WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: Halt and Catch Fire

Between Walking Dead and its spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, AMC currently has a cable ratings juggernaut on its hands. But before the network put all its eggs in the zombie basket, it was committed to developing critical darling successors to shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The would-be fill-in for the latter, Low Winter Sun, got cancelled after a single botched season. But Halt and Catch Fire, a darkly lit drama following Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), a tortured genius businessman in the fledgling world of personal computers in 1980s Texas, rebounded from anemic early ratings to earn increasingly improbable renewals for a second and then third season. And that's when the show did something pretty remarkable: It got even better.