Yeah, I can see what you're saying there. It's almost like they are trying to fill the hole Breaking Bad left, so they need to wow everyone right off the bat.

I really like the characters/casting so far. Cameron wasn't developed much in Episode 1, but Episode 2 was very Cameron-centric. Joe is already really good and I very much like what the writers/Scoot are doing with Gordon. Very relatable character.

Contrary to what someone said earlier, I like the Cardiff boss and his over-the-top Texas accent. He's a character - it's fun to have him be little exaggerated.

Going back to the criticism I quoted, I do hope they just let the story flow. It's definitely interesting so far and has some serious potential.

Side note: The intro is kind of cool, too.

I'm pulling for werewolf.

Like it...the Cameron character, however, is a walking bag of clichés.

I like the show quite a bit, I haven't noticed the issues some people have brought up.

So I guess Joe's dad is a big wig at IBM?

It's been okay so far but ep 2 was a step down in my view. Lee Pace is great but everybody else is kind of meh.

You're underselling Scoot by a lot.

I liked the show enough to start DVR'ing it. Not too many shows lately have kept me interested to bother watching them anymore. This one feels like it has a different storyline than what seems to be common anymore.

I'll just leave this here:

I don't think any of the issues are big, just minor things here and there.

It might end up somewhere in my top 10 for the year, and this year that list is loaded, with some that I expect to be there not even having aired yet.

Yeah, I think he is great.

Uh oh, that episode was...worrisome.

What did I just watch? lol

I have no idea what happened with the gay sex

It was a power play by Joe over John and Jean Smart's characters. One thing we learned about Joe was that he doesn't like people s****ing on his sale pitches. John torpedoed the Silicon Prairie guy, and then he was willing to take a very bad deal just to get money in from Jean Smart's character. It pissed Joe off, and he figured he could get the deal pulled if he effed Jean Smart's for rent boytoy. When he came out from doing that, he made it very clear to her what had happened, to show the lengths he's willing to go to to get what he wants. He's a nut case, which we already knew, but I don't think any of us thought he would go that far make sure he gets what he wants.

There's a huge power dynamic going on between him and John, but they need to start propelling the plot forward, rather than going for shocking stuff like that, doing deus ex machina stuff like the Black Flag logo giving Cameron an idea, and just random "punk" rock moments with Cameron. There's a lot of wasted time in the show right now, and I'm guessing there's starting to be a lot of studio intervention to try to put it back together into something coherent. It's like finding a huge loose string on the bottom of a sweater, and hoping that cutting the thread won't just hide the problem, but actually fix it.

The interesting dynamic was between Gordon and Matthew McConaughey lite. That guy was totally steering the project, and the wreck firing was Gordon just having enough of it (I'm sure the idea was that someone else was driving him into disaster, when he needs to drive it, regardless of whether it's a disaster). They aren't making the status quo, they're doing something groundbreaking. He needs yes men, not we can't do that men. I wish they would have spent a little more time developing that dynamic than seeing Cameron getting paid and wasting her check on a bunch of losers in a hotel room.

I also wasn't expecting Donna to stab the bird with the shovel, I expected her to smash it. That seemed especially cold. What is it with this show and killing animals?

Yeah, that was a huge WTF moment. At first, I was shocked that the gay bomb was dropped like that, but when he got back to the party, I realized what was happening. Kind of awesome, actually.

I've been enjoying this story line. It also looks like John is feeling inadequate, leading to his attempts at regaining power. He can see Joe is clearly better than him at wheeling and dealing and in the office scene with Cameron and right at the end, he looked, to me, like he also felt totally inadequate when it comes to the technical stuff. Hence, why he's reading up on it. I'm finding his character quite interesting.

Totally agree. She's a big waste right now. It looked like her character was on its way to proper development last week, but she just went back to raging against the machine. Her role right now is to think and be frustrated.

Since you're in the industry, I'll ask: how can the show be changed at this point? I know the filming wrapped in the spring, so what they have is what they have. I guess if they have enough stuff filmed they can re-edit?

I do like the show so far and it still has a shot to be very good, but I agree that they've gone too much with shock scenes and Cameron being punky.

