The second season of Halt and Catch Fire, AMC's 1980s-set tech drama, turned out to be terrific, engaging television, taking the show's characters through the earliest days of the online boom and concluding with a finale that leaves all sorts of possibilities open for a third season. It's a great, great season of TV, and if you haven't watched it yet, you should go do that now.
If you have watched it, then dig in below. I talked to the show's co-creators, Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers (yes, they're both really named Chris), about constructing the season, what the show has to say about men and women in the workplace, and their hopes for renewal. (In short: It's far from a sure thing, but AMC has been very supportive of the show in the past and is waiting to pull in more data.)
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
On connectivity and Gordon's ultimate disconnection
Gordon's slow deterioration drew criticism from some, before its purpose became more apparent.
Todd VanDerWerff: The prevailing wisdom is that you heavily retooled from season one into season two. How accurate is that?
Christopher C. Rogers: There is this kind of critical thinking that season two and season one are more disconnected than they are. We didn't replace any writers. I think we just kind of followed the story where it wanted to go. And it seemed like the technology at the end of season one was leading toward this proto-internet connectivity, and certainly some of the actors that were really demanding attention were Kerry Bishé and Mackenzie Davis.
TV: How did you weave that theme of connectivity through the whole season? It's present in every storyline.
Christopher Cantwell (left) and Christopher C. Rogers. (Mark Davis/Getty Images)
Christopher Cantwell: I thought the metaphor was clear in this story. It's a story of the tenuous nature of human connection, our desire to seek connection. It's talked about a lot in today's society about whether or not these devices, this technology that we've built, brings us closer together or pushes us apart. We thought the microcosm of our show was a really wonderful place to reflect that and really dig into the emotional reasons that our characters want to be involved in this technological world and see what was motivating them from the inside out.
TV: Yet Gordon (Scoot McNairy) is really disconnected from the main action of the season, and you got some criticism for that. Why did you decide to send him off on his own?
CC: If we were going to deal with human connection, throughout the season we wanted to have one of our story threads really represent the absence of connection. In order to do that, we really needed to isolate one of the characters.
Gordon made a lot of sense because he was coming off of this rather Pyrrhic victory at Cardiff. He's doing well financially, but at the end of season one he asks this question, "What's next?" And he's really continuing to ask himself that question throughout season two. And I think that to throw Gordon into Mutiny, have him start working there immediately, it just didn't feel right to us.
Joe was off in his own story as well. We wanted both of those guys to dovetail organically back to our main story, which is Mutiny. But overall, for Gordon emotionally, we wanted to tell a story of absence of connection. The way to do that was to really wall the character off from everybody else in his life for a little while.
TV: You also played around with just what the condition affecting his brain was. How did you develop that series of reveals?
CR: We have a lot of wonderful producers on this show who lived through the golden days of moviemaking in the 1980s, and the one criticism that we consistently got from the first season was, "Where was the cocaine?" So I think we had character reasons to play the coke story at the beginning of the [second] season, but I think a coke story on TV can go one of two ways: He's on it, or he's off it. He spirals into addiction, or he has a moment of realization, and he bounces back. That didn't seem fresh or interesting to us.
We played the drugs at the beginning of the season as something that was consistent with the story we didn't see [between seasons] of the development of the Giant Pro. But in ways, it was a head fake to cover what was really going on with Gordon which was this chronic toxic encephalopathy, which is something you'd get from working in jobs with machines, with heavy metals. It's something that felt like it could be real and specific to the kind of work Gordon had been doing all his life. We didn't want it to just be this generic cancer or something that struck somebody because we didn't have a better story idea.
Then within that, we'd been playing these seeds of mental instability in Gordon in the first season, and we thought there was an opportunity to kind of tie everything together and make a bigger picture and bigger meal of his maladies. It was something that we really felt like the actor was up for, and for my money, he really pulled off brilliantly.
TV: Did you see that discussion around midseason where people were wondering where all of this is going? You both seem really fond of constructing these long stories that seem to be heading nowhere, then pulling the rug out from underneath the audience.
CR: I think that these [audience discussions] are good signs sometimes that you're doing something right. Think of Cameron kissing Joe in the season's ninth episode. It was like — we want people to think we're the worst writers in the world for about five minutes. It's like, "Oh, of course there two are back together," and then we try to subvert that expectation. That move where you at first think you know what's going on, and you think you've seen this story before, and then you try to do something different that surprises you is a move that we're very fond of when we can pull it off in an earned way.
On Cameron's leadership style and gender disparities in the workplace
Cameron faced down several huge challenges this season and met them with aplomb.
TV: There was a lot of discussion and debate around whether Cameron was a good or a bad boss. What qualities do you think she has that makes her either an effective or ineffective leader?
