The new setting and shift in protagonists turned out to be exactly what the show needed: It executed the fastest turnaround (in terms of critical acclaim) since Parks & Recreation’s much-mocked first season led into its wildly praised second in 2009. Halt and Catch Fire arrived on AMC last year, facing its network’s strong track record and the high expectations that came with Breaking Bad wrapping up its run and Mad Men preparing up to do the same. When those shows launched, AMC found itself in the top tier of cable TV, but with them gone, it only had ratings monster The Walking Dead available as a viable lead-in for a new series. Each of AMC’s big new dramas arrives under the shadow of the network’s departed behemoths—a burden for Halt and Catch Fire, which needed time to find its characters’ voices amid the complex story that creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers were trying to tell.

The second season focused on Mutiny, the online game company Cameron runs out of a ramshackle house in Austin, Texas, with a bunch of grody young coders and Donna, a mother-of-two struggling to balance her passion for the job with her crumbling marriage. By focusing the season arc on a tech startup run by two women, Halt plumbed largely unexplored dramatic territory for TV, following Donna and Cameron’s efforts to avoid being pigeonholed in a male-dominated industry (that, in time, would only become even more male). What’s more, the show didn’t patronize Cameron’s struggle to define her company as more than an act of rebellion, or Donna’s resistance to becoming den mother to Mutiny’s nerdy employees. The duo’s arguments and managerial clashes were resolved without the grunting testosterone of the first season.

Meanwhile, Joe and Gordon—both of whom fit the antihero mold that defined TV’s cultural revolution post-Sopranos—faced much more dire prospects. After the relative financial success, but intellectual and moral failure, of their PC project in the first season, the men scrambled to find a new foothold in the booming tech industry as their love interests surpassed them. But even so, the creators Cantwell and Rogers never jeered at their characters’ failures—the show simply moved on, as though its two self-destructive male protagonists’ luck had run out. Viewers never got to see Tony Soprano, or Don Draper, or Walter White stop being the de facto leads of their own shows, but as season two of Halt and Catch Fire progressed, it became clear that was exactly what was playing out.

Halt and Catch Fire didn’t settle for subverting the dramas that came before it, nor did it expect easy applause for making its female characters the stars. It also embraced what many successful TV dramas had for decades before and since the rise of the concept of “prestige”—the delight of stolen kisses, overheard insults, and shocking betrayals. Cameron’s budding romance with the arrogant coder Tom, whom she falls for while recovering from her big breakup with Joe, was gripping enough to merit the Friends­-style “Does he get on the plane?!” cliffhanger in the season finale. Gordon’s fracturing marriage to Donna played out the same way viewers had seen a hundred times before, but with rare humanity for their ups-and-downs. When Donna made the decision to abort a pregnancy midway through the season, still a rare twist for an American TV show, it felt like neither a plot chip to be cashed in later, nor like an impetuous act of revenge against Gordon.