TV PREVIEW
“Halt and Catch Fire,” 10 p.m. Sunday (starting June 1), AMC
With its new series “Halt and Catch Fire,” AMC took on a great challenge: transforming Atlanta into a convincing Dallas, Texas — in 1983. (Credit our more generous tax credits on why AMC is here and not Texas.)
“Wrong city, wrong region, wrong era,” mused Melissa Bernstein, an executive producer of the show, which will debut Sunday night. “Atlanta is a wonderful place to shoot, but it’s a new city. There are not a lot of buildings from the 1970s and 1980s.”
She also had to find flat Dallas-like vistas, not an easy feat. It also took time to find a particular brick ranch home that resembled those in the Dallas suburbs. (They found one in Conyers.) And Atlanta is far more verdant than Dallas. On the bright side, most of the first season was shot during the winter.
One spot that passed muster: the Plaza Theatre in Virginia-Highland, which in the pilot shows “Return of the Jedi.” (The Urban Outfitters two doors down had to be CGIed into a rug store.)
What made things easier is there wasn’t a need for a huge number of outdoors scenes. “This is in large part an office drama,” Bernstein said — like “Mad Men.”
The setup: It’s the early 1980s and the PC business is still in its relative infancy. Smooth-talking former IBM PC salesman Joe MacMillan, played by Lee Pace (“Pushing Daisies”), arrives mysteriously from New York to Dallas and talks his way onto the sales staff of a fictional small company, Cardiff Electric, a place he ultimately wants to control and do his bidding.
Joe wants to create a better PC than IBM has made. He recruits smart, alcohol-infused hardware engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), who’s seeking redemption, and fetching young software coding genius Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) to help him achieve his dream.
“This puts the future squarely in the hands of those who know computers not for what they are but the potential of what they can be,” Joe tells Gordon at one point. “Computers are not the thing. They are the thing that gets us to the thing.”
Joe, in a sense, is a bit of a wannabe Steve Jobs.
“He’s a stranger in a strange land,” Pace said in an interview on set in February. “He’s complex and conflicted. He’s a New Yorker who doesn’t belong in Texas but is going to change things up. He sees computers as a tool for greater societal development. The goal of getting computers into people’s hands is important to him. He’s a fighter.”
Despite the challenges, the show successfully captures the look and feel of the early 1980s: the Centipede arcade game in the bar (the Northside Tavern in real life), the Speak and Spell machine Gordon’s kids play with, Cameron’s New Wave haircut, the vintage Radio Shack TRS-80s. Smoking is still ubiquitous.
“It’s such a compelling story,” Bernstein said. “It’s really relevant today, the way technology has taken over our lives. This wasn’t Silicon Valley. It was Silicon Prairie (where Compaq, Texas Instruments and Dell came from).”
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