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!

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.

edit - a great example and one of my favorite scenes from the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc

Great show and fantastic music. This show and Driver were two soundtracks that captured that early/mid 2010s vibe for me personally.

A great watch if you are nostalgic for the early BBS days or early WWW days. The post 2000 generation may not get it.

The first seasons were excellent, the latter seasons not so much.

So good

This series is great at multiple levels:

- the archetype characters and their motivations to do what they do (100% valid today)

- struggles and exhilaration of startups

- as a pseudo-documentary of the early years of personal computing

Highly recommend it!

It’s great but it ain’t no Mr. Robot.

Fantastic show! Just wrote an analysis of the conflicts between the characters and how every disagreement turns into a zero sum game:

https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/halt-and-catch-fire-the-tra...

My dad kept trying to get me to watch this show and I never got around to it. Maybe I need to.

It's quite good, but it gets very Six Feet Under by the end, and you have to suspend a lot of disbelief about technology; it's a little like Hackers in the sense that it's trying to communicate a feeling about operating in specific eras of computing, but not so much trying to realistically depict what it was like.

Christopher Cantwell, the showrunner, is also doing the new series of The Terror (aka North Pole Bear Show) that's premiering this year.

Season 1 was wonderful. The showrunner had initially written the pilot to get a job on Mad Men. It was eviscerated by critics for being too male, too masculine and seasons 2 onward pivoted into a girlboss series with Lee Pace's character taking a backseat and Scooter's character becoming a stay at home house husband. But if you like Breaking Bad and Sopranos, S1 is very well written.

This is one of those shows I've had in the rolling background rewatch queue for years, I love it and I try to recommend it to as many people as possible. Flawed, yes, but still special.

Yes, hands down the best show! They need to do more seasons, especially with modern day problems.

Other thoughtful and well made shows: Dark Matter, For All Mankind, Foundation (also Lee Pace and also stellar).

It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.

Totally worth a watch.

This is on my bucket list to finish. Watched one or two episodes and it reminded me of a dead serious Silicon Valley.