Agree here, too. Gordon is definitely the best character so far and Scoot has done a great job with him. He's the one I'm most interested in watching, other than waiting to see what the deal is with Joe.

I was trying to be deep last night and when Gordon told his wife, "The bird is still alive," I said the bird was a metaphor for Gordon and project. Then his wife killed the bird. Maybe I was wrong.

It's kind of weird watching the show because I am in the final episode (if not the final, close to the final), so I know, at least to some extent, where things end up. Of course, I'm interested to see how they get there. I'm also curious to see if this goes beyond one season. It seems like the kind of story that would be hard to stretch out for multiple seasons, even if it is amazing.

In almost every show, way more footage is shot than needed (you don't want to end up short for TV ever). The exquisite show Fargo runs over every week, and FX evidently doesn't care if shows don't come in at 44:30 (I wouldn't be surprised if it's 41:30...lol) or whatever it is now.

In the case of Halt and Catch Fire, I have a feeling they didn't shoot enough (happens sometimes), and they're probably stuck with more of this molasses plot than they'd like. In some cases, we could consider the length of a scene like the hotel room scene being filler, in that they didn't have enough footage to hit run time otherwise. This show is really weirdly directed (so many pointless dutch angles, which are supposed to actually mean something in movies), so it's actually kind of hard to know what they're working with.

If I were involved with the show, I would be taking a pretty huge knife to it (even if there isn't enough material to begin with), just to try to move it forward. I'm sure they already lost most of their locations, so it seems unlikely to me that re-shoots would be very easy for them (much harder to do re-shoots for period shows, though there were several insert scenes added in the period piece Mob City, so it is certainly possible if AMC allowed it). Studio intervention in this case would most likely just be speeding up the editing, and trying to move it forward (in a worst case scenario they could actually swap the episode order, which I don't think they would do for this show). The problem right now is that they might only have enough material to end up one episode short. That would be bad. I just don't think I've ever seen such a good show stuck in the ground so long. I want to know what happens now, and they aren't telling the story in a way that makes that happen.

My guess for the show is that they made a huge tactical error in the writing thinking that the Cameron character (rebel with too much of a clue) would be the one that connects to the audience. The problem is that the show doesn't appeal to 19 year olds, it appeals to 40+ year olds who lived through that era, and the really meaty characters are Gordon and Joe (to a slightly less extent, John is too). So, nearly all of the focus should be on Gordon first, Joe second, and Cameron as an afterthought. Right now, they're trying to shoehorn in Cameron's character, and have done absolutely nothing to make the audience like her (her only really good moment was when Gordon looked at her code and thought it was brilliant, and she wasn't even on screen for that...lol). I just want her to have the breakthrough that actually will make this show really interesting again. From the previews, it's possible it will pick up steam again next week, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

This is actually interesting. I didn't read anything into the bird, but I think it might be a symbol of Gordon's personality. In order for this project to succeed, the old Gordon has to die (everything that makes him averse to risks, and his risk aversion was in full force in the episode). With the car wreck, and realizing that he needs to do things his own (new) way, I think it seems like the bird is a good payoff for the killing of the old Gordon. I think we'll see a new guy next week, if that was the intent for the scene.

Ah...I like that interpretation.

Makes sense, too, especially seeing as he basically told his wife, "Bitch, leave me alone. You do it."

And thanks for your insider input.

Enjoying it so far although Gordon looking off into space is getting annoying. I want to bitch slap him and and yell "Be a man!" And Cameron is a one note character so far, although i liked the scene with her and John when she's sneaking into his office.

op, did u happen to meet Chris Rogers (one of the co-writers) during the shoots? If so... any thoughts or interesting anecdotes?

nunnehi - ratings wise this show is dead?

Anyone I met, I met very briefly. I was still just an extra, even if on one episode I was considered a "featured extra" and got a little more attention. Essentially, I was still just a nobody who is not to speak unless spoken to. The day before that shoot, I was asked to come down to the set to meet a few people and talk about what I was going to do. In the end, I basically just hung around doing nothing and shook a couple people's hands. I believe one was the show's co-creator Christopher C. Rogers and he seemed very nice. I always take it as a good sign when someone of importance is friendly with extras.

