TV’s Best Drama You’ve Probably Never Heard Of — Scene+Heard TV’s Best Drama You’ve Probably Never Heard Of Image courtesy of Prime Video This piece contains spoilers for Halt and Catch Fire. Halt and Catch Fire is one of my favorite TV shows of all time. During quarantine, I binged all four seasons in a week and was immediately struck by its themes of human connection — the desire for it, the difficulty that inevitably comes with it, and ultimately the necessity of it. Above all, it’s a show obsessed with change. It’s also a show you’ve probably never heard of. When it debuted in 2014, it drew just over 1 million viewers, making it the least-watched premiere in AMC’s modern history. Throughout its running, ratings steadily declined. Despite its lack of popularity, Halt and Catch Fire got better with every season. Over the next three years across 40 episodes, viewers that stuck around witnessed a show brave enough to dispose of its original design and become something even greater. And that’s what intrigues me most about this show. Not its writing nor its performances (both of which are fantastic), but its evolution. What was conceived as an antihero-centric drama about surviving in the cutthroat tech industry transformed into a deeply empathetic ensemble study about finding connection in the process of creation. Image courtesy of AMC AMC broke into the landscape of prestige television with Mad Men and Breaking Bad, both wildly successful shows that defined an era of peak TV. This overtrodden antihero formula bled into Season 1 of Halt and Catch Fire, which tried to capture the same success as other morally-gray dramas. Its main character, Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), is a charismatic salesman with a mysterious past and self-destructive tendencies. In an effort to build a computer that outpaces and outprices the competition, he recruits Gordon (Scoot McNairy), a pitiful computer engineer, and Cameron (Mackenzie Davis), a rebellious coding prodigy. Donna (Kerry Bishé), Gordon’s wife, is relegated to the sideline for the majority of the first season despite a desire to utilize her own engineering talents. Much of Season 1 treads down familiar beats and not much reason is provided for the audience to become emotionally invested. Too much of the narrative hangs on Joe, a mediocre, overconfident man who exploits those around him for personal gain. His arrogance and proclivity to go off the books is supposed to feel admirable and seductively dangerous, but ultimately comes off as manipulative and one-dimensional. The characters around Joe are far more interesting; however, so much time is dedicated to him that they remain archetypal renderings, waiting to be filled in. Nevertheless, there are some great moments in the first season — sparks of what’s to come in later seasons. The tech revolution of the 80s makes for an engaging and nostalgic setting, transporting viewers back to a time of floppy disk drives and dial-up modems. We also see Donna and Cameron

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