In Which We Put Our Hands On An Executive

Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL

by ETHAN PETERSON

Halt and Catch Fire
creators Christopher Cantwell & Christopher C. Rogers
AMC

A monkey's paw is all this third season of Halt and Catch Fire is. Coined by the terrible English writer W.W. Jacobs, the little paw of a monkey is a concept that refers to when you wish for something but the thing you end up getting, while ostensibly identical to what you asked for, is substantially worse that your desire. 

Halt and Catch Fire did everything right for two wonderful seasons, and all I wanted was a third. Now it looks like it is being made in some guy's barn. This is supposed to be Silicon Valley?

I understand that it makes sense that the coders of Cameron Howe's social tech company would bring their clothes from their previous home of Texas to their new California environs. It seriously looks like they are just reusing the costumes from last season to save more money. "Why make more costumes," AMC probably opined in a memo, "no one watches this show enough to notice."

I watch this show, AMC. This third season reads like they only had the money to get the show's signature star, Lee Pace as sinister web security mastermind Joe MacMillan, for a couple of hours each day. The focus here is all on the relationship between Donna Clark (Kerry Bishe) and Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), which was exactly the wrong choice, since like most couples, the Clarks are only interesting when they are fighting.

I blame AMC for this entirely. There is one new actor in the season premiere of Halt and Catch Fire. Drink that in. I understand that later in the season Matthew Lillard and Annabeth Gish will be coming onto the show, but that would cost all of $10. What about maybe casting a star onto this project and giving it a budget to look as good as the other shows on the network. Fear the Walking Dead probably spends more on catering.

Despite the obvious lack of network support for this project — this show could have been Stranger Things — I have full faith that this season will eventually turn it around.

The early days of online interaction as a metaphor for our current view of technology leads to a lot of bracing critical moments. The soul of Halt and Catch Fire was really in the relationship between Cameron Howe (the brilliant and sexy Mackenzie Davis) and Joe MacMillan. The show's run began when they had sex, and the two barely share the screen together at all. Howe now gets along really well with the Clarks and in fact all of her employees, even though she misses the boyfriend she left in Texas.

The premiere was the perfect time to introduce her to a new love interest, someone who was also powerful in Silicon Valley who could become a major character on the show and a rival to MacMillan. This can still happen, but just think of how much that would cost in additional sets.

Instead we meet Ryan (Manish Dayal), who is meant to take the new role as the enterprising technical genius. Cameron struggles to believe in what Ryan is selling her, even though only months ago she was in his exact same situation and her bosses didn't listen. This is slightly implausible, but not as difficult as it is to identify with a character whose only trait is that he likes to work a lot.

Here's the problem: when you are good at one thing, you have a great situation. You are only good at that one thing, so you go and do it as well as you can. But what if you're good at more than one thing? How do you know which thing you are best at? You can't really know, since it depends on how good other people are at the thing you do. If you are the best at it, great and it's lonely at the top. If you are not, maybe you go back and revisit that other thing you do well.

At the end of the day (shut up), a show like Mad Men had two key characters and anything that took the focus off of Peggy or Don was a flat-out distraction from what made the show successful. Halt and Catch Fire created other characters that we love and respect. But there is such thing as being too respectful of what you make. For example, the executive played by Toby Huss should have died a long time ago, preferably in a fire.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Start A Company With Our Best Girlfriend

Season 3 All Happens On A Boat

by DICK CHENEY

"So how was the season finale of True Detective?" Lynne said, twirling a chicken thigh on her finger like a basketball.

"I don't want to talk about it," I said, covering my face with my hands. Lynne gave up on the show in week four, quietly walking out of the room around the time Vince Vaughn used the word 'kike,' throwing a framed photo of her with Matthew McConaughey on the set of Mud into the trash.

"You watch bad shows so I don't have to," she said.

"Ugh." I was still reeling from the twenty minute recap of NBC's Mr. Robinson I had given her the previous day. Women be shopping, I had begun, you can't stop a woman from shopping.

Now that he has a woman in his life, he leaves the house like this?

"Tell me, or the next time Roger Ailes calls I'll tell him you are here."

