Halt and Catch Fire (TV series)

Conception and development history

Halt and Catch Fire was created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers. The two met while working at the Walt Disney Company. Cantwell's online movie company was acquired by Disney and he was moved into its marketing department, while Rogers was hired by Cantwell's team to manage Disney's editorial program for social media. After a year of working together, they learned that they had each graduated from screenwriting programs in college—Cantwell from the University of Southern California as an undergraduate student, and Rogers from the University of California, Los Angeles as a graduate student.^[7] Rogers referred to himself and Cantwell as "dream-deferred writers".^[8] In August 2010, the two agreed to partner with each other on screenwriting, and their first script together, a pilot about the assassination of John F. Kennedy called The Knoll, landed on the Black List of popular unproduced screenplays.^[8][9] It also solidified the relationship with their talent agents, who urged them to work on another script that they could use as a staffing sample. Since their agents thought it was unlikely that a network would option a script from two first-time writers, the intent was to use the staffing sample to land them entry-level writing positions in the industry. Consequently, their agents advised them to write something they were personally invested in.^[8]

The original IBM Personal Computer. The real-life attempts to reverse engineer it inspired the series' pilot.

As Cantwell and Rogers brainstormed for their staffing sample, Cantwell recalled his childhood in Plano, Texas, where his father moved their family in 1982 to take a job as a systems software salesman.^[8][5] As a child, Cantwell had been unaware of Texas' role in the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, but after speaking to his father and researching the era with Rogers, they learned how the Silicon Prairie of Dallas–Fort Worth (in which Plano was located) became a secondary technology hub behind California's Silicon Valley.^[8] Companies in the Silicon Prairie included Texas Instruments, EDS, Tandy, and RadioShack, while elsewhere in Texas, Dell (in Austin) and Compaq (in Houston) also were prominent players in the PC industry.^[7][5] Executive producer Jonathan Lisco said, "[Texas] was viewed by a lot of people at the time, per our research, as sort of a catch basin for people who had not succeeded [in Silicon Valley]. On the other hand, there was a lot of wonderful tech going on here."^[5] Cantwell said that he and Rogers were intrigued by the lesser-known players and settings of the tech industry: "We wanted to find the place you didn't know. Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, IBM, Microsoft, all those stories and companies have been exploited dramatically to great effect."^[7] During their research, Cantwell and Rogers came across stories of computer engineers taking risks in attempting to reverse engineer the IBM PC. These stories informed their script for the Halt and Catch Fire pilot,^[8] which the two conceived in January 2011.^[10] The first eight pages that they wrote consisted of their protagonist Joe MacMillan walking down an IBM hallway.^[11] In May, Cantwell left Disney;^[11] Rogers remained at the company until the future of their project was assured.^[8]

Cantwell and Rogers finished their draft of the pilot in the summer of 2011.^[11] Their agents liked the script but were not optimistic about their chances of selling it. Nonetheless, they sent it to several television networks, leading to meetings with HBO and Showtime, none of which proved fruitful.^[9] In late October,^[11] the writers met with AMC; by that point, Cantwell had been out of work for five months and was quickly diminishing his savings. He and Rogers were surprised to find that the AMC executives had a copy of their script on hand in the meeting. One of the executives, Ben Davis, said: "We were really interested in trying to tap into that world — into the spirit of innovation, and the tech world specifically. I loved the idea that it took place in Dallas and that I didn't hear Steve Jobs' or Bill Gates' name. It approached it from the backdoor instead of straight ahead."^[8] After holding a second meeting with Cantwell and Rogers on December 5, AMC optioned the script the following day.^[8][11] However, in March 2012, Cantwell learned that AMC would not make a decision about Halt and Catch Fire until autumn. Complicating matters, he and his wife had depleted their personal savings by that point. On October 23, 2012, Cantwell and Rogers pitched AMC on how they envisioned Halt and Catch Fire as a potential series.^[11] The network ordered the pilot in November 2012.^[12] The project was Cantwell's and Rogers' first jobs in the television industry;^[9] Cantwell said, "The first writers' room we walked into was our own."^[10] The network announced a series order of ten episodes in July 2013.^[13]

Casting

In February 2013, it was announced that Lee Pace had been cast for the lead role of Joe MacMillan, and that Mackenzie Davis had been cast in a co-starring role as Cameron Howe.^[14] The following month, Scoot McNairy was cast as Gordon Clark and Kerry Bishé as his character's wife, Donna Clark;^[15][16] the casting was a reunion for McNairy and Bishé, who had played a married couple before in the film Argo a year prior.^[16] Also in March, David Wilson Barnes was cast in the pilot as Dale Butler.^[17] Barnes was initially credited among the main cast in the first season, but was written out after just two episodes when the story went in a different direction.^[18] He reprised the character for the series finale.^[19]

For season two, Aleksa Palladino joined the cast as a series regular, while James Cromwell and Mark O'Brien joined as recurring characters.^[20][21] For season three, Manish Dayal was cast as Ryan Ray, an Indian-American computer programmer native to San Francisco. Cantwell and Rogers created the character to match the change in demographic after the series' setting shifted to Northern California that season.^[22] Matthew Lillard and Annabeth Gish were also cast in recurring roles.^[23] For season four, Kathryn Newton and Susanna Skaggs were cast to play teenage versions of the Clarks' daughters, and Anna Chlumsky joined in a supporting role.^[24]