The person who did most of the directing in the scene was first assistant director Drew Ann Rosenberg and she seemed pretty cool, as well. I didn't envy her task. It was a small, hot, set with lots of extras to coordinate and movements to choreograph. It was a long day and I could see it was stressful, but she was always accommodating with everyone.

As I mentioned before, I did get to chat with Lee Pace a little and he was quite cool, even at the end of a long day. I'll give a little anecdote after the episode airs (I think it's episode 10). It's not amazing, but I suppose at least slightly amusing. Still disappointed my 2 seconds of fame didn't even get filmed, but it was still fun and hopefully I'll at least be seen in my role as a standard extra.

On Sunday, it had a 0.2 in the 18-49 demo (765k viewers overall), so I can't call it anything but a dumpster fire in the ratings (though it's not really supposed to appeal to people under 40). It's probably a one and done, but I do wonder if there is any wriggle room to put it on Sundance at a radically slashed budget, even though the show looks very low budget already (Georgia has massive tax breaks that probably come close to offsetting a third of the production costs). Based on what I knew about The Walking Dead, AMC doesn't put that saved tax break money back into the budget, they take it (in season 1, they put it on screen, but in season 2 they basically slashed the budgets by taking the tax break).

As a rough non-accurate example, it would be the equivalent of an hour episode costing 1 million dollars in a non-tax break situation. Because of the tax break, the 1 million dollar episode now costs 666k (still 1 million of production value, minus it taking place somewhere that doesn't even remotely look like Dallas in HACF's case, which can be considered a negative to those familiar with the city but not enough for AMC to care about). What AMC could do is put that 333ishk back into the screen (meaning still making officially a 1 million dollar show), but they chose to just have them work with the original million, while pocketing the 333k of the tax break themselves (it's very debatable how much harm this can bring to a show's potential). Even though the show has a million dollar budget still, the show could have had around a 1.33 or 1.4 million budget (33 percent of every dollar spent in this non-accurate example), which would be a huge difference in just about everything meaningful about production value (the difference between having many locations vs. sitting on a magic farm, or the difference of showing 150 zombies vs. 10 in TWD's case). I haven't seen the second half of this season of that show yet, but the basic strategy for seasons 2 and 3 seemed to be loading the mid-season finale, mid-season return, and finale with all of the budget busting stuff in season 2, and then the premiere, mid-season finale, mid-season return, and finale for season 3. Season 4 did the same thing for the first part of the season, but I don't know if they amped up the action/budgets for the second half yet.

Instead of using the tax break as a benefit to the production value vs. a money grab, a show like The Walking Dead was underbudgeted, and they could have gotten it to a reasonable budget by finagling the tax break to get more of that money on screen. It was a big bone of contention on that show in the first two seasons, and since Rectify and Halt and Catch Fire are both shot in Georgia (with people who don't have any real clout to do anything about budget concerns), similar things are probably happening to those shows (though the people aren't experienced enough to know what they're losing in budgetary tradeoffs, don't care, or can deal with it). I haven't seen a "name" director (meaning ones that cost a lot of money) on the three episodes of Halt and Catch Fire so far (Campanella would be considered a good director, but not a go to guy from what I can see in his filmography), and I wonder if there will ever be one (from looking at what they have listed, Ed Bianchi is, to me, the best director, and I'll be interested to see his episode(s)). It has kind of a nice indie (though uneven) feel, which probably works for the type of show it is, but there are a lot of different director types working on the show, which I think is probably something that scares AMC (even though nearly all of the directors have directed at least one episode of another AMC show). Blah blah blah babble babble babble, I don't know if any of that is interesting.

Can you post some screenshots of the stuff you appeared in, in the first episode I think you said?

Sure. I'll try to get the episode pulled up on my computer or tablet and grab a screenshot. I'm totally classic background, but I'm there. After episode 6, I may post a pic of myself behind the scenes (I'm not huge on pasting my picture all over the interwebs) if I don't show up will in the episode.