Lee Pace's performance in that show is one of my all time favorites. It's incredibly hard to play a charismatic marketing guru because in some sense, you're not acting. In a given scene, the character might be trying to convince people around him of some crazy idea, but if he hasn't convinced you, the viewer, then the entire illusion falls apart. So he really has to do in real life what he's pretending to do on screen.
Funny that this came up today. Last night I started re-watching the series after several years. Just this afternoon I was reflecting on how genuinely charismatic Lee Pace's Joe McMillen is.
You really feel it. Even when we know he's a manipulative sonuvabitch. It's mesmerizing. You have to admire his ability to spin shit into gold. The man has vision.
There's a sequence around S01E07 that I'm looking forward to reaching again, in which Joe is out on the front lawn with Donna's daughters during a hurricane and it's FEELS like magic. His performance feels earnest, and hypnotizing, and genuinely magical as he puts on a show for these young girls in the rain.
There's something intangible and hard to describe about the series. The writers have a way of making it transcend it's core drama and feel very different from just about any other show I can recall. Somehow it feels like pure creative expression that manages to defy outside expectations and tell a story that feels true to life and convey the ambitions of creative people who are fighting to make something beautiful.
It's shocking how few people have seen this show, let along watched it. Part of that probably has to do with how inaccessible it is on streaming. It's only readily available on AMC+. And no one has AMC+.
This is one of those shows that would likely shoot to the top if Netflix got the rights to it and even did a mild push. It's genuinely peak prestige TV.
> There's something intangible and hard to describe about the series. The writers have a way of making it transcend it's core drama and feel very different from just about any other show I can recall.
[actors gathered] at Pace's house on weekends to prepare dinner, drink wine, and discuss the scripts and their characters.. "it was really nice, because you got to hear other people's point of views about your character." For the third season, Pace, Davis, and McNairy lived together in a rented house in Atlanta, with Toby Huss joining them for the fourth season..
Rogers called Lisco the duo's mentor, saying: "He.. showed us the ropes.. it was a master class in how to run a room, both in terms of getting a great story out of people, and.. being a really good and decent and fair person in what can sometimes be a brutal industry.." Between the second and third seasons, all of the series's writers departed to work on their own projects, requiring Cantwell and Rogers to build a new writing staff.
I have Lee Pace on the radar since Singh's The Fall.
Your assessment of movie magic is only partially correct. Obviously, a character has to be convincing by himself but the heavy lifting of the illusion is done by the peer characters acting as if they believe the role he plays.
"The king is always played by the others"
Not sure who is to credit for this quote but in my opinion it is one of the most important insights to understand how movies work and also why movie characters are never relevant role models.
He's also extraordinary in Apple's Foundation, some say he carries the show. I treasure The Fall and every frame of it, in this he's uniquely blended with other great actors and images.
Often in movies you have the scrappy character that rises to the occasion by making a great speech, winning everybody over. I used to love those scenes.
Now, I've realized, in real life they wouldn't have let them finish their first sentence.
I remember seeing this discussed around the show The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, which is about a midcentury NYC divorcee getting into the world of stand up comedy. Overall it works and is a funny and enjoyable show, but there's definitely some of the standup routines depicted on-screen that are not actually as funny as the baked-in audience laughs might indicate. Because yeah... you can't really fake delivering good standup, even with a whole writer's room preparing the jokes and all the editing magic in the world, you still have to actually stand there and tell them in a funny way. That part can't be faked.
It never occurred to me that the jokes were oversold. I think the show is genuinely funny, with a very high batting average. Easily one of the funniest shows on television.
I sure do miss 'Mrs. Maisel'. What a stellar series.
I think I really loved Barry for exactly the opposite of this reason. Seeing a truly great actor play a bad actor was both impressive and hilarious at the same time.
Sadly, Season 1 Joe is just incohesive. Like, you want there to be some structural reason behind his madness and there just isn't any, because there's too much of crazy. Season 2 tries to walk much of that back.
I haven't yet seen season 3 and beyond, but it's clear the OP blogger agrees:
> The best thing the show’s writers ever did was realize that Joe wasn’t the most interesting character.
