In an apparently futile attempt to fill the hole left in my life (and heart) by Mad Men, I’ve been show shopping recently. Maybe it’s just too soon but all of the good “replacements” have already gone. I watched Breaking Bad years ago. I don’t actually like Boardwalk Empire, though for the life of me I can’t articulate why that is, since it would seem to be everything I love: period drama, character depth, Steve Buscemi. I really enjoy The Americans but I’ve watched it already. Same with Bomb Girls, Manhattan, Bletchley Circle and Hell on Wheels. What’s next?
Note: There are some very mild and minor spoilers for the first season of Halt & Catch Fire.
Following the AMC bandwagon, I decided to spend some time pouring through Halt and Catch Fire, especially since I had oral surgery recently and was laid up in bed. I’m well aware that AMC has a penchant for damaged male leads (Don Draper, Walter White, Cullen Bohannon) and for creating drama in a foreign context (the 60s, a druglord’s inner circle, the 1870s, a zombie apocalypse) but they tried to create a reduction of those two things with H&CF that just didn’t quite work.
It’s not a bad show by any means. It’s interesting and I’m a technology geek (it’s my profession) so there’s a fair bit of good nerdiness going on to appease me. Nonetheless, what ends up happening is that there’s a little too much contrivance. I don’t understand Lee Pace’s Joe. He’s vying for success, he’s fighting, he’s fighting, he’s giving up and refusing to do anything beneficial. He’s blowing things up and making the world go; he’s blowing things up and making the world fall apart. I can’t say I get exactly what I’m supposed to feel when I watch him and that makes it hard for me to get behind his story.
But Artie! The World’s Strongest Man is his boss. That’s nice, at least. John’s motivations are somewhat clearer by the end of the first season but they also start out slightly murky. The difference is that I know what John wants but I have no clue what it is Joe seeks. None. One of the hallmarks of enjoying Mad Men was the fact that Don Draper didn’t know what he wanted and we knew that. I don’t know if Joe knows what he wants or not. How do you carry a character drama with that lingering?
Enter Gordon. Gordon is a geek, through and through, and he’s largely sympathetic, which does set up a nice contrast to the Joe character, so their partnership makes sense. I can enjoy watching Gordon but he, too, seems to go to extremes at points, ones that aren’t necessarily unfounded but ones which make the show harder to understand. His wife, Donna, e.g. the replacement narrator from the 9th season of Scrubs, is also a geek but has put aside a lot of her geekery for the ends of running a household, bringing money home, and keeping her husband sane. Her character has some of the typical repressed housewife elements (even though she is not a housewife) but her intelligence is constantly proven out rather than pointed out, and I appreciate that, too.
This brings me to Cameron Howe, played by Mackenzie Davis, who happens to remind me greatly of Cobie Smulders playing Robin Scherbatzky in How I Met Your Mother. My major defense to this is that they’re both pretty Canadian actresses but that isn’t it. It’s the voice, a very invulnerable and self-assured tone put over an independent but still frightened personality. I appreciate what Cameron as a character brings to the story but I have a huge bone to pick with the tech aspect of this. I’m so tired of the “girl hacker” stereotype in media. She’s always skinny, with nontraditional hair (style or color or both), with nonconformist clothes, attitudes, and musical taste. She is also snarky, hyper-smart (smarter than the boys), unemotional, and a confirmed loner. In fact, I’d say that the best part about Cameron is when she undoes a lot of this to be someone more “real,” e.g. trying on mainstream clothes (but not wearing them), and when she goes rogue to form her own company, inviting Donna to join her. Are you possibly understanding why Peggy is my Mad Men favorite?
It’s a little bit grating to my technological self to hear explanations of technology and programming, though I can forgive this on the basis that the vast majority of viewers probably aren’t familiar with the true inner workings of computers, much less the 1980s “IBM Compatible” phrase. (There was at least one scene in the pilot, though, where the hardware that was being disassembled was clearly more “modern” and I found myself wondering why nobody would have considered 3D printing some 30 year old components. Come on! That’s what modern tech is for!) The overwhelming, point, however, which is about creating the “future” is relatively enjoyable. I suppose what I seek from a second season is a bit more of the larger world. The COMDEX plot line and the introduction of the Mac128K brought some of that up but that took a long time to arrive.
Maybe what I really want is a show that just goes into the tech from a more sophisticated perspective but that’s not terribly realistic, either. Hollywood rarely ever gets tech right (and I STILL joke about Skyfall and its hideous representations. They plugged a known violent terrorist hacker’s computer directly into their production network! FFS!) and Halt and Catch Fire gets pretty much everything right so I really should not be complaining. I haven’t given up; I’m interested in seeing the second season, but I don’t know if I would have watched this show if Mad Men weren’t gone.
PS: The show’s reference to the famous Mac commercial amused me.
PPS: That commercial was parodied on Futurama more than a decade ago, and since I draw my blog title from my all-time favorite show (Futurama) I have to make note.
Dumpster Jedi 