Prior to the fourth season, AMC addressed the gender pay gap among its four leads by giving Davis and Bishé salary raises to match what Pace and McNairy were already earning. Davis and Bishé were relatively unknown when they originally signed their deals for the series, leading to lower salaries. Davis, in particular, was earning the minimum quote at the time. Their characters earned more screen time beginning with the second season, but the actresses did not feel they were being compensated equitably for their work. Before Davis and Bishé could renegotiate with AMC, the network gave them unsolicited raises.^[25]

Crew

Due to the Cantwell's and Rogers' inexperience, the network wanted experienced producers for the project and brought in Melissa Bernstein and Mark Johnson, who were producing AMC's hit television drama Breaking Bad at the time. The two guided Cantwell and Rogers through the process of creating the pilot and were, as the writers called them, their "advocates... with the network".^[26] AMC also chose to hire someone more experienced as the series showrunner.^[27] As part of a two-year deal with AMC, Jonathan Lisco was named to the role in July 2013, having just concluded three seasons as executive producer on the television drama series Southland.^[28] Lisco was impressed by the script for the Halt and Catch Fire pilot but was initially unconvinced that he was best suited for the role of showrunner. He did not view himself as a technophile and questioned if there would be "enough stakes in the bits and the bytes",^[29] saying the subject matter did not "dramatically blow your hair back".^[30] However, the network helped change his mind by telling him the series could not be exclusively about technology and the reason for their interest in him was his desire to delve deep into the characters to create stakes. After meeting with Cantwell and Rogers, Lisco felt an immediate creative connection and sensed that they had a strong vision for the series, convincing him to sign on as showrunner.^[29][31] Leasing office space in Studio City, Los Angeles, he helped walk Cantwell and Rogers through the process of assessing and hiring writers.^[8]

Lisco stepped down as showrunner after the second season to work on the TNT television series Animal Kingdom. AMC's president of original programming and development Joel Stillerman called his departure "completely amicable".^[32] Cantwell and Rogers took over as showrunners beginning with the third season.^[33] Rogers called Lisco the duo's mentor, saying: "He kept us creatively involved and really showed us the ropes, and we felt like it was a master class in how to run a room, both in terms of getting a great story out of people, and in terms of being a really good and decent and fair person in what can sometimes be a brutal industry."^[22] During the same offseason, all of the series' writers also departed, as they were each busy working on their own projects. As a result, Cantwell and Rogers were forced to build a new writing staff.^[26][34] Due to series' shift in setting from Dallas to California for the third season, Cantwell and Rogers wanted the visuals to have a sunnier look, resulting in them hiring a new director of photography, Evans Brown.^[34]

Writing

Each season, the writers strove to "use up [their] story fast", rather than save the most dramatic moments for later.^[35] Rogers said that the uncertainty of the series' fate from season to season "reinforced a hold-nothing-back mindset in the storytelling".^[36] They also aimed to advance the plot quickly enough that it would not be predictable to the audience. Rogers described their approach: "we want to put ourselves into corners and ask ourselves to write out of them."^[35]

Cantwell and Rogers were hoping to use the pilot to land writing jobs on series they already liked. Consequently, they wrote it to emulate the "difficult men" dramas that inspired them to get into television, series such as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. Joe MacMillan was written in the pilot as a traditional antihero, with the world organized around him. After the series was picked up and the staff began writing additional episodes, Rogers said they found a "writers' groove" and changed their approach: "We figured out what was our voice, as opposed to the voice that felt like it was emulating the shows we liked."^[37] Rogers acknowledged that he and Cantwell were inexperienced writers but said that they were "careful enough to lay in these little grenades into each character" that they were able to "explode" to evolve the characters beyond their archetypes.^[26] Bishé said the cast were initially under the impression that the series would be a "slick corporate thriller" when they signed onto it, but over time, it evolved into an ensemble-based "real human drama".^[38][39] Cantwell said the dynamic between Joe and Gordon in the first season was inspired by his father's experience in software sales in the 1980s; Cantwell's father would pitch to clients on sales calls, while the software engineer that he would bring along would explain the technical details.^[40]

In the second season, the focus of the series shifted to the partnership between Donna and Cameron in their startup company, the online gaming service Mutiny.^[41] Rogers said that the technology of the time period seemed to be pointing to "this proto-internet connectivity" and that as actors, Bishé and Davis were deserving of more attention.^[42] Cantwell said that the staff did not make a conscientious decision to re-focus the show around the female characters, but that it instead arose from their wanting to continue writing "compelling and earned stories for each of those characters based on where [they] left them in season one".^[41] Rogers said the first-season partnership between Joe and Gordon was dominated by egos, a need to prove themselves, and a lack of mutual respect. For the Donna–Cameron partnership, they did not want to repeat that dynamic and instead wanted to write one with a "bedrock" on which a friendship could be built. The theme of connectivity was incorporated into the season as an exploration of whether technology "brings us closer together or pushes us apart" as well as what the characters' motivations were for their involvement in the technology industry. The second season also isolated Joe and Gordon somewhat from the main storylines to reflect an "absence of connection".^[42] Cantwell and Rogers liked making viewers think they were "the worst writers in the world for about five minutes" by creating familiar situations but subverting expectations with the end result; one example they cited was Joe's and Cameron's kiss in the season's penultimate episode.^[42]