CR: I think she's good and bad. It's important to look at the story and see, okay, we're going to show someone who, while she may have this kind of prodigy-level genius when it comes to certain aspects of computing, when it comes to what she's doing with her own hands, with her own brain, we thought it was interesting to throw Cameron suddenly into a management role that was thrust upon her. She wants to start a company. That's her dream, but can she handle the ins and outs of what that means?
We wanted to show her as someone who's rather unwieldy when it came to dealing with employees, when it came to dealing with sharing. The way that we often talked about Cameron's journey over season two was that she goes from open to closed, to use a technological metaphor. She goes from open source to closed and proprietary. She goes from saying this is a place where no one has a boss to saying, "This is my company, and I'm not selling it." She's no longer interested in other opinions in the room.
At the end of season one, we had talked about these characters that Joe had greatly affected over the course of that story, both Gordon Clark and Cameron. And we wanted to see the positive and negative effects of that. And Cameron really is, in a lot of ways, in a business sense, the monster that Joe created when it comes to her impulses.
TV: Throughout the season, people write off Cameron as being too emotional, when Joe is often just as guided by his emotions in decision-making. Was that link intentional?
CC: Cameron is someone who very much goes on her instinct and her gut and would use that to make choices. In the course of this season, we see her try to be more of a leader by putting some of those things in check, only to have these bad things keep happening, which make her say, "I can't be in a relationship at the same time. I can't actually run this place democratically." I think she empirically gets to this place of, "I'm trusting my gut, and nobody can tell me I'm not supposed to."
Joe followed his emotions with no regard for anyone in the first season. And this season was about him trying to find redemption and do penance and be a better person to see if that yielded a better result. So you have two people on two different paths getting two different results for their efforts.
TV: It felt to me like there were storylines throughout this season that were suggesting when women are in leadership positions, they're second-guessed in ways men aren't.
CR: We definitely wanted to explore that. We wanted to put these characters in a similar situation that Gordon and Joe were in in season one, and I think it's interesting when you see characters in the show as well as some of the audience of the show actually second-guess these characters and question their motives. It's really fascinating.
CC: Were we trying to point to the fact that yes, Donna and Cameron face a level of scrutiny and second-guessing that Gordon and Joe weren't subject to? We absolutely were. I think we really did want to point to the fact that this is a time when computers were becoming the toys for boys they would be for the next decade and that there was inherent distrust for Donna and Cameron, two women, especially seeking capital in this world. They have to go get [John] Bosworth, to some extent, to be taken seriously by some people.
TV: So how many big tech innovations can these people come up with? Obviously, they're following in others' footsteps in some places, but they really do seem to be on the forefront most of the time.
CR: What we want to do is have the characters ultimately drive the story. We want to invest in the characters' personal lives. We want to see their personal lives, their psychology, their emotions reflected in what they're doing on a business scale. But when you boil it down to the technology story and what we're trying to reflect of the period of the '80s and the birth of modern computing as we know it, what we're trying to say is that these ideas really don't necessarily 100 percent originate with one single person who then takes that idea, makes it the best version it can be and then carries it across the finish line.
One person may have an idea, another person may innovate on that idea and make it better, one person may take that idea and make it worse, and one company fails while another company succeeds. And I think that very messy nature of innovation and the evolution of ideas is something that we really wanted to be reflected in the show. But we do try to be careful and not have Cameron come up with every computing innovation that happens between 1983 and 2005. We want to make sure that we're always struggling to come across as a plausible story.
TV: Do you see that in some ways, still reflected in the tech world of today? It's certainly reflective of the collaborative nature of making film or TV.
CC: A lot of times as we're doing these partner stories, I like to think the more functional stuff we rip from our own process of guiding the big unwieldy ship that is a TV show.
We do think that what's so great about the tech story is it repeats and remakes itself over and over from generation to generation. The technology might change, but the fact that people who create things can make themselves into those creations, the partnerships, the betrayals — those are timeless motifs in this field. We absolutely look to modern things, then try to take those stories back in time and see if we can find a precedent.
On Donna, and finding a new way to tell a story about a crumbling marriage
Donna became the season's heart.
TV: Donna was the heart of the season in a lot of ways, and I was fascinated by how you portrayed a marriage in trouble in a way I hadn't seen quite this way before — just two people who really aren't talking. There's no larger conflict. They're just not talking.
CR: In season one, we always had plans for Donna to be more than just a housewife. But when we brought Kerry Bishé on to play that character, she really lit up the screen in a way that she became our secret weapon. In season two, we really wanted to expand her character and put her in one of the driver's seats in a way we hadn't seen before.
