I've had a long career in IT and lived wide eyed through this time in my early teens (I taught myself to code aged 10 and always knew it's where I'd end up so lived and breathed it) and so many times it was so on the nose it made me cringe. When they were at Comdex it was a stream of groans; Windows is buggy, touch screens will never take off. There were a few other early episodes that incited the same reaction. I had a few IT friends ask if I was watching it and said exactly the same thing. I understand it's difficult when you are close to a subject matter, but their aim was so broad I don't think that it a real factor.
You are right on the money, Donna was the only one that felt like a real person.
Again you are totally right about the finale. Horribly disjointed and attempted to shoe horn a second series in in pretty much the last half. The modem compression algorithm plot line out of no where was just ridiculous and again on the nose.
The triangle between Joe/Gordon/Cameron feels continually forced and having Donna go and work for Mutiny was suffocatingly heavy-handed. They are all too underwritten with scant lines hinting at pasts the wholly felt like there was no intention to add any depth to sink your teeth in until/if a second series was green lit. With a character like Joe if we don't have some real insight there is a complete disconnect, which is exactly what I felt.
I want to like it more than I do because I was there at that time, eagerly on the consumer end of it all. I walked the floor of the UK equivalent of Comdex at Crystal Palace with my Dad seeing my future stretch out before me; in fact both of ours.
Again I acknowledge that proximity can breed contempt when something misses the mark but I think it goes beyond that. If the finale hadn't had fell so entirely flat I don't think I'd feel quite the way I do. Disappointed.
Shout by sp1tiVIP OG 13BlockedParent2014-08-04T22:08:24Z
While this show chose an interesting subject and time period I can't say they delivered.
The core issue for me are easily the characters. I feel rather sorry for Lee Pace having to play Joe in this because despite being the catalyst for most of what the cast does he has no clear line and apparently nothing behind him that would drive him to be how he is (try to portray that). Gordon is rather plain and Cameron more often than not is defined by quirk because she is such a rebel(!!111). Donna was about the only one in the cast that felt like a real person despite letting herself be shoved around whenever they felt like it.
Storywise they managed to string things together after the mid point mainly thanks to their planned release date but they still managed to put a big dent into whatever they had with the last episode with absurd events, little consequences and that terrible phone company side-thing reveal... I'm not seeing how a second season will improve this so if that was the end of it I'm OK with that.