The hardest part of making the first season of Halt and Catch Fire for the show’s creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C Rogers was watching it on AMC. “By the time it aired last summer, we had been working on it for two and a half years, and it lasts for 10 weeks and then it’s gone,” Cantwell says. “It’s the part you have the least control over. That was a new part of the process for us.”

While the show, about the 80s tech scene in Texas and the creation of a new personal computer, was praised by critics, the viewers didn’t exactly show up, which made that part of the process even harder. While the premiere attracted just over 1 million viewers, the finale only had about half as many, which is unfortunate because the series only improved as it went along.

“I think we were very happy from a creative standpoint with how the season ended,” Cantwell says. “We feel like we were putting out our strongest episodes by the end, but that doesn’t really jibe with a rise in viewership.”



There was some debate about whether or not AMC would renew the show and Cantwell and Rogers say that they network asked them, in broad strokes, where the show would go in a second season if they got the green light. AMC, the home of Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, one of TV’s biggest hits, knows how to have patience to let a good drama catch on.

“It was a much DVR-ed show. People wanted to watch it and they didn’t show up live. Unlike Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, we don’t really kill people off unexpectedly,” Rogers jokes. “The Nielsen ratings isn’t the only way to judge the success of a show anymore … [AMC] knows the TV landscape is changing and they made an up-to-date decision about the future of the show.”



That decision, naturally, was a renewal (or else we wouldn’t still be talking about the show) and Halt and Catch Fire returns to AMC this Sunday 31 May, at 10pm EDT. What are Cantwell and Roger’s plans for season two? Since the team of slick salesman Joe (Lee Pace), nerdy hardware tech Gordon (Scoot McNairy), and renegade programmer Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) created the Giant computer for their small tech firm, Cardiff Electric, there has been some fallout. Cardiff gets sold off to a larger company to keep cranking out computers and Cameron has left to form Mutiny, an early version of an online gaming company where the modems are still dial-up and the most ingenious game is a full-colour version of backgammon. Cameron has also signed on Gordon’s wife Donna (Kerry Bishé), a skilled computer scientist in her own right, to help run the anarchic company.

“Out of the fires of Cardiff comes Mutiny and we’re going to see [Donna and Cameron] embark on a partnership that will feel very different from the one between Gordon and Joe,” Cantwell says. “We’ll also see how [the men] come back into the fold and how they start swirling around each other as we move into the proto-internet era.”



One of the most interesting things about this second season is that the women are in charge and the men, formerly driving the creation of the PC, are now rendered powerless and almost obsolete. This also allows for a feminist bent to the season, just as discussion about the role of women in technology companies in Silicon Valley comes to the fore in the modern world. Cantwell and Rogers say that all they were looking for was a natural extension of the story they started telling in season one, not that they were seeking something that would be a hot-button issue or lure in more viewers – though more viewers never hurt.



“Whether it’s the video games we show or Atari 2600s or people are programming for Commodore 64s is in service of the character drama, which is what drives the show,” Rogers says. “We want people to watch it and forget that it happens 30 years ago. We hope it feels very modern and that means it’s universal.”

While that certainly happens at points during the first several episodes, there is still something fun about watching coders listen to music on giant headphones and blow the dust out of Atari cartridges to get them to work. “That pressure [to be historically accurate] is half of what is super fun about working on the show,” Cantwell says. “We’re going to make a Dig Dug II joke and have a character make a reference to Mr Garrett [from the Facts of Life]. Those opportunities are the most fun things about the show.”

Naturally both of the creators hope that more people will tune into something that they’ve worked so hard on. They say that while each season is a self-contained whole and people could tune into the first episode of season two without feeling lost, it’s still helpful to watch the first 10 episodes before wading in. Thanks to the internet, viewers have had time to catch up on the show, which was streaming on Amazon Prime and is now available in its entirety on Netflix. AMC is also making the entire first season available on demand for those who want to binge before the second season premiere.

Ironically enough, all this new technology poses its own set of problems for the creators. “I’ve had a friend or two watch it all in 24 or 48 hours,” Rogers says. “They tell me that and I’m always really flattered, but I think: ‘That was three years of my life that you just digested in a day!’”