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"Mutiny energy": How the constant threat of cancellation led AMC's Halt & Catch Fire to be more experimental and "blow it up" every season
The Halt and Catch Fire showrunners always thought they were getting cancelled, so they planned every season as if it was the last
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For a period drama, AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire sure had a lot of twists and turns. It turns out there was a reason for that. The team behind the series were always afraid of being cancelled and planned each season as if it was their last. Since the series lasted for four seasons, that means there were a lot of big dramatic moments, character development, and experimentation.
“In that second season I think you can see us moving past what we think a TV show is supposed to be into kind of making our TV show,” co-creator and co-showrunner Christopher C. Rogers recalls during a panel at the 2024 ATX TV Festival.
Rogers went on to say that the fear of being cancelled caused them to experiment with different tones, as they believed they wouldn’t get another chance to try anything like that again.
“We’re kind of like, ‘Oh, maybe this is a good Sopranos episode. Or maybe we kind of feel like a Mad Men show.’ And season two, the kind of ensemble of it, the energy of it, the kind of irreverence and the dick jokes, and the mutiny energy was kind of just us going, ‘Well, if we never get to do this again, let’s at least kind of do our flavor of this.’ We were so rewarded for that I think in terms of the experience we had and the reception that it just became the mantra. I’ll always be so grateful we got to make the second season for that reason.”
Co-creator and co-showrunner Christopher Cantwell echoes the sentiment.
“We just decided to intentionally blow it up for every season after that. It became thematically about radical reinvention. It almost felt like an anthology show, it just had the same characters.”
Now that’s how you make a television show.
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