I love the subject matter of Halt and Catch fire but felt let down by the story telling.
I say that because maybe you need to give it a second chance. Season 4 character payoff is some of the best tv ever period.
The pacing was quite slow, I also didn't enjoy westworld for the exact same reason, so maybe i'm just not the right kind of person.
The general technology/corporate story arcs were pretty great, but a lot of the scenes they wrote for Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) were atrocious. The writers basically kept changing his fundamental character traits every episode. Lee's a great actor and did the best anyone realistically could with the material, but it was a complete mess in terms of the writers introducing constant character whiplash. And then the way Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) was written as a romantic arc with him, I'm not sure anybody could have cared less if they wound up together or not, or never talked again the rest of their lives.
I've heard the fourth season is spectacular, and I'd like to get back to it someday, but the first season really wasn't strong enough to keep a lot of viewers, including myself.
By “generally” I’m guessing you just mean yourself?
I thought the writing was pretty weak. They kept falling back on silly tropes to force some drama into the show rather than letting the subject matter itself be the drama. It very much felt like they “jumped the shark” right from the very first episode.
Very few of those characters were believable, let alone likeable.
I do agree season 4 is better, but and the reason why is because the dialled it back on the writing and focused a lot more on the characters. Which is what they should have done from the start.
The writing for me felt a lot more like they didn’t have confidence that the subject matter is interesting enough on its own. Which is a sign of bad writing, not good writing.
That all said, there were some good moments. But on the whole it just wasn’t great. However there isn’t many shows based around this subject so I guess some geeks try to convince themselves that the show was better than it actually was. But each to their own I guess
In my case I think it's an aversion to specialized marketing. I hated Silicon Valley, too; I think it's a lack of distance from the topic which makes me overthink the thing rather than just having fun with the story.
But with HACF I didn't just dislike the topic, I thought the acting was corny and stiff and I thought that the characters were unmotivated throughout the thing, with motivation being replaced with pseudo-historical anecdote. I thought the actors were poorly cast, and I feel like they did a bad job 'convincing' me of anything.
"Of course they're doing the thing, that's who Z is!" isn't compelling enough for me to enjoy it and suspend my real personality from interjecting criticism during the watch.
But who cares what I think : i've been out of lock-step with the crowd for a few years w.r.t. media consumption. Amazon/Netflix/Disney/whoever, AMC in this case shouldn't be considering what I think when toting their bags of money to the bank.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/best-tv-shows-21st-c...
I’m really curious, if you thought the writing was pretty weak in HCF, what’s a show that you thought was particularly well written?
Amusingly, when I read that book, I mistook it for fiction. Kidder's narrative non-fiction style was so detailed I assumed it couldn't have been from notes or interviews.