Why did it flop compared to AMC's other major TV series?
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Why did it flop compared to AMC's other major TV series?
Why did it flop compared to AMC's other major TV series?
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What even was it? You can't tell from the title
Its a show like Speed. If the main characters ever stop moving they begin to burn. It's kind of a fast paced thriller where they have to find out why this is happening to them while they run around trying not to burst into flames.
A show about programmers, engineers, and businesspeople in the burgeoning field of personal computing during the 80s and 90s.
I see so they gave it an interesting name to hide its boringness
It was marginally OK
I saw errors in it. I designed my 1st computer back in '79 so I knew the tech back in the day. Most of the tech stuff was fine but it didn't get too technical. When it did, i saw the flaws. Then when Mr. Bi-gay was written in to appease The Agenda, I had seen enough to not watch it anymore.
no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)
What even are Breaking Bad and Mad Men? You can't tell from the title
>What are you doing Mr. White, Breaking Bad?
Jesse explained this in the show.
You'd have to watch the show to know that
I got a postcard in the mail with a little explainer on it.
Mad Men sounds like ad men
it was woke trash with gays and transgenders
Did it flop? I know the first season was some of the best on modern television in years. It had 4-5 season I think. Is that considered a flop now?
It was 4 seasons and I'd say it was a respectable run, the finale was great.
It always got great critical reviews but horrible ratings. AMC believed in it enough to let them finish. It could have kept going into the '90s but it felt like it had run its course already. Better to end early than become The Simpsons.
>It could have kept going into the '90s
The show reached the '90s in the 3rd season I think.
I haven't watched it since it first aired but yeah it seems to have ended in 1993. I just meant instead of the sort of "where are they now" montage they could have not killed Gordon since they knew the show was ending so why not and instead showed them deal with the implications of losing to Netscape and Yahoo and so on until they bring in moot.
because the first season is the only good season
everything after is mid
it just loses any sense of direction it had
if its not circle jerked on this board every single day for the rest of time it counts as a flop
>because the first season is the only good season
Completely wrong, season 1 they're trying too hard to be Mad Men + Breaking Bad, after that they lets the characters grow and weren't trying to hard to be "prestige TV."
you are wrong.
now i await your cope and seethe
>It had 4-5 season I think. Is that considered a flop now?
Look at the commercials surrounding this show, the core audience is a nostalgic rich tech boomer.
The econ of the show changes bc of this, they generate a lot more from commercials per viewer than any other show.
>Jews gets involved in the production
>Becomes insufferable
I wish we could've had a proper show about 80s and 90s tech. There was and still is a market for it. Just keep the unrealistic blackrock diversity and feminism shit out of it.
At least we'll always have Pirates of Silicon Valley.
I donno, Donna who tries to be a powerful woman manages to alienate her husband and all her friends.
Because it turned into GRRRL POWER slop after the solid first season.
>unrealistic beautiful crazy eye female genius programmer
it always was.
I'm willing to suspend disbelief for pretty sperg girls. But, for me it was ruined when Dr. Idris Elba invented the internet and chopped his wiener off in the final scene.
I heard the BLECKED website grew from some of elbas smeg chunks
I always liked the opening credits.
Kino tune
it has mackenzie davis in it. dopey girl dorks up the screen!
>a new role offer for me, why thank you my agent - ah, a robot, again.
computer nerd show, not accessible to mainstream audiences
I remembered Mr. Robot doing better.
i watched for her and lee
i will watch anything for lee
REMINDER
pushing daisies is kino.
>pushing daisies
I wonder if that Friday the 13th TV series Bryan Fuller was working on will ever come out.
i like the 90s show but i dunno why they even called it friday the 13th
You should check out Station Eleven.
she was insufferable in that show
Wow what a great female programmer, except that she's not. I wonder if they wrote erroneous code on purpose.
gotta watch for the Bosman
Because in season 2 they basically decide to suck the dick of video game players for views. Then Season 4 I hear is sort of generic. Season 1 was pretty good though.
Donna didn't get her breasts out.
>Interesting premise
>awesome title theme and soundtrack
>nice visual design
>pointless and utterly irrelevant gay sex scene in episode 2
Yeah...
mackenzie was a b***h in this. muh soul programs
fuk off it's about making money
>we've been a married couple twice now haha isn't that weird what if we kept doing that
Season 1 was good because it had a direction and the characters changed. Then Season 2 happened and the writers suddenly remembered they're doing prestige TV on AMC. So they started writing in smear-the-queer subplots for minor characters and decided to stop moving the plot forward.
You think you're getting a series about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates but you're getting Mad Men without the charm or writing quality.
