Halt and Catch On…Please?

The AMC tech drama wants us to love it.

Halt and Catch Fire is about a woman in her early twenties who is the founder of an online gaming company — Mutiny — that looks to be shaping into something like Prodigy or AOL (it takes place in 1985). Her co-founder is newly the breadwinner for her family of four.

But last year, last season, Halt and Catch Fire centered around approximations of the Steves Jobs and Wozniak, with a Don Draper/Steve Jobs hybrid figure leading a company of dudes (except for Cameron, who went on to found Mutiny) and an engineer he convinces to reverse-engineer the BIOS of an IBM PC to manufacture a cloned new machine (somewhat similar to Compaq’s history). From the beginning, Cameron and Donna were presented as more complicated than just the love interests of the two leads, but they weren’t given nearly as much screen time and character development as the guys. But in the final two episodes of the first season, the male characters were de-centered, making way for the new story arc. The TV show is all the better for it.

Quite a lot has been written already about how the show this season “isn’t a Bechdel test, it’s a full-fledged regents exam.” But I love it for another reason — Halt and Catch Fire gets too on the nose with tech references like an old blogger trivia night several drinks in.

Take this banner ad for the series:

Joe manipulates people, Cameron plays punk music really loud, Gordon is alienated, and Donna’s character shifted from predominantly shown at home with her two kids, to the second season where most of her lines are about managing the company as Mutiny co-founder… Voila! ctrl+alt+esc+shift!

The series gleefully offers up semi-factual internet history references with a similar lack of subtlety. It is usually understated in its character development and dramatic tension, so to see familiar tech references work into to the script this way is endearingly clumsy.

Cameron Howe, programming genius — and until she started her own company — the token woman, is often compared to familiar names in history. She names her creation to a crowd of snickering nerds, “I wrote the BIOS. I name it. ‘Lovelace.’…. Not Linda Lovelace, you pervs, ADA LOVELACE. As in the first computer programmer ever.” In another scene she is told by an executive at a company she turned down, “You could’ve been the next GRACE HOPPER. Instead, you’re in line to be another programmer no one remembers.”

This season, with Mutiny’s chat and community features picking up, there is room for a lot of winking about how characters have just stumbled upon something that will be very common …someday. Donna quotes some proto-trolling on the proto-message board service she is creating at Mutiny. “They call it …a FLAMEWAR,” she tells her husband Gordon. Immediately after proposing to the daughter of a billionaire, Joe is at his computer, playing a game on Mutiny, and chatting with his ex, “camhowe” while using a default username. That is, proto-cyberstalking her with the limited tools he has to do so. In another episode, one of the Mutiny developers is flirting with a guy in a community room and he inspires an online personals section.

Last week’s episode Play with Friends offered up a number of examples of this eagerness to show what’s on the verge. Here are just a few of the discoveries made in the episode:

— Cats on the internet: People are using Mutiny to talk about their cats. “Do I need to draw a venn diagram for you of cat ladies and gamers? Not a lot of overlap.”

— Reply All fail: The worst possible message, intended as a private message, is sent out to everyone on the network.

— First person shooters/MMOs: Playing with Nerf blasters, Cameron has an idea for a new game — “Instead of shooting at a tank or a robot, what if you’re shooting at another user on our network? …human players aren’t predictable like a computer-generated enemy.”

— Online communities: Cameron plans to drop community and Donna must convince her of its merits. “The code might not be revolutionary, but the interactions between users are a completely new way of communicating.

People can be more authentic online than in real life, and that is addictive.” (But lines like this forecasting a world of social networks and user interactions are in just about every episode in the second season.)

The characters are complicated and interesting — especially Cameron, who is at turns arrogant and vulnerable (unsurprisingly some MRAs and Gamergaters hated her even before she went on to found a gaming company.) The Spotify playlist for her character is an impeccable selection of punk, post-punk and no wave. Good transmedia, AMC! (I can’t believe I just typed that.) Joe, the Draper-esque character, is queer but not another bisexual sociopath stereotype — rather his queerness is presented as a redeeming quality. But the best scenes by far are when Donna and Cameron’s management styles clash because there is a real respect between the two women.

While the series is getting better and better with each episode it is struggling to find an audience. As of yet, there is only one post on Medium tagged. Perhaps it is still too early for this kind of history to appeal to a mass audience?