on those terms. And IMHO, succeeds on them, even when it was was a non-obvious turn. The characters are superb.

Why do you say "gender aside" though? I suspect if the real players were women, turning them into men for TV might be looked at negatively. How is this different?

I suspect the differences between Joe, Gordon, and co., and the actual people behind the PC revolution as captured by Silicon Cowboys, go far beyond differences in demographics or check-box traits, to their fundamental personalities themselves. Focusing on such superficial traits is a red herring.

So gender doesn't matter until it does. Got it.

Hey, you're the one who brought it up.

It's basically writing prompts for culture-war mad-libs. Ways to start a fight. You should not regard it as serious discourse.

Agreed. I don't know what is responsible for this, but it's increasingly difficult to find shows that try to develop characters that are interesting and encourage us to care about them instead of just pulling something new every week from a grab-bag of dramatic twists.

As a counterpoint, I really enjoyed Dog Day Afternoon, which is basically a masterclass in taking a single situation and a fantastic actor and just letting it play out.

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