Prior to the third season, Cantwell and Rogers rented a house in Joshua Tree National Park for three days in October 2015 and discussed how they wanted to plot out the season's story.^[34][41] They wanted to reach the advent of the World Wide Web in 1990, which they considered an exciting setting and a natural destination for the series. However, doing so would have required them to advance the plot by four years from the end of season two.^[41] They thought they still "had so much story left on the table at the end of season two" with the characters' arrival in California in 1986 that they did not want to skip over with a time jump.^[43] Ultimately, they decided that instead of choosing between the two approaches, they would incorporate both of them into the season; the majority of the season takes place in 1986 before making a time jump to 1990 for the final two episodes.^[34][41] With the new setting in Silicon Valley, Cantwell and Rogers wanted to explore if the characters who had demonstrated their potential in Texas could "really pull it off once they're in the big leagues".^[22] One of the themes that they settled on for season three was "people with the right idea at the wrong time" who failed due to market or technology forces not aligning.^[43]

Heading into the fourth season, Cantwell and Rogers knew it would be the series' final one, giving them the opportunity to write a conclusion on their own terms.^[44] In researching the tech industry following the inception of the World Wide Web in 1990, they found that there was not "a lot of major business investments and huge development in the web" for several years due to its nascency.^[44][45] As a result, they decided to create another time jump in the series' storytelling. The opening sequence in the season's first episode shows the passage of more than three years and was meant to depict the characters in stasis, waiting for the technology world to catch on.^[45] Over the first three seasons, the protagonists engaged in numerous ventures with the thinking, "This is the project that will make me whole"; for the final season, Cantwell and Rogers wanted to thematically explore if the characters could ever break this cycle or make peace with it.^[46]

Pre-production, filming, and production design

Halt and Catch Fire was produced in-house by AMC Studios, which has infrastructure and crew in Atlanta, Georgia, due to state tax incentives that are favorable to filming.^[5] Although the series was set in Dallas and Silicon Valley, it was primarily filmed in the Atlanta area.^[7] The writing staff, however, was based in Los Angeles.^[10] Many crew members who worked on another Atlanta-based AMC series, The Walking Dead, were borrowed during its offseason to work on Halt and Catch Fire. The series was shot using Arri Alexa cameras, with dailies being delivered by FotoKem Atlanta using their nextLAB system.^[47] The series had a budget that various sources estimated between $2–$3 million per episode, which Variety said was on the lower end of cable TV dramas.^[48][49]

The pilot was directed by Juan José Campanella^[50] and produced over six weeks from April to May 2013.^[11] It was primarily shot on location in the Atlanta area, although one set was used as Joe's condominium.^[7][47] Additionally, as part of a one-day shoot in Dallas in May,^[11] AMC paid to restore a 50-foot-tall neon sign of Big Tex located at a former Centennial Liquors store.^[51] After the series was picked up, several scenes from the pilot episode were re-shot.^[52][53] Lisco said that the staff wanted to make the tone "a little more jagged, a little more ambiguous" by giving Cameron more edge and by exploring whether Joe is "a visionary or a fraud".^[52]

After the series' order, the staff decided that the production facility housing Joe's condo set was too far away from other locations at which the crew would need to shoot. As a result, the staff partnered with Mark Henderson, Daniel Minchew, and Glenn Murer, who converted a facility that previously served as a DuPont plant and a dog food factory into a sound stage. The space, named Atlanta Filmworks, comprised two adjacent 20,000-square-foot warehouses and a 17,000-square-foot production office. The soundproofed Studio A, measuring 110 feet wide by 200 feet long by 42 feet high, housed the set for Cardiff Electric's corporate offices, which occupied 9,000 square feet. Initially envisioned as a flex space for set construction, Studio B was also used for filming, housing the set for Joe's condo, among others. As a result, several enhancements were made prior to season two, such as quieter heaters and additional lighting.^[47]

Production on the remaining nine episodes of the first season began in October 2013 and lasted until May 2014.^[11] The weather was uncharacteristically cold and snowy for Atlanta, complicating outdoor shoots and suspending production for a few days. Location scouting was carried out by location manager Ryan Schaetzle to find settings that would not be anachronistic and would require the least amount of modifications to match the period setting. Storefronts and restaurants proved particularly difficult for achieving period accuracy, as small details such as carpeting, window frames, lighting fixtures, chair upholstery patterns, and bathroom fixtures needed to be retrofitted. Strategic framing of shots was also used to avoid anachronisms,^[47] as was computer-generated imagery to turn an Urban Outfitters location into a rug store.^[54] Scenes set at a Las Vegas hotel hosting COMDEX attendees in the season's penultimate episode were filmed at the American Cancer Society Center in downtown Atlanta.^[47]

Production on season two lasted from October 2014 to May 2015.^[11] The staff dismantled all of the first-season sets except for the Clark family house,^[44] a decision Cantwell said was made to force the series to reinvent itself and to parallel the reinvention common within the technology industry.^[36] The season two set for the house that headquartered Mutiny, Cameron's start-up company, was designed to mimic the homes found in the Lakewood neighborhood of Dallas. Modeled after a single-story American Craftsman–style home that was popular in the 1920s, the set's design featured hardwood floors, ample trim moldings, built-in shelving painted white, and curved kitchen woodwork.^[55] Production on season three took place from November 2015 to August 2016.^[11] Although the series' setting moved to Silicon Valley beginning with that season, production remained in the Atlanta area, with the exception of two scenes from that season that were shot near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.^[34]

