Halt & Catch Fire

While in discotheque De Hooizolder horny country girls hysterically hurled their big white underpants at the bassist of Doe Maar, MacGuyver somewhere in the bushes of a tropical rainforest made of 6 paperclips, a rubber band and some thumbtacks a machine gun and mothers did not send their child to school without a pack of Tjolk in the lunch box, Joe MacMillan hatched a plan. A master plan. It's the eighties. Neon green leggings are generally accepted, Madonna provides musical wallpaper and IBM dominates the computer world. Joe doesn't like the latter, so that has to change. Together with computer builder Gordon Clark and software wizkid Cameron Howe, he rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to redefine the personal computer. No method is shunned. Espionage, manipulation, extortion, Joe has it all in his repertoire and that makes Halt And Catch Fire a true page turner. Figuratively then, because it is of course not a book. But you know that too. That last comment was actually superfluous. Apologies for that. Halt And Catch Fire has actors who are pretty good, a stylist who is so into the eighties that she herself probably wears shoulder pads every day and a storyline that won't let you go. It's really just the 80's version of Mad Men. Also a series in which AMC managed to capture a certain era in the smallest details and to captivate the viewer with a story in which nothing really happened. You should be able to do it.

Good pilot. Now let's see what the series will look like in the upcoming episodes. But an interesting start.