Halt and Catch Fire: The Complete First Season

The same year that HBO launched its modern tech comedy Silicon Valley, AMC premiered Halt and Catch Fire, a drama about the early days of the home computing revolution. Set in a small Texas tech company in the early ‘80s, the story centers on three characters: Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), a former golden boy salesman from IBM who has a dream of taking on his old company with a visionary personal computer; Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a computer engineer still licking his wounds after a failed attempt to launch his own machine; and Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), a rebellious young college student with a punk attitude and a genius for coding. Joe recruits these two underdogs to run the development team and manages to sell the president of a small company on his grand vision. Gordon's wife, Donna (Kerry Bishé), an engineer who works at Texas Instruments, is an uncredited fourth member of the team, and the Clark family home life provides a contrast to the gamesmanship at work. The title of the show is a computer term for a command that orders every function to run at once and compete for dominance, which is a fair description of the working relationship of these characters, as Joe constantly engages in mind games, betrayal, and psychological warfare. Joe is a fascinating and enigmatic—if also unlikable—character, a corporate pirate willing to pillage his competitors for an advantage, but the show itself is just not that compelling. Compiling all 10 episodes from the 2014 debut season, extras include behind-the-scenes featurettes and episode summaries. A strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)