Even in season one, when Gordon's out late, we had a lot of scenes where they were together and able to talk things through, or even fight about things and clear the air. [But in season two,] they're not talking, and showing how many problems that can create. That's such a universal thing that so many of us go through — not just marriages but all the relationships in our lives, when you're just not communicating with someone that you need to be communicating with. It can really, really cause havoc on your life, their life, your life together.
We wanted them to keep missing each other in a certain way, even when they were in scenes together, and build that to a cumulative place where by the end of the season, the viewers are taking stock like, "Man, you guys need to really sit down and hash it out."
TV: Donna's abortion in episode six wasn't turned into a big story point or anything like that. It was just a decision she made. How did you find that storyline?
CC: We're really proud of that episode. It was important to us once we arrived on that feeling like a true choice for the character. We thought that Donna had a legitimate reason to make this choice. It wasn't about the company. It wasn't saying you can't have one or the other. It wasn't about her marriage. It should be a personal choice she made.
We didn't want to comment on it because most of the time, when it's done on TV, abortion has created this [dramatic music] "dun dun dun" moment. We thought this was true for the character, so we felt like the lighter touch was the right one. We didn't want to praise or condemn her or comment too much on that. That just seems like the human and right way to play that story. I thought Kerry carried it off beautifully and added so much to it. Her intuitive sense of why Donna was doing what she was doing was such a nuanced, touchy thing, and she nailed it.
TV: How did you build the relationship between Donna and Cameron? They didn't share a lot of scenes in season one, but when season two begins, they've been working together for a while.
CR: We looked at the first partnership of season one. We looked at Joe and Gordon and the flavor of that. We didn't want to repeat that. When we looked at Joe and Gordon we saw guys whose egos were really outsized from the beginning, and they really had something to prove. There was also probably between the two of them, not much respect. We talked about that a lot. At the end of the day, they really didn't have each other's backs.
We wanted to change that up a little bit when we saw Cameron and Donna's partnership. We wanted to see two people who could fight, who could really get into it, who also have healthy egos. But at the end of the day, there was a bedrock there. And that bedrock starts to get laid in episode one of the season when they have it out for the first time.
We get the sense in episode one that these two have been maybe playing nice at the office, maybe having some things go unsaid. But when they really have it out, that starts to lay a bedrock of their relationship and a deeper friendship underneath the going concern of Mutiny and all of the stresses and tension of that. We wanted to tell a story where at the end of the day, that bedrock would remain intact and even grow stronger, even when they find themselves often on either sides of an argument when it comes to the company's future.
TV: Was there any significance to the fact that Cameron's vision for Mutiny involved competition and Donna's involved community and bringing people together?
CC: With Donna there was this feeling of the ability to connect with people, this idea of community. This chance to bring people together around a common thing felt very true to her character, who had been kind of isolated and felt like she'd missed her moment in the first season. The idea that Cameron doesn't have anyone in her life and can't communicate with anyone but the zeroes and ones on her machine, and therefore, she goes for the release of playing. We really tried to root her ideas in the fact that it's more fun to do this with somebody you love and have a relationship with, and sometimes it's easier to do that through your computer than it is to do that in real life.
On Joe, and finding a way to keep estranged characters on the show, while staying true to the story
Joe ended up on the show's fringes this season, until he slowly was drawn back in.
TV: Joe [Lee Pace] seems so far out on the fringes of these people's lives — and justifiably so. Honestly, how is he even still around?
CR: That's Joe's magic power. Joe is that guy. He doesn't build the machine; he doesn't program it. He has notions, he has ideas, he has a magnetism, and he has a momentum behind him that really pushes him forward. The fact that these people again find themselves in each other's orbits is almost entirely due to Joe at the beginning of this season. Joe is the reason season two happened. He's actually the impetus for all of this, and when he starts meddling — whether he thinks it's a good idea or not, or whether he has good intentions or not — these people's lives get shaken up. Sometimes, the product and the people come out for the better, and sometimes, they come out for the worse, including Joe. Joe is not immune to the damage that's caused by that visionary quality he possesses.
TV: He's also a window into the world of big business starting to take an interest in the tech sector. What did that add to the story?
CC: We thought it made sense. It's a big idea, timesharing, and it was at the time this idea that there's all this unused computing time on these major mainframes. General Electric is a good company to look at that figured this out and suddenly had this brand new business. It felt like very Joe MacMillan to look around at fallow resources and suddenly make this burgeoning online thing bigger by a multitude.
So much of the season was about Joe coming back. We wanted to play fair with the audience and to keep everybody pretty far away for a while. It seemed like there was no place further away from Mutiny than working in an oil business. The idea that Joe would go to this oil business to try to start over again, only to somehow, through this realization, be sucked back into technology. It seemed very fair because if we came back to season two and suddenly Joe is sitting in tech, sitting someplace near Mutiny, it seemed like it would be convenience. It was important to us that Joe spend a long time away from all those characters.
