dlchambers

Boy, do I want to like this show. But 4 or episodes in, it's just a predictable soap opera. Bad-girl daughter does naughty stuff but daddy still loves her. Good-boy son wants to - but can't - please daddy. Black sheep youngest son refuses family help and does heroic stuff. (Sadly, the most interesting son was killed off). Chinese actress plays pretty Indian wife. Costner scowls. Indian Chief broods. Seriously? This is the most disappointing show since Terra Nova, which also had huge promise but quickly collapsed under crummy writing and formulaic plotlines. There's no saving this. It hurts me to say it, but cancel this mess already.

I really wanted to like this show. I was a part of the period it depicts and it was a fun, crazy time when technology - especially hardware - was exploding. Everywhere you looked (in Silicon Valley) someone was doing something really, really cool. The 1st episode was decent, though the characters were WAAAAY too cliche, so I was wary. But it wasn't so bad I'd stop watching, so I kept on with it. Then, in episode 2, when the hacker chick rants about a 16 bit bus and a photo-realistic screen, I turned it off, and I'm done. I get it that this is TV, and it's a fictionalized version of things. I get it that it's targeted toward today's audience. But the writing is horrible: 1) In the early '80s, there were no female programmers, let alone homeless ones who were as hot as Mary Stuart Masterson in "Some Kind of Wonderful". 2) No one hooked up the way she and "Steve Jobs" did. 3) No one demanded 16 bits. We were all too busy trying to get 8 bit to work. 4) No one used the term "photo-realistic". Character-based screens were the norm, CGA was cutting edge, and the original Mac's graphical UI was mind-blowing. So, by dropping a 2014 femaie-cliche into a 1984 period piece, they've made it simply unwatchable. Very sad.