Halt and Catch Fire

Halt and Catch Fire captures the rise of the PC era in the early 1980s, during which an unlikely trio – a visionary, an engineer and a prodigy – take personal and professional risks in the race to build a computer that will change the world as they know it.

The series is set roughly one year after IBM all but corners the market with the release of its first major product – the IBM PC. It is also the same year people realize the IBM PC’s fatal flaw, which quickly makes personal computing anyone’s game. In this fictional drama, a former IBM executive, Joe McMillan (Lee Pace) plans to reverse engineer the flagship product of his former employer, he forces his current company, Cardiff Electric, into the personal computer race. McMillan enlists the help of Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a once great engineer who dreams of creating a revolutionary product while trying to manage his initially unsupportive wife Donna (Kerry Bishé), and Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), a volatile prodigy who puts her future in jeopardy to join MacMillan’s rogue PC project. While charting the changing culture of Texas’ Silicon Prairie, tensions build within the group as they attempt to navigate the thin line between visionary and fraud, genius and delusion, and as their drive to do something that matters runs up against their ability to truly innovate. Halt and Catch Fire thrives on the spirit of innovation and explores what it’s like to stand at the forefront of something truly great and world-changing and work towards it, no matter the risk.

The final season of the series saw the cast navigating the early days of the Internet and web browsers, pondering their destinies both personally and professionally, while the competitive nature of the tech world continues to complicate and affect their relationships.

production details
USA | AMC | 40×44 minutes | 2014-2018

Creators: Chris Cantwell, Chris Rogers
Executive Producers: Jonathan Lisco, Mark Johnson

cast
Lee Pace as Joe MacMillan
Scoot McNairy as Gordon Clark
Mackenzie Davis as Cameron Howe
Toby Huss as John Bosworth
Kerry Bishé as Donna Clark
Bianca Malinowski as Debbie
Alana Cavanaugh as Haley Clark
Eric Goins as Larry
Scott Michael Foster as Hunt Whitmarsh
Manish Dayal as Ryan