Like, Lee is a good actor for sure, he was just given a poorly story crafted role.
If you like Lee Pace, check out The Fall (2006). It's my favorite film, incredibly ambitious and funny and yet virtually unknown to the public. Lee's performance is incredible, as is his young co-star's.
Yeah, it's somewhat splintered in that you're unsure what movie you're watching between different parts, but I have a strong love for movies that dare, and that one certainly does.
I'll also second your comment about the kid, which is one of the best child performances I've seen.
Are we watching the same clip? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
This is from the pilot and I watched it based on high recommendations, and I couldn't keep going because the character you're describing as so convincing and charismatic is so dramatically unlikeable!?
In this scene, he is:
* disrespectful and entitled with a coworker
* privileged and self-important about his background with a client
* then makes an admittedly pretty rousing speech, but TBH the show doesn't really trust us to understand that "this is meant to be inspirational" because it keeps cutting to the other character reacting "inspired", which is significant because
* he doesn't make the sale
* then proceeds to verbally scream abuse at the other character.
and then i'm supposed to be excited about watching the two of these start a computer company together? ..........why?
The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
> The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
The thing is, Joe is supposed to actually have substance and vision. He's not faking it. The difference is that all those sales guys are pretending to be someone like Joe.
It was easy to dismiss the show at the time because, though Pace’s performance was great from the beginning, it felt like he was a Temu Don Draper in an 80s Mad Men wannabe with ‘tech’ replacing ‘ads’.
The show is not at all that if you stick with it for even a short while.
Totally agree, he was incredibly good in that show.
He's also really great in the show Foundation, with a pretty different role. I watched Foundation much more recently and it took me a while to realize it was the same actor from Halt.
I got really disappointed at the mainframe booting into PC-DOS with a CGA font on a 3278 terminal. The show made such an impeccable job at rebuilding the 3033 CPU and the 3278 terminal just to make such a horrible job depicting its boot process. A VM/SE banner or an MVS login screen would have been sufficient (if inaccurate, if we are looking at the operator console). Did the research point out mainframes don't run PC operating systems?
Lee Pace is a first rate actor but I could not recognize him or indeed, most of the characters in this show, as representative of their roles. I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it. I still enjoyed it somewhat. Not Silicon Valley good but okay.
I'm always surprised Lee Pace doesn't get more recognition; I've loved a lot of his quirkier projects like Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but it's not like he hasn't also been in mainstream things like The Hobbit and Guardians of the Galaxy.
I really liked the show despite Lee Pace's performance.
Pace really nails the intense Jobs vibe, but having seen his other work, it seems like it might not be 100% acting. There's consistency to the off feeling he gives across roles.
Gordon's role was probably the most setting accurate, but I do feel the story would have suffered if the entire cast was realistic to 80s standards rather than translated into late-2010s sensibilities.
> I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it.
This! It's not a bad show but people calling it the Best Drama are wildly overselling it.
Maybe I should watch a full episode but this clip doesn't sell -me- on it. Heavy handed and a bit phony. Great talent in these scenes, not directed or crafted for my tastes. I'm saying my feelings not downvoting!
Anyone modeling themselves after someone, isn't going to have that electricity.
You really have to believe in yourself and your plan, and have a real plan even if its in flux, to communicate like that and carry it off. But when audacity is backed up by substance, it really gets people's attention.
And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.
I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk.
Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season.
What's so great about it is:
- mushroom theory of management works
- trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible
- throw all the corporate bs away, just build
- competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works
- real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down
as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show!
The problem with it is that it is ahistorical enough in the tech that some things just don't work. The show tackles stuff about like a decade before it was actually relevant in market, and that has subtle problems that give the business stuff an uncanny-valley feel. Still a fun drama though.
Season 1 feels like its connecting back to Compaq, which made a competitor to IBM's PC platform. Founded by previous TI employees, reverse engineered IBM's BIOS, etc.
Correction: Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and QuantumLink (insofar as Mutiny is QuantumLink, anyway). Season 3 can be roughly summarized as "LOL, Norton".
My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.
Patriot is amazing, more people should watch it, everyone I know who has was enthralled by it.
