As memorable friendship lines go, “Reverse-engineer an IBM PC with me!” is not exactly something from “Casablanca.” But Lee Pace (“Pushing Daisies”) ably sells the pitch as Joe MacMillan, a rogue former IBM employee who’s courting the help of frustrated engineer Gordon (Scoot McNairy) to help him stealth-build a new machine that will put the established companies on notice.
“Computers aren’t the thing. They are the thing that gets us to the thing,” Joe says. (“Oh, like porn,” I imagined half the viewing audience instantly thinking.)
Following on the heels of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” AMC rewinds to the nascent personal-computer industry in “Halt and Catch Fire,” a drama set in the early-’80s world of Texas’ Silicon Prairie at the fictional Cardiff Electric. Techies may speculate about the company on which it’s based, though the creators insist it’s all an amalgamation.
In any case, I’m pretty sure Steve Jobs was never as dashing as Pace, whose Joe deploys a wolfish grin and seductive relentlessness to win Gordon and a brilliant college student (Mackenzie Davis) onto his team.
Davis’ Cameron, whose blond mop-top channels Darryl Hannah in “Blade Runner,” is the most interesting of the three characters — a punk-rock hacker who knows she’s already an anomaly in the testosterone-soaked world of computer science. When Joe shows up to lecture at her class, she hits him with a few know-it-all answers; not long after, they’re doing it in a closet, an act he inelegantly concludes with, “This doesn’t mean you’ve got the job.”
The premiere flags a bit when we get to the actual business at hand; Pace and McNairy hole up in the latter’s garage, furiously soldering wires and reading off columns of numbers. It’s not the stuff of great drama.
Nor, really, is the predictable struggle between Gordon and his engineer wife (Kerry Bishe) about how, as she says, “we can’t go through this again.” The two once collaborated on an earlier computer venture that crashed and burned, and now she’s settled into domestic life, while he’s visibly wilting from boredom. (I did like the nice touch of having her repair the kids’ Speak & Spell, that pre-Siri computer voice embedded in my Gen-X childhood memories.)
Things pick up as Joe takes a calculated risk by outing their project to the competition, putting his bosses in a no-win position that demands they fund the build.
I’m game to keep watching, though I wonder how appealing the show will be to crucial younger viewers who’ve never seen a dark computer screen with a few green lines of text and a flashing cursor.
But perhaps “Halt and Catch Fire” can engagingly fill in the gap between then and now — if it focuses on the human stories behind the machine that will eventually change everything.