AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire” pilot brilliantly depicts the Wild West of the 1980s PC revolution

At SXSW, AMC previewed the pilot episode of “Halt and Catch Fire,” an upcoming drama about a group of programmers trying to clone the IBM PC in Texas during the early 1980s. We definitely liked what we saw, but the show feels like the slow burn kind of drama that draws you in over the course of a few episodes.

The first season of Halt and Catch Fire will run for 10 episodes beginning with its June 1, 2014 premiere.

With Breaking Bad and Mad Men, AMC has proved that it can make extraordinary TV shows out of unexpected topics. The network is taking another such risk with Halt and Catch Fire by setting it in the so-called Silicon Prairie.

Halt and Catch Fire tries to express the psychopathology of our connected, mobile world by looking back at the genesis of the personal computer movement. One episode isn’t enough to judge by, but my first impression is that, while the show won’t grab us by the throat like Breaking Bad, it will slowly reel us in the way Mad Men did.