Counterpart was great but structure made it hard for to watch knowing it'd been cancelled.
Scavengers Reign was great; I couldn't get into Common Side Effects.
Evil is exactly the Catholic X-Files, which is an amazing concept, but by the end of the 2nd season it is all the way off the rails and hurtling into a canyon.
Given your list, you might dig Lodge 49, which is somewhere in the intersection of HACF, Evil, The Big Lebowski.
Patriot is my single favorite show of all time. I absolutely adore it and every preposterous, absurd line.
So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.
So many phenomenal scenes. I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public but it was unafraid to take some serious and weird risks. But they pay off in spades for me!
HACF only has four seasons, but it features great character arcs and a beautiful ending. I don’t think it’s on the level of The Wire, but it’s way more than enough to stand apart.
I've heard about the show on an episode of the podcast "Endless Thread", where the creator Joseph Bennett talked about how the show came to be and how his creative process worked.
It was very intriguing and I started watching it on the same day. This would have really deserved a renewal for another season, but sadly it got cancelled.
One of the few sci fi shows that makes an alien world truly feel alien. Where it clearly has its own evolution, ecosystems, rules, etc., but they are so... alien that it is barely comprehensible to the characters and audience.
He has something to do with this show as well which was obtuse enough to keep me at a distance. It's an unhinged, detective story with puppets in a noir-laden city grit setting.
Station Eleven. Wouldn't have made it past a few episodes if I didn't know how good Mackenzie Davis was from watching HCF 1000 times. I stuck through a few things I didn't care for at first, now it will probably remain my favorite show of all time.
Station Eleven is so beautiful and human. Great pick. Highly recommend The Leftovers if you liked that one. Its exploration of life and grief and humanity following a secular rapture is stunning, and the performances are outstanding.
I have seen two of your five shows and like them a lot, and heard of another and it’s already on my to-watch list. This is enough overlap to get the other ones added to the list (plus that pilot).
Given the agreement in taste so far, here’s a couple to try if you haven’t:
- Sweet Vicious — marred by getting cancelled after one season, but a fun season anyway. College sexual assault survivor becomes an anti-rapist vigilante. It’s, uh… more light-hearted than the premise sounds?
- Review with Forrest MacNeil — A guy has a review show where he attempts to review… life. Takes viewer requests for what specifically to review in each episode. He takes his job very seriously. Avoid seeing episode counts if at all possible. Trust me on that part. Doesn’t ruin it if you do see them, but being blind to that does improve it.
Another that I’m not sure counts as under-watched as it’s more recent, but I rarely see it discussed in the wild: Dickinson, a magical realism biographical show about the poet, that mixes in humor and some modern pop culture (think: A Knight’s Tale).
great recommndations, Patriot is amazing dark comedy with great atmosphere, SR is great semi-documentary about alien planet ecosystem, very peaceful, didn't like CSE and Counterpart though
I would suggest also Devs just for the visuals and Tales from the Loop for the most peaceful TV show I've ever seen
> Scavengers reign is from the same people as common side effects.
In case it matters to someone, the order is reverse. As in, Scavengers Reign came before. Also, be aware it wasn’t renewed for a second season. But it absolutely deserved it, just not enough people knew about it.
Rubicon is excellent. I was disappointed at the time it only got one season, but in retrospect it worked out okay because it's one season done very very well.
As someone who lived through that era, I couldn't watch it. A deep sense of uncanny valley. The 97% that they got completely right was ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Often senslessly so. Stuff that a technical consultant would have caught in an instant.
I did rather enjoy the way that they captured the manic energy of the generation of dirtbag sales and marketing people that drove the PC industry in that era.
What it missed, I though, is that it failed to capture the breathless sense of wonder at finding yourself at the center of an event around which the entire universe was going to pivot -- something that was obviously going to change everything. That's what you lived if you worked on the technical side of the PC industry.
Tracy Kidder's book, The Soul of a New Machine, however....
> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong.
Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!
Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents.
So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip.
Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an 8KB EPROM chip if you do a web search) and plugs it into a breadboard and proceeds to dump out each byte of the chip with Joe (Lee Pace) writing down the address and data at that particular address on a pad of paper.
