5 Reasons Why 'Halt and Catch Fire' Is Experiencing a Sophomore Surge

It’s rare, but sometimes a TV show that starts out slow in its first season blossoms into greatness in Season 2. (It’s basically the opposite of what’s happening with True Detective right now.) We saw it with Parks and Recreation, and The Office — two comedies that showed faint glimmers of promise at first, then rewarded patient viewers with a breakout second season. Let’s call it the “sophomore surge.”

And it’s happening right now to AMC’s 1980s computer drama Halt and Catch Fire — whose first season, if we’re being honest, halted more often than it caught fire. But to their credit, creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers unplugged and rebooted for Season 2, and the result is a compelling, dynamic drama that’s become one of this summer’s most addictive shows.

How’d they do it? We found five key reasons for Halt’s creative rebirth:

1. The women have stepped into the spotlight.

Halt’s first season focused on flashy salesman Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) and meek programmer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) as they worked to develop an IBM PC clone at a small Texas software company. It was fine, but we had seen shows like that before. (More on that in a bit.) Season 2 found its groove, though, by switching its focus to the two female leads: Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) and Donna (Kerry Bishé).

These two couldn’t be more different — Cameron’s a moody genius who hates conformity; Donna’s a wife and mom who’s also a whiz with a soldering iron — but they joined forces to form Mutiny, an upstart gaming company. They still butt heads from time to time, but they also support each other as they take on the boys’ club of corporate computing together. And their uneasy alliance has more storytelling verve than anything we saw last season.

2. We’re getting to witness the birth of online gaming.

The best parts of Halt Season 2 have taken place in Mutiny’s frat-house headquarters, where programmers work day and night developing cool new games… and creating the blueprint for an online community that’s about to explode. Mutiny is the punk-rock agitator nipping at the heels of big boys like Atari and Nintendo, and they look the part, too; watching Cameron and Donna try to play mother hen to this unkempt band of misfits is worth a few laughs, and ties into today’s wild, messy start-up culture.

But really, it’s fertile dramatic ground, too. Mutiny takes off thanks to their online games (that run across balky phone-line modems, of course; it’s still 1985), but they soon discover their users want to talk to each other online, even when they’re not gaming. This new chat-room functionality becomes Mutiny’s most popular feature, and it’s thrilling to see them take the first uncertain steps towards mapping out the World Wide Web.

Video: We Quiz the ‘Halt and Catch Fire’ Cast on ‘80s Video Games

3. It sent its main characters in different directions… and it actually worked.

We usually hate it when TV shows start a season with all of their main characters spread out in separate locations, making us wait patiently for them to be in the same room again. But Halt has done a great job of justifying its characters’ diverging paths, and bringing them back together in satisfying fashion.

With Cameron and Donna busy at Mutiny, Joe and Gordon started Season 2 in career limbo. After setting fire (literally) to his PC dreams, Joe’s settled down with a new girlfriend: Sara (Boardwalk Empire’s Aleksa Palladino), the daughter of oil tycoon Jacob Wheeler (James Cromwell). And he’s out of the personal-computer game entirely. Meanwhile, Gordon received a healthy buyout check from his former employers… and is now spending it on a healthy cocaine habit.

Joe’s manipulative head games dominated Season 1, but it’s nice to see Cameron and Donna strike out on their own without any need for his input. And when he does come back into the picture, offering valuable server space to Mutiny with Gordon’s help, the new power dynamics between Joe and Cameron (they had a fling last season, the embers of which are still burning) definitely produce some sparks. It’s like the creators had to split the characters up to reimagine how they relate to each other — and it paid off.

4. They cut down on the tech talk in favor of personal stories.

This is a show about computers, after all, so it makes sense that we see a lot of loving close-ups of microchips and motherboards on Halt. But things maybe got a bit too wonky last season with all the dense computer lingo. The shift to Mutiny and game development made things more accessible, and Season 2 has also woven in some poignant personal stories to make us care more about these computer nerds.

Gordon was blindsided when a doctor diagnosed him with a degenerative brain disorder — a pointed reminder that even fat tech-company checks can’t buy happiness. Plus, Donna’s surprise pregnancy and Cameron’s whirlwind romance with fellow geek Tom (Mark O'Brien) added a few emotional speed bumps to slow down Mutiny’s momentum. Even that eternal enigma Joe MacMillan has shown signs of personal growth this season. It’s all made Halt less chilly, and more relatable.

5. They stopped trying to be a carbon copy of Mad Men and found their own niche.

When it debuted last season, many critics wrote off Halt as a second-rate knockoff of AMC’s showcase drama Mad Men. And they weren’t wrong: Joe MacMillan’s charismatic pitches about a PC-driven future were distinctly Don Draper-esque.

But Halt managed to step out of Mad Men’s shadow this season, mostly by putting Joe on the back burner and reinventing him as the type of BS-slinging authority figure Cameron and Mutiny are rebelling against. Joe’s become a semi-antagonist, rather than a mysterious antihero. (And who needs another one of those on TV?)

In fact, we’ve barely seen Joe go into salesman mode at all this season. Instead, Season 2 has focused on Cameron and Donna’s struggle to earn respect in a male-dominated industry and to innovate in a rapidly changing online environment. It’s almost as if Peggy and Joan started their own ad agency at the end of Mad Men — and since we never got to see that, Season 2 of Halt is the next best thing.

Now it remains to be seen if this creative rebirth will actually lead to a third season; Halt still only averages about half a million viewers a week. (Actually, it was kind of surprising that it even got renewed for Season 2.) But now we’re totally invested, and it’d be a shame if we never got to see if Halt can keep this sophomore surge going.

The Season 2 finale of Halt and Catch Fire airs Sunday, Aug. 2 at 10 p.m. on AMC.