Shortly after the TV industry saw Mad Men explode as a ratings titan, Hollywood went in a predictable direction and pumped out a bunch of series set in the '60s. TV junkies know how that turned out, as shows like The Playboy Club, Pan Am, and Swingtown sputtered out of the gate with ratings as bad as their reviews.

The reason Mad Men worked, of course, wasn't set design, fashion, or dated references. Rather, its creators and writers made the most of an era when culture and business transformed quickly—and when relationships and families crumbled as a result. With that in mind, television has yet to focus on one sector that's changed America much more quickly than advertising or television itself—technology.

So far, the modern media world's most dramatic takes on wild tech-sector stories have been relegated to biopics about the likes of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. And even when it's included, technology isn't necessarily the true backbone of comedy series like Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley, which often use geeky references as window dressing for otherwise simple gags.

Thus, a series like Halt and Catch Fire seems long overdue. And from the look of its pilot episode, geeky TV types might be in for a legitimate, serialized take on early '80s computer culture. The series premiere, which debuts on AMC June 1 but is currently free to stream through AMC's site, may very well lead a new field of technologically proficient drama series—with a soldering iron in one hand and a reverse-engineered ROM BIOS in the other.

"IBM doesn't own anything inside the machine"

The series, set in 1983 Dallas, Texas, opens with a computer screen that displays a definition of its titular phrase: “an early computer command that sent the machine into a race condition… and control of the computer could not be regained.” (Such instructions don’t actually set the machine on fire, but engineers do love hyperbole in their expressions.)

The show quickly homes in on a few early '80s culture clashes. Most obviously, there's a three-way split in aesthetic, between '70s polyester, '80s power-business attire, and the ratty, punk-rock uprising that never sat well with either of those. There's also the matter of "good ol' boy" culture in Dallas not playing nicely with the cutthroat personal computer industry set to rock the Tandys and IBMs and Apples of the world. This new wave is expressed most clearly by lead character Joe MacMillan.

Played by actor Lee Pace (Lincoln, The Hobbit), MacMillan spends the series pilot setting a computer industry shake up into motion. After leaving a lucrative marketing job at IBM, MacMillan sets his sights on a small (and fictional) system software firm, called Cardiff Electric, where he manipulates both its senior VP of sales and its best engineer into building the PC industry’s first clone computers.

The engineer, Gordon Clark, is the key to MacMillan’s plan. Clark has taken up a boring gig at Cardiff after a failed, late ‘70s attempt to launch his own line of personal computers. After steamrolling his job interview with bluster and promises of big numbers, MacMillan targets and picks on the placid, depressed engineer until stoking a fire of anger, at which point Clark owns up to his more optimistic, risk-taking past. Stop coding and start making computers again, MacMillan asks: "I want to build a machine that nobody else has the balls to build!"

After Clark weighs the offer—and catches hell from his wife, a fellow engineer who worked on that failed computer years earlier and doesn't want to see her husband fall flat once more—he agrees to MacMillan’s crazy plan: to reverse-engineer IBM’s PC ROM BIOS so that Cardiff can become a PC clone manufacturer.

“Anybody can buy all this stuff off the shelf right now,” Clark says to MacMillan in his garage while picking a motherboard out of an IBM machine he just purchased. “Open architecture. IBM basically doesn’t own anything inside the machine”—except for the code on the main chip, he says.

What follows is the geekiest montage ever aired on television: a good few minutes of the duo recording pin voltages and transcribing the hex digit addresses of a BIOS. The montage ends with the men successfully cold-booting a computer by using the information they reverse-engineered, and MacMillan decides to immediately report that success to his former IBM bosses.

Jobs-and-Wozniak dynamic

Because this is an AMC series, Halt and Catch Fire has bigger priorities than techie competency in mind. For starters, the show doesn't even take six minutes to reach its first sex scene.

It happens shortly after MacMillan meets his computer-genius match during a guest college lecture he gives in Austin, Texas. "What will be true about computers 10 years from now?" he asks, and the only satisfactory answer he receives is from a young punk-rocker named Cameron Howe: "Computers will be connected together across one network with a standard protocol.” Soon afterward, they chug beers at a dive bar, then make each other's very personal acquaintance in its basement while the sounds of video games and pinball bleed into the room.

Otherwise, the show splits its time between early personal computer technology and the emotions of the people behind it. Thus, Halt and Catch Fire doesn't take long to create a Jobs-and-Wozniak dynamic between the asinine bluster of MacMillan and the nervous genius of Clark. The former is evident during a particularly nonsensical sales meeting, where MacMillan pitches Cardiff's products to a vendor: "The window of opportunity is closing," he says. "This is your chance. This is not about not losing—this is about you finally having the confidence to walk out on the ledge and know you’re not going to fall."

Scoot McNairy, who plays Clark, is more commanding and interesting a character as he battles his insecurity demons, but the leading men's immediate comparisons to the tech industry's obvious power duo makes their interactions feel a little too predetermined. Thankfully, the show has two capable—and technologically proficient—lead women to anchor both the geeky and heartfelt extremes of the show thus far. Kerry Bishé, as Clark's wife, can just as easily pick apart a Speak & Spell as she can her husband's career anxiety, while Mackenzie Davis' middle-finger-waving performance as newest Cardiff hire Howe is equal parts bratty and wary. She's already clashing with the uptight, big-hair surroundings at her new Dallas job, and that tension is welcome.

The first episode's tech laundry list is thick enough for a 48-minute span: a hacked Speak & Spell; a reverse-engineered PC BIOS; a lengthy conversation about the impending PC clone industry; and a joke about Reagan's strategic defense initiative. There's not much here to pick apart in terms of inaccuracy, except for Howe's use of a quarter-on-a-string trick to play free games of Centipede, which was mostly rendered unusable by that time thanks to anti-strimming coin slots.

Rather, the question is whether the 10-episode season will leave much room for more lengthy, technology-backed sequences, or whether the technology will quickly take a backseat to AMC-style drama (particularly in MacMillan's Don Draper-esque past, currently veiled in utter secrecy). The cast can't reverse-engineer computer elements in every single episode, presumably.

For its first episode, at least, Halt and Catch Fire employs technology as a central driving force as opposed to window dressing for quick gags, and it does so without skipping too many details or offering condescending summaries at the moment any jargon comes up. This quality, more so than the ratings of Big Bang Theory or the name-dropping and in-jokes of Silicon Valley, is what makes this show proof that perhaps the nerds truly have won.