>You think you're getting a series about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates but you're getting Mad Men without the charm or writing quality.
It's to the show's credit that it isn't unalloyed aspirational tech fetishism, the fact that more than half the time the characters completely miss the boat on what the future of computing will be makes it more authentic. The future is only obvious in retrospect.
I recall a line when they're walking through the COMDEX exhibition, one of them stares into the camera and says something like "touchscreens will never catch on".
I happens a bunch of times. The PC they spend the first season building is completely superseded by the Macintosh, Donna's IPO flops, they think curated content lists will beat algorithmic search engines etc.
the mac market was completly different. they were like $10k back then.
why did donna become such a b***h in season 4?
The main problem to me was that these three (and four later, when Gordon's wife become a main) were always the avantgarde of some movement. Microcomputers? They were there, paving the road for others. Revolutionary OS? They were there. Chatrooms with a social media twist on a C64? It was their idea. MMORPGS in the early 90s with 3D graphics? It was their idea.
I mean, after a while I started to doubt they portrayal as perpetous underdogs.
Other than that, excellent show
Yes, and I have to wonder if the producers got trapped by the great performances put in by the actors and were too scared to replace them. Season two moving Cameron and Donna to the front, introducing a bunch of new second tier characters, while pushing Joe and Gordon, season one's frontline characters, to the back hint that they may have planned to do this each season, with the second line characters of the previous season coming to the front to be the pioneers of a new wave of tech while the previous season's top characters faded into the background.
Season two characters like Yo-Yo and Tom seemed well positioned to be season three central characters about the video game revolution but they didn't have the charisma of McNairy, Pace, Bishe, and Davis so the show was rewritten to keep the original four as the focus through all the seasons.
Only if you're ignorant of the tech from the period where it starts. As someone who grew up writing 6809 assembly language, I found the name to be a good inside geek joke and fitting to the characters.
The tech world has always attracted weirdos but the degree to which they're shown flying their freak flag was indeed unrealistic for the time period, especially when they were in Texas. IIRC, some of the producers or show runners were gay so they're always going to try to sneak in their lifestyle.
Donna and Cam are not all that far out, especially for the early days. Female programmers have long been around. Yes, many in the early days were "coders" who did mostly direct translations of program designs given to them into code but some were able to do software design themselves. None of them however looked anything like Donna or Cameron. Pic related wrote one of the top home video games of the era (River Raid). As the 80s went on and more people got computers in their homes, the male/female ratio got very lopsided due to boys being more interested than girls in computers as hobbies.
Toby Huss was the surprise of that show. Way underrated actor. His character also had the best scenes and the best development throughout the show. I watched the show the first time by myself but re-watched it about 6 months later with a friend who wanted to see it, and I was blown away at the difference between season 1 and season 4 Bosworth.
My head canon is that if they did go with rotating characters in and out as the tech progressed each season, Bosworth being a non-tech guy could have been the constant through the series, being the business face that ends up at each of the companies and giving the show a reason to progress through them all.
Stupid name
it means you cant stop
if you stop you stagnate
if you stagnate you become irrelevant
if you become irrelevant you die
halt(stop) and catch fire(die)
it makes perfect sense and its a good name for what the show is about
moron
>mad men
isnt about mad men
>breaking bad
isnt about breaking bad(whatever the frick that means)
>squid game
isnt about squids
It's from a joke list of assembly pneumonics that went around the tech community in the '70s.
SCF ; Stop and Catch Fire
Like the NOP instruction of No OPeration
>you are reading more into it, but fine--that is acceptable.
>SCF ; Stop and Catch Fire
Oops. I meant Halt and Catch Fire HCF (HALT is an actual pneumonic, so the joke had more relevance)
Another one was RPM for Read Programmer's Mind
Don't give a shit. You're asking why no one saw the show. I'm telling you why. The name sucked, no one knew what the frick out was about.
It didn't flop, you just don't understand the economics behind it. You and I were not the target audience, Gen-X and Boomer tech millionaires and billionaires were the target audience. That's why the commercials were mostly for luxury goods. It didn't matter if the show attracted less than a million viewers, all the really mattered was that Woz and friends watched (which they say they did). What is it worth to an advertiser to know that Woz is going to see your ads?
Us plebes got to take the ride through early computing history subsidized by the people who made that period what it was.
davis has negative charisma
Haley a cute.
I could "fix" her.
She appears to have expanded her range a bit since then.
It came at the peak of the Learn to Code Bro (TM) era. I thought it would be a huge hit. Nobody gave a shit not even those learn2codebros. That's when I knew the industry was doomed to enshittify as the nobody was going to carry on the torch of gen-x / boomer nerd culture.