For research, the production staff and cast studied Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, Tracy Kidder's book The Soul of a New Machine, and Robert X. Cringely's documentary Triumph of the Nerds.^[56][57] The series had at least three technical advisors,^[58] among them Bill Lowden^[29] and industry veteran Carl Ledbetter, the latter of whom worked at IBM, AT&T Consumer Products, and Sun Microsystems. In addition to reviewing early scripts for authenticity,^[59] Ledbetter helped operate props on set, controlling lights on a breadboard from underneath a table or hand feeding a printout through a dot matrix printer.^[10] At the series' onset, much of the vintage computer props were obtained on eBay or from private collectors through Craigslist.^[10][47] One such prop was the original Apple Macintosh, which had become a collector's item and was particularly difficult to locate.^[47] Many props were also borrowed from the Rhode Island Computer Museum.^[60] From season two onwards, the series' staff collaborated with the Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle to obtain vintage equipment. One prop that could not be sourced was an IBM 3033 mainframe computer, requiring a replica to be built in consultation with Living Computers using original plans from IBM's archives.^[61][62]

Due to the production schedule, the actors did not have formal table reads of the scripts. Instead, they organized their own, gathering at Pace's house on weekends to prepare dinner, drink wine, and discuss the scripts and their characters. Davis said of the cast dinners, "it was really nice, because you got to hear other people's point of views about your character."^[37][63] For the third season, Pace, Davis, and McNairy lived together in a rented house in Atlanta,^[38] with Toby Huss joining them for the fourth season.^[64] The arrangement helped foster a camaraderie among the cast members.^[38]

The fourth season's first episode opens with a sequence edited to appear to be a "one shot" that covers three years of story. The sequence was conceived by Campanella and filmed over two days, requiring several hairstyle and wardrobe changes to the actors.^[44] For the series finale, the scene in which Donna hosts a gala at her house for women in tech was filmed at a mid-century modern-style home in northeastern Atlanta. It was selected for its minimalist architecture that could be easily decorated to reflect Donna's upscale tastes and the period setting. Due to a slope in the lawn, a wooden platform was built on it and covered with sod to give it a flat appearance. With filming taking place over four hours during a sunny summer evening, a grip cloud and "solids" were required to block light to give the appearance of the scene's dusk setting. Davis only required one take for her character's fall into the pool at the end of the scene.^[65] Donna's and Cameron's diner scene featured in the closing moments of the series finale was filmed at the Waffle House Museum in July 2017, prior to the final week of shooting.^[66] Within a week of the series wrapping, the crew transitioned to a new AMC television series, Lodge 49.^[67]

Music

The original score was composed by Austrian musician Paul Haslinger, formerly of German electronic music group Tangerine Dream from 1986–1990.^[68] He landed the position on the series through its music supervisor, his friend Thomas Golubić.^[69] Having previously recorded music during that decade, Haslinger was drawn to Halt and Catch Fire as a second chance to write for the 1980s.^[70] However, rather than merely revive the music of the decade, he instead wanted to draw from its moodiness,^[71] and to combine his favorite retro sounds with modern-day elements.^[70] Haslinger's score was electronic, making heavy use of synthesizers;^[68] he composed it using his original equipment and samples as well as virtual instruments, creating a blend of "analog and digital sounds from that era and [his] own sound design".^[72] He rationalized the restraint he exhibited in his compositions by citing the mid-range spectrum that he believed 1980s music mostly occupied.^[69] He sought to emulate "the inaccuracies of the technology of that time", explaining that the music was never perfectly in tune or in sync. Certain characters were accompanied by recurring musical elements; for Joe, Haslinger composed "glassy" tracks with out-of-focus, slightly off-pitch elements to match the character's struggles.^[69] However, he eschewed explicit musical themes for each character to avoid sounding "hokey". Instead, he tried to write for the subtext or underlying tension of scenes.^[70] Starting with the third season, Haslinger sought to pare down his compositions, often starting with fifteen tracks of audio before scaling down to five. He also incorporated more influences from beyond the 1980s, such as the works of Giorgio Moroder.^[73] A compilation of tracks from the first three seasons was released on vinyl record through Lakeshore Records on September 16, 2016.^[74]

Golubić and his team at the firm SuperMusicVision handled music licensing,^[45] creating a soundtrack of album-oriented rock, college rock, new wave, and 1980s punk.^[36] Golubić said that his team sought to license lesser-known tracks, believing the use of obvious 1980s hits would be "kitschy" and not within the series' budget; explaining their approach, he said, "We want to immerse people in that time period, not distract them".^[10][75] The music supervisors were engaged by the writers early in their creative process in an attempt to better integrate music into the series.^[76] Golubić and his team started by compiling playlists of songs that were evocative of the show's period setting, before attempting to secure licensing deals.^[35] They also curated playlists for each of the main characters after discussing them and their backstories.^[77] Golubić said of the process, "This is how we informed ourselves of the world that the characters live in."^[76] The playlists were sent to the actors to help them prepare for their roles,^[75] and were used by the producers, writers, and editors as a reference for developing the story.^[77] For example, Joe was seen as a "futurist looking forward" embodied by acts ahead of their time such as Gary Numan, the Cars, and Wire,^[76][78] while Gordon was interpreted as someone whose musical tastes did not evolve past 1970s acts such as Steely Dan and Boz Scaggs due to his preoccupation with work.^[76][78] AMC partnered with music streaming service Spotify to share the character playlists online and to promote them on amctv.com and the network's "Story Sync" second screen platform.^[75]