After writing the address and address contents for the first time, Joe asks Gordon how many times they have to do this procedure. Gordon replies 65536, which would imply a 64KB ROM chip - but the web search said the IBM PC used an 8KB EPROM for the BIOS.
After more dreary, repetitive work, they accomplish the dumping and transcribing of the IBM PC BIOS in one weekend.
But one could have used a short BASIC program to dump the IBM PC BIOS ROM - the IBM PC wasn't a locked down game console...
Maybe as a HW guy, writing a BASIC program to dump the BIOS would not come to mind.
For a legal clean-room implementation of the IBM PC BIOS, the actual contents of the IBM PC BIOS aren't needed.
You need the specs for each BIOS function (input/output parameters and description of what the BIOS function does).
The IBM PC Technical Reference Manual (which cost $99 back then) contains the BIOS assembly language listing.
One would need to type up the lines that list the input/output requirements for each BIOS function and their purpose and they'd be half-way to a clean-room PC BIOS.
But that'd be way less dramatic (and easier) than the way shown in the episode.
I lived through parts of the tech eras depicted and I thought it captured the culture of people really well. It would have been boring to get bogged down in the details of historical differences, I'm not expecting this to be a documentary. Many of the people I worked with referred to the mushroom farms referenced in Soul of a New Machine from first hand experience The show had to change things as the years passed on the show in order to have the same main cast of characters involved as technology changed. I read Soul of a New Machine recently and one really has to have the right mind set to appreciate it, there are a lot of very specific details to that time in Massachusetts, working for what feels like a small division of ponderous Data General, competing technically and politically with separate groups within Data General, where every main character is a man, almost incidentally competing with the other computer companies, it does convey the feeling of a startup within a bigger company, so I don't hold the book in nearly the same high regard as others.
It’s very hard to capture everything in such an era. Maybe they made other choices that aligned with the fiction they were writing. It’s not a documentary. And TV shows can’t capture as much as books.
The show successfully gives enough to people to haven’t lived in that era. It’s an amazing show.
I view any historically based show as an alternate history. Nothing good comes from expecting too much consistency with our reality.
After all, if we could rewind those years, all that chaos would have all happened very differently. We canonize our own particular history too easily. Manifest destiny is not a real thing.
Ledbetter actually implicitly reveals why the pilot episode was so off, interestingly.
First off, he wasn't working in the industry at the time the pilot episode takes place. He first got involved in the industry a couple of years later, working for Sun Microsystems. (So not quite the ideal candidate for a technical consultant). And second off, he came to the table after the pilot episode had been written, but before the first regular season script was written. There's only so much a technical consultant can do when he's presented with a script whose central plot point is "it's hard to reverse engineer IBM PCs". He does claim responsibility for the procedure they used to reverse engineer the BIOS, oddly. But I am inclined to be generous, and give him credit for providing the most absurdly difficult technically-plausible procedure for reverse-engineering the BIOS, and grant that the right thing to do (throw the entire script away and start again because it WASN'T difficult to reverse-engineer the BIOS) was not a pragmatic realistic recommendation for a rookie technical consultant to deliver.
To put things in perspective. There was no need to reverse engineer the BIOS at all, because the IBM Technical Manual provided exquisitely commented assembler source code for the BIOS (copyright protected), including API documentation (the essence of which is not copyright protected). And a complete set of schematics. And IBM was -- for complicated reasons -- actively encouraging third parties to build clones. So correcting the technical inaccuracies in a pilot script whose entire plot revolves around "how audaciously difficult it is to reverse an IBM PC" is a bit interesting.
Once corrected, the plot of the pilot episode would have revolved around clean-room procedures for translating API documentation into copyright-safe BIOSes. Probably not that interesting to the unwashed masses. And abstract speculation as to whether IBM would sue their pants off for IP violations, even though IBM was very publicly and loudly saying that they would not. And whether you could convince CFOs and investors that they could take IBM at their word.
The actual strategy IBM was using was pretty clever, and quite horrifyingly machiavellian (although fair and reasonable enough that nobody ever really complained about it). I'm not actually sure if I'm allowed to tell the story of what happened when IBM patent attorneys showed up at our door wanting to have a discussion about a 10" thick stack of patents. Suffice it to say that I think they were playing a long game.
