No escape

Philip Reeve on Halt and Catch Fire:

 

It may not sound like a promising dramatic situation, especially to those of us who don't know the first thing about technology, but as it develops, Halt... becomes astonishingly compulsive viewing, and grows from a story about the small lives of a few characters to a portrait of a whole industry and the way it transformed our world. As season follows season and the location shifts from Texas to San Francisco, our heroes move on from their laptop computer to creating online communities, games, trading sites, search engines. The internet is taking shape around them. They never become zillionaires - this isn't a story about the people who create Google or Yahoo or Amazon. It's about people who do all right for themselves creating things that compete with those companies in their early days before getting bought out by them, or rendered obsolete when someone else comes up with a better idea.

I missed Halt and Catch Fire on its first run precisely because I do know the first thing about technology. Years later on a friend's recommendation I watched it and was hooked. By the (rushed) final season I was into the series so much that I was ekeing out the final episodes 15 minutes at a time. It was like watching my freelance life unroll.