Amc S Halt And Catch Fire Is Appealingly Mad Men Ish

• AMC
• Lee Pace and Scoot McNairy on Halt and Catch Fire

Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s latest attempt to own your Sunday night, is already drawing comparisons to Mad Men. Aside from being produced by the same cable network, they’re both period dramas (set in the 1980s and 1960s, respectively) that recall better days for the American economy. They both have mysterious, magnetic leading men who are flanked by sidekicks and subordinates struggling with their own ambitions. And both shows premiered with episodes that, while giving some reasons to hope for the best, initially left us wondering in which direction they were headed.

It’s only after we meet Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a software engineer at the middling Cardiff Electric in Dallas, that we actually learn what Joe is trying to do: reverse-engineer an IBM PC to create a clone and maybe some market competition. Gordon is a failed visionary; he tried to produce his own PC before IBM cornered the market, and he is initially reluctant to help Joe. But Joe wears him down at work (it turns out he is no longer with “Big Blue”), and the two quickly break down IBM’s Basic Input/Output System (BIOS).