Punk rock played a prominent role in the characterization of Cameron, frequently playing through her headphones on-screen or non-diegetically to represent her temperament as a rebellious loner. The scene in which she enters the Cardiff Electfic offices for her first day of work is soundtracked by the Clash's "The Magnificent Seven", whose lyrics about the "futility of the capitalist grind underscor[e] her ambivalence about the job", according to Pitchfork.^[79] After she founds Mutiny, the company offices are frequently heard playing punk, post-punk, and alternative rock,^[80] representing her growing influence in the tech industry.^[79] Towards the end of the series, punk music is used in the characterization of the Clarks' teenage daughters. The rebellious, troublemaker Joanie enjoys Shonen Knife, and Haley listens to PJ Harvey and riot grrrl bands while coming to terms with being queer.^[79]

Among the tracks licensed for use in the series were "Red Eyes" by the War on Drugs,^[81] "Velouria" by Pixies, "So Far Away" by Dire Straits, a cover of the Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" by the Raveonettes,^[79] and "Mercy Street" by Peter Gabriel.^[35] For the closing sequence of the series finale, the song "Take Me Home" by Phil Collins was originally written into the script, but due to the high cost of licensing it, the producers instead went with Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill".^[66]

Title sequence

The opening title sequence was created by the design studio Elastic, with creative direction from Antibody. Patrick Clair served as director and Jennifer Sofio Hall as executive producer, with lead animation by Raoul Marks, art direction by Eddy Herringson, and typographic consultation by Jennifer Walsh. The title sequence depicts an electrical signal racing across a neon-red digital landscape, leaving a trail as it travels. Along the way it passes digitally distressed images of the main cast members, before it completes its journey to light up an LED indicator.^[82] Marks said the signal was depicted "allegorically to illustrate the competing forces driving young tech entrepreneurs towards a new technological dawn".^[83]

The animators were tasked with creating an "abstract and symbolic" sequence "about the computer era that was about people, not machines", which they found challenging. The sequence originated as a pitch to the showrunners to depict the "birth of an idea". The artists' first inspiration was to show a lightbulb turning on, a common visual metaphor for an idea, and consequently they sought to show the journey of a signal to light up the bulb. Clair said the storyboarding process took longer than usual and went through many iterations. During this stage, Herringson toyed with geometric shapes inspired by Saul Bass art, retro video games, and sex education films; Clair said the team "bounced between digital sperm to missile command and back — all in 8-bit." After several iterations, they replaced the lightbulb with an LED indicator to better evoke the computer era. In the initial pitch, the artists depicted competing signals that ended up disintegrating or being left behind, but these elements were scaled back. The team took artistic license with the appearance of electric and digital signals in the sequence. Due to the need to show the signal in a state of constant motion from shot to shot, precise animation and cuts between shots were required. Serif fonts were used for the credits and were inspired by the mature, classical typography and conservative layout design of personal computing advertisements from the 1980s. The color scheme, inspired by high-saturation 4-bit color computer graphics, was dominated by an "iridescent red that never peaked beyond hot magenta".^[82]

To give the title sequence a human element, images of the main cast members were incorporated. Rather than show "beauty shots" of the actors, the animators heavily edited images of them in a glitch art style. Marks "de-rezzed" the character images with Adobe Photoshop by selecting rectangular sections and using the software's average color feature on each; Marks said the process gave each portrait an "interesting facial approximation". Afterwards, the images were built into 3D models, although the artists did not want a "fully immersive 3D scene" but one that still had "more depth than just a graphic". Since the series' story was about "people putting pressure on themselves, and risking self-destruction through their own ambition", the artists wanted to depict them "decaying, breaking under the pressure of velocity and self-destruction". They achieved this by streaking debris, digital artifacts, and facial details away from the portraits in horizontal lines; Marks likened the effect to a person "re-entering the atmosphere from orbit but in a digital world".^[82]

The opening theme was composed by Danish electronic musician Trentemøller. Marks described the theme as "straddl[ing] the line between contemporary electronica and more retro-analog" sounds. The theme was provided late in the process of creating the title sequence.^[82]

Main cast

Lee Pace portrayed Joe MacMillan, one of the series' protagonists.

• Lee Pace as Joe MacMillan: A technology entrepreneur and former IBM sales executive. He joins Cardiff Electric where he provides the impetus for the IBM clone. Later in the series, he initiates projects involving time-sharing, NSFNET, antivirus software, a web browser and a search engine. He has limited technical expertise and has a difficult relationship with other characters, including a complicated romantic relationship with Cameron Howe, and he is estranged from his parents.^[84]
• Scoot McNairy as Gordon Clark: A computer engineer who is selected by Joe MacMillan to build the IBM clone in the first season after Joe reads an article that Gordon wrote on open architecture. Motivated about the failure of Symphonic, a computer he created with his wife Donna,^[10] Gordon works with Joe to build the hardware for the new computer. He suffers from a degenerative brain disorder caused by toxic encephalopathy throughout the later seasons and the breakdown of his marriage.^[85]
• Mackenzie Davis as Cameron Howe (born Catherine Howe): A technology prodigy who is recruited from university by Joe MacMillian to write the BIOS for the IBM clone. She later forms her own gaming company Mutiny with Donna Clark and creates Space Bike, a successful video game series for Atari.^[86] Her father died in the Vietnam War and she has a difficult relationship with her mother.^[84]
• Kerry Bishé as Donna Clark (née Emerson): A computer engineer and wife of Gordon. She originally works for Texas Instruments, before joining Mutiny to support Cameron.^[87] After Mutiny, she becomes a partner in a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Donna is shown to put her own ambition above her relationships, particularly the one she has with Cameron.^[88]
• Toby Huss as John Bosworth: The senior VP of Cardiff Electric who hired Joe at Cardiff. At the end of the first season, he is incarcerated for illegally funding the PC project. He is shown to be a good salesman and in season 2 he works for Mutiny. He sees himself as a father figure to Cameron Howe.^[89]
• Aleksa Palladino as Sara Wheeler (season 2): A freelance journalist and Joe's girlfriend during season 2.