I hear you. After the first season, the tech and industry was just a backdrop, and I couldn't get into because the rest of it was pretty weak.
I had the same feeling but the opposite outcome with Silicon Valley. Growing up in Palo Alto, it took me a while to figure out if I was enjoying this show because it was genuinely funny or if it was just because it hit the absurdity of the time and place so well.
I've only visited Palo Alto, but I recognised way too many aspects of that series from various VC startups. Up to and including the startup I was apart of that had offices in a bedroom in a house in Atherton for a while, and the craziness around Techcrunch (which was incidentally started out of the bedroom next to "ours" in that house in Atherton).
I remember the writers of SV actually somehow had to tone down the ridiculousness of the SV setting. See this quote from The New Yorker [0]:
>“His [Teller, working for Google] message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’
>Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!
PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating
That's absolutely bitchun. You should definitely do so. What's actually in there? Ideally you'd have it done up as a set piece and mock up a connection to Mutiny on there ;)
Especially when I start to spend too much time obsessing about storage optimization, or similar. To me, sometimes, the computer is the thing.
But it's really helpful to take a step back and think about the big picture.
I just finished my third run through the series. There have been a lot of movies and shows about how tech "grew up" in the 80s and 90s, but this one feels closest to home for me. It was an incredible time to live through. Everybody was trying all kinds of stuff, fundamental stuff not stuff around the edges, and nobody knew what would hit and what wouldn't. Some kid in East Minnesota had the same shot as some guy in Stanford. There was very much a Wild West feel to it.
With apologies for going all old-guy, today it seems that whatever you do, you end up in some walled garden along a pre-programmed path. Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple? I don't know. It does not look like a worthwhile thing to spend my time on.
Everything you do today, it's like you automatically end up on some set of train tracks somebody else has made. Maybe they let your train run, maybe not. Maybe they like what you're doing and let your train run like the wind so that they can copy it all.
HCF reminded me that there was a time before all of this. Good memories.
Agentic coding may be an even bigger change, and it might kick off a new time like that. Too soon to tell. I sure hope so. I can't help but notice there are a lotta folks looking to get their hooks into the system.
> Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple?
Yes! I've spent much more time screwing around with linkers and search paths than I ever have App Store Connect. It's really not very difficult, it's always surprising to hear engineers expect it'd be something they'd sink time into.
Honestly, I think it's pretty remarkable you can distribute software to billions of devices with about as much clicking and form-filling as buying a plane ticket. Was there a time it was even easier?
I really don't know why this idea still persists that going through App Store review is this awful thing that takes forever and eats up all of your time. It really doesn't nowadays. I've shipped several apps in the last few years and the longest one of my apps has been in review has been maybe 3 days, and the average is between 1-2 days. That's usually for new apps. For updates, it's usually half a day to 1.5 days to get it reviewed.
It takes barely any time to manage the review process. I have had apps and updates rejected but it was easy enough to make some changes and re-submit.
Readit News
edit - a great example and one of my favorite scenes from the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc
You really feel it. Even when we know he's a manipulative sonuvabitch. It's mesmerizing. You have to admire his ability to spin shit into gold. The man has vision.
There's a sequence around S01E07 that I'm looking forward to reaching again, in which Joe is out on the front lawn with Donna's daughters during a hurricane and it's FEELS like magic. His performance feels earnest, and hypnotizing, and genuinely magical as he puts on a show for these young girls in the rain.
There's something intangible and hard to describe about the series. The writers have a way of making it transcend it's core drama and feel very different from just about any other show I can recall. Somehow it feels like pure creative expression that manages to defy outside expectations and tell a story that feels true to life and convey the ambitions of creative people who are fighting to make something beautiful.
It's shocking how few people have seen this show, let along watched it. Part of that probably has to do with how inaccessible it is on streaming. It's only readily available on AMC+. And no one has AMC+.
This is one of those shows that would likely shoot to the top if Netflix got the rights to it and even did a mild push. It's genuinely peak prestige TV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
Dead Comment
Your assessment of movie magic is only partially correct. Obviously, a character has to be convincing by himself but the heavy lifting of the illusion is done by the peer characters acting as if they believe the role he plays.
