Giving Halt And Catch Fire The Benefit Of The Doubt

In several episodes of its latest season, The Good Wife featured a recurring gag in which Alicia tried to work her way through "AMC's Darkness At Noon," a gritty crime drama that was obviously modeled, at first, on AMC's Low Winter Sun but took a True Detective-y turn as time went on. In case it wasn't clear what the Good Wife producers were getting at, the show's Emmy campaign made the point explicit with an ad comparing The Good Wife's output over the season to that of its probable Best Drama Series rivals -- all shorter-run series, generally on cable (exceptions: Downton Abbey and House Of Cards). Message: Emmy voters are positively prejudiced toward cable shows because the greater latitude they're permitted, the lack of pressure to attract a mass audience, and their tiny artisanal season lengths all seem to confer automatic prestige.

I thought about all of these conditions a lot while watching the pilot of AMC's Halt And Catch Fire. I'm not sure it would ever make it onto Alicia's DVR, but even if it did, I doubt she'd make it very far past the pilot, which ends with a parade of IBM lawyers trooping into the offices of a much smaller tech company forced by a couple of rogue employees into the PC-clone hardware business; even set in the early '80s, that's probably not escapist enough for Alicia, attorney of record for ChumHum. After the pilot, I'm not certain I'm going to stay on board either...and yet I think I might have been brainwashed into giving it more of a chance than my heart actually desires.

On the one hand, not watching Halt And Catch Fire would be somewhat hypocritical of me. I am forever complaining about how samey TV can be (see: NBC's über-generic new medical drama The Night Shift, notable only for all the spectacularly bad decisions that clearly went into its marketing campaign). The early years of computing are both a time and a milieu that haven't been covered in scripted TV (other than in the early-aughts TV movie Pirates Of Silicon Valley, which dealt with the friendship of and eventual schism between real-life pioneers Bill Gates and Steve Jobs), and I feel like it's my responsibility to support shows that deviate from staple TV topics and thus help head off more duplicates in the future. I mean, soon there are going to be two shows about private doctors on the same network. It's really getting ridiculous.

But on the other hand, I seriously don't know whom this show is for. It's not just the problem our Mark Blankenship recently addressed -- that watching people working on their computers is inherently uncinematic -- because it's such early days in the development of the technology that you hardly even see people near computers, and when you do they're actually messing around in the computers' guts with soldering irons and stuff, which is kind of cool, or at least causes sprays of sparks. Instead, it's a lot of talking about intellectual property and maverick entrepreneurship and who knows which programming languages.

I can imagine this storyline being roughed out with memories of how cool it was when that one season of Mad Men reset with all the best people from Sterling Cooper sneaking off to start their own splinter agency...except that by the time that happened, we'd already known all those characters for three whole seasons. It's hard to get that exercised about whether a super-smart engineer is going to leave his stable job and take a chance on a new venture when (a) since that's the premise of the show, we can be pretty sure he will, and (b) we just met him, so who cares what he does? And once we're past that question, the stakes feel kind of low: to be fair to all the doctor and lawyer shows, the reason there are so many of them is that people's actual lives are on the line, not just the question of whether people are going to have to mooch jobs at Texas Instruments from their wives or something.

And if you don't find the business stuff especially dramatic, it might be because you're hung up, instead, on the fact that it's hard to invest in the success or failure of any of these fictional hardware innovations. You know that if you go to Best Buy right now, none of your PC options is going to be a Cardiff Electric. It's like if The Americans were all about a couple of supposed U.S. citizens who were actually covert agents from, like, Greece.

AND YET! Even with all the prestige cable shows that seemed important yet failed to hook me (Treme, The Killing), there are many more that I'm embarrassed to admit passed me by when their first seasons were actually on (Orphan Black) or got way more compelling as their first season went on (Rome, Deadwood, Fargo). Even though I have no problem whatsoever ditching network shows -- even ambitious ones -- that bore me straight out of the gate (hi, Crossbones), I'm so much more willing to give a fancy cable show the benefit of the doubt and let it win me over. I'm exactly the gullible viewer The Good Wife was justly mocking.

And yet...I mean, at least it's not Hell On Wheels.