Recurring cast

First season

In 1983, former IBM sales executive Joe MacMillan joins Cardiff Electric, a Dallas-based mainframe software company. There, he enlists the help of computer engineer Gordon Clark to reverse engineer an IBM PC and reconstruct the assembly language code of its BIOS. Company owner Nathan Cardiff and vice president John Bosworth confront the two when the company is sued by IBM for copyright infringement. After Joe reveals that he told IBM about the project, Cardiff Electric is forced to legitimize it and enter the personal computing business. Needing a software engineer to write the BIOS for their IBM clone, Joe recruits prodigy college student Cameron Howe to join Cardiff. Joe heads the PC project, with Gordon leading the hardware team and Cameron writing the BIOS in a "clean room". Joe's goal for the PC is to be twice the speed at half the cost of IBM's PC, but much of the company does not buy into his vision or trust him. He further alienates himself from Cardiff and Bosworth by upsetting a potential investor and after IBM responds to the project with aggressive undercutting, luring away two-thirds of Cardiff Electric's clients, resulting in layoffs.

Despite being suspicious of Joe, Cameron begins an on-again, off-again relationship with him. Gordon's wife, Donna, an engineer at Texas Instruments, is wary of her husband's involvement in the project after the failure of their PC, the Symphonic, years prior. Eventually she contributes to Cardiff Electric's project, first by leading a data recovery effort (for a data loss event faked by Joe) then inspiring Gordon with the idea for a double-sided printed circuit board. Gordon brokers a deal to procure discounted liquid crystal displays through his father-in-law's connection with a Japanese company. After finishing the BIOS, Cameron is promoted to head of the software engineering team and designs a user-friendly operating system (OS) intended to draw the user in. Joe's ex-lover Simon, an industrial designer, designs the case for the PC, which is named the "Cardiff Giant". Initially hesitant to the project, Bosworth comes around, only to be told by Cardiff that he will not fund it any further. With Cameron's help, Bosworth embezzles money to sustain the project but is arrested as the Cardiff Electric office is raided by the FBI. Having smuggled out the prototype of the Giant, Gordon convinces the others to proceed with their plan to present at the COMDEX trade show.

At COMDEX, the team are shocked to discover the "Slingshot", a copycat of the Giant, being presented by the Clarks' neighbor (a former Cardiff Electric employee) and Donna's former manager from TI. In order to undercut the Slingshot and make the Giant commercially viable, Gordon removes Cameron's OS and the supporting hardware. When Joe supports the decision, a heartbroken Cameron leaves him. Joe and Gordon present the downgraded Giant at COMDEX and secure their first order, but it's a hollow victory for the team. After witnessing a demonstration of the Apple Macintosh at the conference, Joe becomes disillusioned with the Giant. Cameron quits Cardiff Electric and takes most of the software engineering team with her to start an online gaming startup company called Mutiny. After Donna leaves TI, she accepts an offer from Cameron to join Mutiny. The Cardiff Electric team celebrates the completion of the Giant, but Joe sets fire to the truck containing the first shipment and disappears, leaving Gordon to run the company.

Second season

After releasing two models of the Giant to modest success, Cardiff Electric is sold to an international conglomerate in 1985. Running Mutiny out of a rented house with their developers, Donna and Cameron are frantically dealing with day-to-day crises to keep the company afloat. Gordon collects a large six-figure check as part of the Cardiff Electric sale, but Joe receives nothing. Ready to move on from his past, Joe gets engaged to his girlfriend Sara and goes to work at Westgroup Energy, an oil magnate where her father, Jacob Wheeler, is CEO. Starting off in data entry, Joe spots an opportunity to use the company's mainframe computers for time-sharing.

Cameron hires a recently paroled Bosworth, who provides managerial direction for Mutiny and serves as a father figure to her. She also hires one the company's subscribing users, Tom, a gifted game designer whom she begins dating. In his newfound free time, Gordon attempts to map Mutiny's network by writing a computer program called "Sonaris". However, it inadvertently acts as malware, infecting Mutiny's network and users. Eager to make up for his mistake, Gordon obliges Joe's request to secretly help configure Westgroup's mainframes for time-sharing, on the condition that Mutiny be the first client at a discounted rate. With a stable network, Mutiny thrives, due in part to the service's popular new "Community" chat rooms conceived by Donna. Her dedication to work takes her attention away from her home life, and after becoming pregnant, she decides to have an abortion. Meanwhile, Gordon is diagnosed with toxic encephalopathy but decides not to tell Donna.

Jacob supports Joe's time-sharing pitch but asks him to lock in a more lucrative rate for Westgroup. Cameron objects to increased charges, but Donna and Joe negotiate a compromised rate based on Mutiny meeting certain benchmarks. One of those is porting their software to the AT&T Unix PC, which the Mutiny team unsuccessfully fakes during a demo for Joe. Despite the ruse, he is impressed by their innovation to transmit data over coaxial cable. Seeing the potential for broadband network connections, Joe convinces Jacob that Westgroup should acquire Mutiny. Cameron vacillates on whether to accept their offer but is dissuaded by Joe after he realizes Jacob would corrupt the startup's vision. Joe decides to quit Westgroup and after marrying Sara, plans to move with her to California.