"All right!" I screamed in her face. "Vince Vaughn was murdered by Mexicans and he hallucinated black kids bullying him for being who he was! Colin Farrell looked up to God in the heavens and it turned out his wife was making her rape up to get out of the marriage! The mayor killed himself because he was sad! Rachel McAdams dyed her hair the same color that it was! The solution to the murder the season began with had nothing to do with any of the characters on the show! Rachel and Colin fell in love forever based on the mutual sharing of how terrible Nic Pizzolatto has been for their career! Colin Farrell's torso looked decent to good! Is that what you fucking wanted to hear?"

His inspiration was 90s album art and early 60s porn magazines. That explains a lot.

"Wow," Lynne said, "by any chance did Ray Velcoro (Farrell) tell Rachel McAdams 'None of that is your fault' after he had mincing sex that reminded her of the abuse she suffered as a little girl?" Lynne always reads the worst recaps of television shows, the ones that are like, 'Last night's True Detective was a fine example of film noir...' It's like, go fuck yourself. At least include your significant other as a presence in the recap, so you can make it seem like you're not just quietly taking notes on Vince Vaughn's skin by yourself.

"None of it was anyone's fault," I replied. "About 100 people were murdered and there was not one investigation."

A tortured portrait of a man who hates minorities.

After that, Lynne and I had make-up sex on top of our bear rug and ate string cheese like the dogs in Lady and the Tramp. I still couldn't get over how bad the finale was, so to take my mind off it, I explained in choking, interrupted sobs how it wasn't fair that Nic had a job while the guys who make Halt and Catch Fire can't even get a meeting with AMC because no one watches their show.

His hoodie exceeded all my expectations. Watch this show immediately in its entirety please.

It is almost impossible to write about Halt and Catch Fire. The show stars Lee Pace and his huge, massive eyebrows as Joe MacMillan. In the first scene of Halt, Joe is speaking at a university computer class when he discovers Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), a computer prodigy who is basically if Kate Moss absorbed Albert Einstein. This wonderful, multidimensional character proves to Nic Pizzolatto once and for all all that not every woman need either be a whore or a lesbian.

"Vince Vaughn fired his agent, honey. Don't worry."

Complementing these two centerpieces is the starmaking role of Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) a disgraced engineer working at a small Texas electronics company that Joe flips on its head. McNairy's Clark is married with two young daughters. He and his wife Donna (the gorgeous Kerry Bishé) are recovering from the failed launch of Gordon's computing brainchild, a device called Symphonic. Gordon's relationship with Donna is fractious, disturbed and fragile: it is also completely authentic.

Instead of relying on nudity, profanity or violence to carry any of the action, Halt and Catch Fire consists of intensely charged personal interactions between people meant to be more intelligent than any on television. Instead of making genuises so different from us they are unrecognizable, creators Chris Cantwell and Chris Rogers do a marvelous job of treading the line between moments that are alien to strategies for life that are barely recognizable. Halt feels so much like the world that it must actually be disturbing for some people to watch. This is the only reason that would explain the low ratings.

Talking about boys again.

The second season of Halt and Catch Fire explored Cameron starting her own tech company with Gordon's wife Donna, one that she named Mutiny. She also found manic pixie love with a young programmer named Tom.

Tom is the absolute sweetest and everytime he and Cameron kissed I had butterflies in my colon. Meanwhile, Lee Pace suppressed his past dalliances with men and pursued a relationship with the journalist daughter of a CEO of a multinational corporation, Sara Wheeler (Aleksa Palladino). She wasn't the strongest personality on the show — her clothes always looked like a throw rug — and she ended up "needing her time and space," which we all know what that means.

It's a good thing Colin Farrell fathered like twelve children out of wedlock in the 90s so they had these pics to use.

Having a show about two women running a company was exciting on both a sexual and human resources level. It felt novel, which the first season of True Detective exemplified, especially when Matthew McConaughey said things were shit for like ten straight minutes that one time. When it came to basically all the guys on the show dying and Rachel McAdams living somewhere in Venezuela and still being extremely cranky... the target was in L.A. but the arrow was in New York.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

This is the same haircut she had to begin with. She should have gotten one of those Wendy Williams wigs.

"Spirit Moves" - Langhorne Slim (mp3)

In Which We Pray For The People Of Pakistan

Shopping List

by DICK CHENEY

HBO's disastrous programming of late reminds me of the Republican presidential field, I wrote. But no, there is nothing to watch on HBO anymore. Cancel all of your subscriptions. Did you know they are jumping into bed with J.J. Abrams? Do they ever want a woman to watch one of their shows again?

