Halt And Catch Fire: Season 1 (2014)

At the moment, period drama – especially American period drama – is utterly fascinated with the late 70s and 80s. In part, that reflects our need to go back to the origins of our overconnected, digital world and get in touch with how it all began. But it also reflects a will to wonder, a need to recapture the breathless belief in the future that seems to have been lost now that the future has arrived so completely. Set on the eve of the personal computer revolution, AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire is the latest series to position itself at this digital threshold – a threshold that’s all the more evocative for being itself repositioned from Silicon Valley to one of the satellite Silicon Prairies that also started to emerge around this time. This particular Prairie is set on the outskirts of Dallas, where a team of three hotshot scientists (Lee Pace, Scoot McNairy, Mackenzie Davis) come together under fairly insalubrious circumstances to create a new personal computer, although the series isn’t quite as fascinated with period procedural as that might make it sound. For all that it pores over microchips, circuitboards and other quaint paraphernalia, the script reserves most of its energy for the rise of a new kind of IT entrepreneurship, detailing the promotional and motivational origins of a world in which purchasing personal computing and communicating devices has become synonymous with self-realisation. As a result, there aren’t characters per se so much as different species of self-helpmanship, which creates a burlesque attitude and atmosphere that might be a bit surprising to anyone expecting a more placid informational procedural, but also makes it quite rousing at unexpected and incongruous moments. At times, it’s almost as if the series’ period mission is to capture all the most hoary IT cliches just before they gained enough critical mass to become cliches, as well as all the most pervasive IT character types just before they gained enough visibility and traction to become stereotypes. That’s tricky ground, since without the utmost delicacy it can easily slip back into cliches and stereotypes, a sales pitch that hasn’t updated its lingo for thirty years. But when it works it really works, taking you back to the eve of a new era of feeling, a new structure of inspiration and anticipation, a world in which nostalgia seemed like the last thing anybody would ever predict for the future.