TV: Do you think the show has a certain fatalism to it? An idea that you can't escape your true self?
CR: Speaking for myself, on my worst day, there's a certain fatalism to me. And I look to the writers of the show that have been there, and I know a lot of us have that quality. You can sometimes go toward that darkness and feel that, that there's no escape. These people are building these machines, and there's a tremendous excitement, and there's a tremendous joy in what they're doing.
But at the same time I think that they're slaves to their visions. They're at the office, they're working, they're always thinking of the next thing they're always thinking how to push themselves forward, how to push this idea forward. They're driven people, and I think that's a central tenet of the show. These are characters that the moment they try to stop and smell the roses, they could literally combust. That's a very painful process, as well as a very invigorating process.
TV: Bringing Bos back worked out wonderfully, but you could have easily written that character out as well. What made him a good character to bring back?
CC: Toby Huss, in all the color and the options he brought to that character. I look back at that pilot script, and the least fleshed-out of those characters as we wrote them originally was John Bosworth. We cast Toby Huss, and he brought this humor and this warmth. You felt for this guy, and you suddenly understood where he was coming from. That made us write more scenes for him, and through that process we found this relationship he and Cameron developed. He was someone you loved to write for.
Sometimes when you're writing, you go where the energy is, and so many of the Mutiny scenes and some of the Bosworth scenes are just that. They felt good and vibrant. And also felt like there was story to tell, because his was one of rebirth. He was a guy who had to change or be washed away, and he does change. It's fun to watch him be a fish out of water first, then someone that thrives in this kind of unlikely, chaotic startup environment.
On what season three would hold — and if there would be a season three at all
As the season ends, Mutiny is decamping for California.
TV: The finale ends with everybody headed to California. What does California represent to them and to you as writers?
CR: These characters have been in Silicon Prairie for a while now. There's a hope that they can make it and play the big time, and these characters are ready to see if they can do that. For us, Silicon Valley really represents that. And these characters have done a lot of damage to each other, and there's a really strong emotional desire among all of them to start over again.
There's a desire to escape what they've gone through, to put that behind them. There's a desire to move forward, and I think as we've already found in season two, there's always going to be the question of, can you do that? Can you really leave your past entirely behind, and can you start over? Can you divorce yourself from the parts of yourself that you don't like or the damage that's been done by others? Does that always stay with you no matter where you go?
There's a quote that I heard once. Chris and I watched a documentary about the Galapagos Islands and people that tried to settle them, and I think it was, "No matter how far you go in the world searching for paradise, you always bring yourself with you." And we want that undercurrent to definitely be present when they're all in that plane headed to California.
CC: Throughout this season and last season, people are always talking about going to California. Cameron almost goes at the end of last year. Joe was planning to go at the beginning of this year and again as the season concludes. And I think there's this hope everyone has that California will be better, and that is where "Heaven Is a Place" [the title of the finale] comes from — maybe that is a place where all of the things that bothered them will not follow. But as Chris just said, it's not likely that that is the case.
TV: Joe seems like he'll be more of a forthright antagonist to the other three in a third season. Would that be the case?
CR: We owe story on that character, and that character deserves to be seen in a life that shows the aftermath of what he's gone through and where he is. That shot of him in that office building with the glass wall looking out onto the city, it's really sad that this guy has walled himself off. He no longer trusts anyone. He's in a pretty dark place. He's alone, and we've discovered that when Joe is alone, he can be quite a dangerous person. Ultimately that character, even if he does function somewhat as an antagonist, to us he's pivotally more fascinating when we show his human fragility and all of that stuff behind the aggressive visionary mask that he often wears.
TV: What have you heard about another season from AMC?
CR: The honest truth is that AMC is pulling in all of its data. They definitely like to crunch a lot on this and have a lot of conversations. They're a network that takes a lot into consideration and probably more than just numbers. I know that we've been a bit ratings-challenged this season. Critically, we've been very well received. That all that goes into the network machine, when executives sit down and they make their decision, and in the past they've been very supportive of us. We felt very fortunate to be able to do a season two of this show. We're proud of the work we've done. We would love to keep telling the story. We'll just see if AMC agrees with us.
CC: This is a network that went with Mad Men and Breaking Bad when they were trying to find their audience. We were lucky enough to talk to [Breaking Bad creator] Vince Gilligan about this, and what he told us is, "Let all the episodes air. Let them get all of their data." He had to wait every year, so if it was good enough for him, it's good enough for us.
Halt and Catch Fire's first season is available on Netflix, while previous episodes of the second season are available on AMC's website and for digital download.