"The king is always played by the others"
Not sure who is to credit for this quote but in my opinion it is one of the most important insights to understand how movies work and also why movie characters are never relevant role models.
Now, I've realized, in real life they wouldn't have let them finish their first sentence.
He's also fantastic in Apple TV's Foundation and it's been really impressive seeing his range put on display there.
I remember seeing this discussed around the show The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, which is about a midcentury NYC divorcee getting into the world of stand up comedy. Overall it works and is a funny and enjoyable show, but there's definitely some of the standup routines depicted on-screen that are not actually as funny as the baked-in audience laughs might indicate. Because yeah... you can't really fake delivering good standup, even with a whole writer's room preparing the jokes and all the editing magic in the world, you still have to actually stand there and tell them in a funny way. That part can't be faked.
I sure do miss 'Mrs. Maisel'. What a stellar series.
I haven't yet seen season 3 and beyond, but it's clear the OP blogger agrees:
> The best thing the show’s writers ever did was realize that Joe wasn’t the most interesting character.
Like, Lee is a good actor for sure, he was just given a poorly story crafted role.
I'll also second your comment about the kid, which is one of the best child performances I've seen.
This is from the pilot and I watched it based on high recommendations, and I couldn't keep going because the character you're describing as so convincing and charismatic is so dramatically unlikeable!?
In this scene, he is:
* disrespectful and entitled with a coworker
* privileged and self-important about his background with a client
* then makes an admittedly pretty rousing speech, but TBH the show doesn't really trust us to understand that "this is meant to be inspirational" because it keeps cutting to the other character reacting "inspired", which is significant because
* he doesn't make the sale
* then proceeds to verbally scream abuse at the other character.
and then i'm supposed to be excited about watching the two of these start a computer company together? ..........why?
Scoot McNary is good in lots of things-- Monsters is a favorite. Mackenzie Davis in Station 11!
Viewers may have missed the show but casting agents didn't.
An absolute legendary performance.
The thing is, Joe is supposed to actually have substance and vision. He's not faking it. The difference is that all those sales guys are pretending to be someone like Joe.
The show is not at all that if you stick with it for even a short while.
He's also really great in the show Foundation, with a pretty different role. I watched Foundation much more recently and it took me a while to realize it was the same actor from Halt.
Pace really nails the intense Jobs vibe, but having seen his other work, it seems like it might not be 100% acting. There's consistency to the off feeling he gives across roles.
Gordon's role was probably the most setting accurate, but I do feel the story would have suffered if the entire cast was realistic to 80s standards rather than translated into late-2010s sensibilities.
This! It's not a bad show but people calling it the Best Drama are wildly overselling it.
also something about him with a good engineer
reminds me of me and my boss, i hope lol
You really have to believe in yourself and your plan, and have a real plan even if its in flux, to communicate like that and carry it off. But when audacity is backed up by substance, it really gets people's attention.
I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk.
Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season.
What's so great about it is:
- mushroom theory of management works - trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible - throw all the corporate bs away, just build - competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works - real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down
as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show!
Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and Compuserve, and still in Texas.
Season 3 is about the early commercial Internet, same characters, SFBA.
Season 4 is about the Yahoo era of the Internet and about venture capital, also SFBA.
Soul of a new machine is a fantastic book. About DG going up against DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and their Vax machines.
Please do! Ephemera like that can tell more sides of the story that didn't make it into the book, for whatever reason.
Also, I really liked DG/UX, for reasons I no longer recall.
I've only watched the first season and really don't see the link to Soul of a New Machine.
In an effort to sing the song of underappreciated works of greatness...
Patriot - a CIA hitman who writes folk songs about his exploits imdb.com/title/tt4687882/
Counterpart - not a multiverse, just a biverse imdb.com/title/tt4643084/
Scavengers Reign - Robinson Crusoe by way of a nature documentary of a very bizarre alien planet. imdb.com/title/tt21056886/
Common Side Effects - cops, robbers, magic mushrooms, corporate bad guys and the cure for everything. imdb.com/title/tt28093628
Evil - x-files meets Catholic mysticism. imdb.com/title/tt9055008/
The Heat Vision and Jack pilot episode - Jack Black, Owen Wilson and a script by Dan Harmon. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6lWgXDOAJ5s&pp=ygUUaGVhdCB2aXN...