Gordon finally tells Donna about his medical diagnosis, but refuses to let it distract her from Mutiny. However, his condition worsens, and after exhibiting erratic behavior in the wake of the failure of his personal business selling homebuilt computers, he begins stress therapy. Tom and Cameron write a first-person shooter game, but on the night of its planned launch, they discover Westgroup has replaced Mutiny's service on their network with a copycat version called "WestNet". Joe tries to explain to the Mutiny staff that he is not responsible, but they don't believe him. Cameron and Donna are forced to sell the game to sustain the company. Dismayed that he was not involved in the decision, Tom breaks up with Cameron and leaves the company. Cameron visits Joe at Westgroup and emotionally manipulates him, allowing her to run the "Sonaris" malware on a Westgroup computer, crippling the company's network during Joe's presentation of WestNet at a shareholders meeting.

Losing her trust in Joe, Sara divorces him. Jacob is scapegoated for the WestNet fiasco and is fired. After Gordon admits to having an affair, Donna gives him an ultimatum to save their marriage: he must purchase and renovate a mainframe computer located in California for Mutiny, move their family there with the company, and take a job with them; he agrees. Gordon writes Joe an antivirus program in hopes it will help Westgroup, but Joe uses it instead to pitch a venture capitalist. He invites Gordon to join him in the venture but is refused. Gordon is furious to learn later that Joe has received $10 million in funding for a new company in the San Francisco Bay Area, MacMillan Utility. Having transitioned from games to an online community, Mutiny departs for California.

Third season

In 1986, Mutiny reaches 100,000 users and celebrates the launch of its mainframe computer. Cameron is living with the Clarks, whose marital tensions flare up in the office, and Gordon is in the middle of a copyright infringement lawsuit against Joe. After noticing that Mutiny's chat feature is facilitating user-to-user transactions, Donna and Cameron are inspired to build an online trading feature and begin pitching venture capitalists. One of them, Diane Gould, helps them acquire a budding competitor, Swap Meet. Meanwhile, a Mutiny programmer, Ryan Ray, uncovers a security vulnerability in the chat rooms, but Donna and Cameron pay little attention. Ryan feels underappreciated at Mutiny, and after being inspired by Joe's presentation of MacMillan Utility's no-cost consumer antivirus software, Citadel, he convinces Joe to hire him.

The merger between Swap Meet and Mutiny causes friction in the office, as Cameron is resistant to adapting her code to be compatible with Swap Meet's. She expresses a desire to fire the Swap Meet founders, Doug and Craig; Donna lies to Cameron about Diane's willingness to support such a decision. At MacMillan Utility, when Ryan learns that the company plans to charge users for Citadel, he views it as a betrayal of Joe's principles. Joe tells him that if they are to keep Citadel free of charge, they will need another revenue stream. Beginning a special project in Joe's apartment, Ryan maps the ARPANET, an early predecessor to the Internet. Studying the map, they see potential in NSFNET, a backbone network not yet approved for commercial use. The two build their own regional network at MacMillan Utility, but after spending millions of the company's money and making a handshake deal with the NSFNET in defiance of the company's board of directors, Joe is stripped of his executive powers. As a result, he declares in a deposition that Citadel was stolen from Gordon.

Cameron's and Donna's relationship continues to deteriorate; Cameron unilaterally fires Doug and Craig, and the women clash on a solution for implementing credit card transactions, as well as whether to undertake an initial public offering (IPO) after Mutiny receives a $20 million acquisition offer from CompuServe. Cameron wants to delay it 1–2 years to continue developing Mutiny, while Donna sees a window of opportunity of just three months. Cameron is outvoted by Donna, Diane, Bosworth, and Gordon on the IPO; feeling betrayed, she leaves the company, and decides to move to Japan with Tom, whom she recently married. The Mutiny IPO dramatically underperforms expectations to everyone's shock.

Gordon and Joe preserve the NSFNET deal with Gordon heading MacMillan Utility, but the company is thrown into disarray after Ryan releases Citadel's source code and becomes a fugitive from the FBI. Due to his association with Ryan, Joe removes himself from the project to keep it alive. Months later, Ryan shows up at Joe's apartment and is dismayed to learn his legal options. The next morning, Joe discovers that Ryan has killed himself; his suicide note warns about the ways in which people will use the connectedness of computer networks to hurt each other.

Four years later in 1990, Mutiny has folded. The Clarks are amicably divorced. Donna is named partner at Diane's VC firm, while Gordon is running the regional network. Joe is working out of his apartment, still mourning Ryan. Bosworth is retired and living with Diane. Cameron is a successful video game developer for Atari. While promoting her game Space Bike IV at COMDEX, she reconnects with Joe and sleeps with him. Shortly after, Donna, Joe, Gordon, Cameron, and Tom meet at the former Mutiny office over several days to discuss a memo about the fledgling World Wide Web that Donna sent them. Joe proposes building a web browser, and everyone but Tom is receptive; he and Joe have a physical altercation, halting the meetings. Still hurt by the dissolution of their friendship, Cameron tells Donna she cannot work with her; Donna begrudgingly tells her to take the project and leaves. Huddled around a computer, Gordon, Joe, and Cameron prepare to start their new venture.