HBO had success by adapting the works of a fantasy writer whose literary efforts were deemed too complex to bring to film or television. They decided to follow this up by working on Michael Crichton's back catalogue. I am sorry but this looks like a complete mess.

Do you giggle like a schoolgirl every time someone says they have the munchies? You will probably enjoy The Brink.

The other day I watched The Brink, a thinly veiled excuse for Tim Robbins to complain about Israel every week. I have to give this humorless show credit in that it actually attempts to portray a non-Western country, in this case, Pakistan. However mostly of the comedy consists of Jack Black smoking pot and Robbins having sex with Asian prostitutes, which really grates after awhile.

The Brink is going for something like Dr. Strangelove but the weird thing is that it actually takes itself seriously. Straddling the line between parody and satire is working out decently well for Donald Trump at this point, but I've never heard of it being a success in television. It is astonishing how many people take Donald Trump at face value. What he said about John McCain was hilarious, and he has singlehandedly made Jon Stewart funny again. Does The Nation also think that Big Bird is destined to become our Secretary of Defense?

Cute lampshade. I think Farrell was in a sitting position the entire episode.

After Sunday night's disasterpiece, there is only one more episode left of True Detective, which I have to give some credit to — at least it didn't try to save its mess of a season by showing off Rachel McAdams' body in an extremely unlikely sex scene with Colin Farrell. They did have intercourse, but it was very restrained and loving, and prefacing by Farrell's Ray Velcoro explaing, "I am a bad man."

The president of HBO gave a rambling and completely insincere interview about how much he loves True Detective. "The finale will really deliver," he explained, as he mimed masturbating to the reporter. Well, it has better, since David Fincher's shows (Utopia? Synchronicity? Get the fuck out of here) are D.O.A., the last season of House of Cards was about as entertaining as a White House press conference and someone (probably Michael Lombardo) got high on molly and greenlit a Lewis and Clark miniseries. This is a real thing.

"I looked in the woods for your rapist for over an hour. I think that was sufficient."

But back to True Detective. The story so far: There isn't much of one. From the attorney general to the chief of police, everyone enjoys a hot bang now and then. The protagonists of True Detective are the people excluded from these lively sex parties. Since there were not invited, they decided to steal some important business paperwork from the event. Naturally, the owners of the paperwork want it back. Instead of just making a photocopy, Taylor Kitsch refuses and is murdered.

Are you getting excited! About the paperwork! But you know what might save HBO? A miniseries about affordable housing. What even is this.

He wrote down flash grenades on a piece of paper. What even is this.

A mark of evil is how easily we are influenced by our environment. "If you had just been honest, we couldn't have got you," the people blackmailing Taylor Kitsch explained. Instead he had to pretend to be a straight man, and it is what got him killed. I believe the same thing happened to Rock Hudson.

Vince Vaughn was busy, and a lot more. He showed his wife the guy he killed and she was nonplussed. I think she has probably seen it and a lot more before when she was Nucky Thompson's wife in a past life. I am running out of steam trying to describe how lame True Detective is, but not even Vaughn blowing up his own casino for some reason was sufficient to bring excitement to events.

I guess their production budget was pretty meager by this point.

Instead of describing Rachel McAdams' sex with Colin Farrell in excruciating detail (he touched her arm with his finger) or bashing HBO for their terrible choice of programming, I need to focus on a growing trend: older woman stealing the roles of younger women. I am absolutely devastated that the careers of Jonathan Demme and Meryl Streep have come to this:

Maybe cast one person of color in your movies, just to amuse me.

I didn't feel sympathetic towards Ellen Page when she was a pregnant white girl with a cute boyfriend, and I certainly don't care about some older white woman appropriating cultures she isn't a part of and trying to restore order to her family. Jonathan Demme was a respected and admired artist at one time. Now he's probably going to executive produce a miniseries about the Wright brothers or something while Halt and Catch Fire gets canceled. There is no justice.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

I'm sensing the mayor may be a thinly veiled commentary on HBO's president.

"Break the Chain" - Ultimate Painting (mp3)