Counterpart was great but structure made it hard for to watch knowing it'd been cancelled.
Scavengers Reign was great; I couldn't get into Common Side Effects.
Evil is exactly the Catholic X-Files, which is an amazing concept, but by the end of the 2nd season it is all the way off the rails and hurtling into a canyon.
Given your list, you might dig Lodge 49, which is somewhere in the intersection of HACF, Evil, The Big Lebowski.
So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.
So many phenomenal scenes. I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public but it was unafraid to take some serious and weird risks. But they pay off in spades for me!
https://youtu.be/FFK7RHYdWCc?si=w8R0eO6W3uGgXt3R
For those curious, start by watching the 8 minute short which originated it all. If it hooks you, you’ll love the show.
https://vimeo.com/179779722
But be aware the show wasn’t renewed for a second season. Not enough people knew about it.
It was very intriguing and I started watching it on the same day. This would have really deserved a renewal for another season, but sadly it got cancelled.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13148384/?ref_=ext_shr
Given the agreement in taste so far, here’s a couple to try if you haven’t:
- Sweet Vicious — marred by getting cancelled after one season, but a fun season anyway. College sexual assault survivor becomes an anti-rapist vigilante. It’s, uh… more light-hearted than the premise sounds?
- Review with Forrest MacNeil — A guy has a review show where he attempts to review… life. Takes viewer requests for what specifically to review in each episode. He takes his job very seriously. Avoid seeing episode counts if at all possible. Trust me on that part. Doesn’t ruin it if you do see them, but being blind to that does improve it.
Another that I’m not sure counts as under-watched as it’s more recent, but I rarely see it discussed in the wild: Dickinson, a magical realism biographical show about the poet, that mixes in humor and some modern pop culture (think: A Knight’s Tale).
I don't understand. How would knowing how many episodes there are have an impact on the show? (And the number of episodes seems just... fine?)
I would suggest also Devs just for the visuals and Tales from the Loop for the most peaceful TV show I've ever seen
In case it matters to someone, the order is reverse. As in, Scavengers Reign came before. Also, be aware it wasn’t renewed for a second season. But it absolutely deserved it, just not enough people knew about it.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4497617/?ref_=ext_shr
I will binge anything he makes with the double bullseye of these shows
https://www.lgclaret.com/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-techniques-in-mode...
(And he's also done two bands: The Jones Sisters and Hoist the King.)
I'd also add the two other legs of the Lee Pace Great Television stool: Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies.
- Black Earth Rising
- Pine Gap
I did rather enjoy the way that they captured the manic energy of the generation of dirtbag sales and marketing people that drove the PC industry in that era.
What it missed, I though, is that it failed to capture the breathless sense of wonder at finding yourself at the center of an event around which the entire universe was going to pivot -- something that was obviously going to change everything. That's what you lived if you worked on the technical side of the PC industry.
Tracy Kidder's book, The Soul of a New Machine, however....
Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!
So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip.
Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an 8KB EPROM chip if you do a web search) and plugs it into a breadboard and proceeds to dump out each byte of the chip with Joe (Lee Pace) writing down the address and data at that particular address on a pad of paper.
After writing the address and address contents for the first time, Joe asks Gordon how many times they have to do this procedure. Gordon replies 65536, which would imply a 64KB ROM chip - but the web search said the IBM PC used an 8KB EPROM for the BIOS.
After more dreary, repetitive work, they accomplish the dumping and transcribing of the IBM PC BIOS in one weekend.
But one could have used a short BASIC program to dump the IBM PC BIOS ROM - the IBM PC wasn't a locked down game console...
Maybe as a HW guy, writing a BASIC program to dump the BIOS would not come to mind.
For a legal clean-room implementation of the IBM PC BIOS, the actual contents of the IBM PC BIOS aren't needed.
You need the specs for each BIOS function (input/output parameters and description of what the BIOS function does).