Fourth season

Over three years, Gordon and Joe form a successful internet service provider (ISP) called CalNect, though Joe focuses on logging new website URLs. Meanwhile, Cameron is working in Japan on a web browser for the team, but fails to complete it before Mosaic beats them to market. When CalNect's backbone provider MCI declines to offer them more bandwidth, Gordon and Joe realize MCI is forming its own ISP, causing them to sell CalNect. Meanwhile, Cameron's latest game, a cerebral role-playing game called Pilgrim, is performing poorly in focus groups and after a negative review is published, Atari puts the title on hold. During a visit to California, she tells Joe that Tom is divorcing her; she and Joe rekindle a romance. At the VC firm AGGEK, Donna sets up an incubator for a medical database indexing company called Rover to pivot them into web indexing. Needing to dig himself out of debt, Bosworth comes out of retirement to oversee the project.

After Gordon's teenage daughter Haley builds a website from Joe's directory of URLs, they form a new startup called Comet to develop it into a human-curated web directory. The team hires a chief ontologist, Katie, whom Gordon begins dating. Donna is surprised to learn her daughter is working on a search engine competing with her own. As Comet grows, Rover's algorithm proves substandard. Desperate for the project to succeed, Bosworth approaches Cameron to ask for help improving the algorithm, which she obliges. Rover's sudden improvement results in Series A funding but Donna is suspicious. When she gets into an argument with Bosworth about the subject, he suffers a heart attack. At the hospital, Donna realizes Cameron was behind the algorithm and tells her to stay out of her life. Cameron admits to Joe her role in helping his competition.

Facing an intellectual property ownership conflict, Donna fires Rover's head programmer but refuses to purchase the rights to the algorithm from Cameron, due to their estrangement. Diane subsequently removes Donna from the project; Cameron signs away the algorithm to Rover without accepting compensation. After meeting with a financier named Alexa, Cameron is given funding to work independently and begins developing virtual worlds. At Comet, Joe encourages Haley when he notices her coming to terms with being queer. When Haley's school grades begin slipping, Gordon tells her she must take time off from Comet, leading to her storming out. Bosworth admits to Diane that he is in debt; the two marry. Although Rover is generating more web traffic than Comet, Donna tells Gordon she thinks retaining visitors longer will be the key to success. As a result, he is inspired with an idea to relaunch Comet as a web portal, which Joe excitedly agrees to. However, before they can begin, Gordon dies from a stroke. His friends and family gather to grieve and clean out his house; Cameron and Donna reconcile, while Katie departs for Seattle.

Months later, Comet is ready for its relaunch, for which Cameron led the development. Joe wants to optimize the site for the yet-to-be released browser Netscape Navigator. After Alexa sends Cameron a beta copy of it, she and Joe discover that Yahoo! has received prominent placement on the browser's toolbar as its default search provider. They realize that Comet has already lost, and after one final night together, they break up. Joe sells Comet, while AGGEK agrees to sell Rover's algorithm to index medical records once again. Diane retires and is succeeded at the firm by Donna, who renames it "Symphonic Ventures" and fosters a relaxed, inclusive work culture. After unsuccessful business trips together, Cameron ends her professional relationship with Alexa. Preparing to leave California, Cameron stops at Donna's house to say goodbye but stays to help Donna try to recover Haley's school project from her crashed hard drive. Donna and Cameron discuss the prospect of working together again. Later that evening, Donna hosts a gala for women in tech before visiting the former Mutiny offices with Cameron. The following morning, as they leave a diner, Donna has an epiphany and tells Cameron, "I have an idea". Joe returns home to New York to become a humanities teacher. Addressing his students with the same words he spoke to Cameron's college class in the series pilot, he says, "Let me start by asking a question."

Critical response

Viewership ratings

The premiere episode drew 1.2 million viewers according to Nielsen data, 433,000 of them in the 18–49 age demographic;^[169] it was the only episode of the series to surpass one million viewers during its initial broadcast.^[66] The first season drew modest overall viewership, averaging 760,000 viewers per episode, and a 0.3 rating in the 18–49 age demographic for live plus same-day viewings.^[170] When accounting for time shifting via digital video recorders (DVRs), the season averaged 1.3 million viewers per episode in live plus 7-day viewings; 606,000 of them were ages 18–49,^[171][172] making Halt and Catch Fire among the "most upscale dramas on ad-supported television" behind Mad Men and The Good Wife, according to AMC.^[172] Despite the low overall ratings, AMC renewed the show in August 2014 for a second season of ten episodes. The network's president Charlie Collier said, "We have a history of demonstrating patience through the early seasons of new shows, betting on talent and building audience over time."^[173]

Season two premiered on May 31, 2015, and concluded on August 2, 2015.^[174] Despite the critical acclaim that season two garnered, viewership declined. The season averaged 520,000 viewers per episode and a 0.2 rating in the 18–49 age demographic in live plus same-day viewings.^[170][175] Still, AMC renewed the series in October 2015 for a ten-episode third season. Stillerman said, "The critical momentum was a big part of the decision."^[176]

The first episode of season three aired on August 21, 2016,^[177] ahead of the two-hour season premiere on August 23, 2016.^[178] The Tuesday premiere drew just 385,000 same-day viewers.^[179]

AMC renewed Halt and Catch Fire for a fourth and final season of ten episodes on October 10, 2016.^[180] The final season began with a two-hour premiere on August 19, 2017,^[3] and concluded with a two-hour series finale on October 14, 2017.

Halt and Catch Fire : U.S. viewers per episode (thousands)

Season		Episode number										Average
		1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
	1	1190	970	765	844	575	718	832	627	549	574	764
	2	659	494	452	451	543	558	499	497	588	485	523
	3	367	339	397	312	324	280	307	366	407	287	339
	4	340	340	270	344	313	354	322	327	394	394	340

Audience measurement performed by Nielsen Media Research.^{[181][182][183][184]}

Accolades