The IBM PC Technical Reference Manual (which cost $99 back then) contains the BIOS assembly language listing.
One would need to type up the lines that list the input/output requirements for each BIOS function and their purpose and they'd be half-way to a clean-room PC BIOS.
But that'd be way less dramatic (and easier) than the way shown in the episode.
see https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/112846/halt-...
After all, if we could rewind those years, all that chaos would have all happened very differently. We canonize our own particular history too easily. Manifest destiny is not a real thing.
First off, he wasn't working in the industry at the time the pilot episode takes place. He first got involved in the industry a couple of years later, working for Sun Microsystems. (So not quite the ideal candidate for a technical consultant). And second off, he came to the table after the pilot episode had been written, but before the first regular season script was written. There's only so much a technical consultant can do when he's presented with a script whose central plot point is "it's hard to reverse engineer IBM PCs". He does claim responsibility for the procedure they used to reverse engineer the BIOS, oddly. But I am inclined to be generous, and give him credit for providing the most absurdly difficult technically-plausible procedure for reverse-engineering the BIOS, and grant that the right thing to do (throw the entire script away and start again because it WASN'T difficult to reverse-engineer the BIOS) was not a pragmatic realistic recommendation for a rookie technical consultant to deliver.
To put things in perspective. There was no need to reverse engineer the BIOS at all, because the IBM Technical Manual provided exquisitely commented assembler source code for the BIOS (copyright protected), including API documentation (the essence of which is not copyright protected). And a complete set of schematics. And IBM was -- for complicated reasons -- actively encouraging third parties to build clones. So correcting the technical inaccuracies in a pilot script whose entire plot revolves around "how audaciously difficult it is to reverse an IBM PC" is a bit interesting.
Once corrected, the plot of the pilot episode would have revolved around clean-room procedures for translating API documentation into copyright-safe BIOSes. Probably not that interesting to the unwashed masses. And abstract speculation as to whether IBM would sue their pants off for IP violations, even though IBM was very publicly and loudly saying that they would not. And whether you could convince CFOs and investors that they could take IBM at their word.
The actual strategy IBM was using was pretty clever, and quite horrifyingly machiavellian (although fair and reasonable enough that nobody ever really complained about it). I'm not actually sure if I'm allowed to tell the story of what happened when IBM patent attorneys showed up at our door wanting to have a discussion about a 10" thick stack of patents. Suffice it to say that I think they were playing a long game.
I had the same feeling but the opposite outcome with Silicon Valley. Growing up in Palo Alto, it took me a while to figure out if I was enjoying this show because it was genuinely funny or if it was just because it hit the absurdity of the time and place so well.
I guess that's to its credit: it nailed the culture.
>“His [Teller, working for Google] message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’
>Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating
PPS - ATX TV did a 10 year anniversary interview with a handful of the cast and crew that's worth watching if you're a fan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6L1suN-mGE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeY_5n75zPM
Especially when I start to spend too much time obsessing about storage optimization, or similar. To me, sometimes, the computer is the thing. But it's really helpful to take a step back and think about the big picture.
With apologies for going all old-guy, today it seems that whatever you do, you end up in some walled garden along a pre-programmed path. Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple? I don't know. It does not look like a worthwhile thing to spend my time on.
Everything you do today, it's like you automatically end up on some set of train tracks somebody else has made. Maybe they let your train run, maybe not. Maybe they like what you're doing and let your train run like the wind so that they can copy it all.
HCF reminded me that there was a time before all of this. Good memories.
Agentic coding may be an even bigger change, and it might kick off a new time like that. Too soon to tell. I sure hope so. I can't help but notice there are a lotta folks looking to get their hooks into the system.
Yes! I've spent much more time screwing around with linkers and search paths than I ever have App Store Connect. It's really not very difficult, it's always surprising to hear engineers expect it'd be something they'd sink time into.
Honestly, I think it's pretty remarkable you can distribute software to billions of devices with about as much clicking and form-filling as buying a plane ticket. Was there a time it was even easier?
It takes barely any time to manage the review process. I have had apps and updates rejected but it was easy enough to make some changes and re-submit.