This is one of the few new series that AMC has put out that actually seemed interesting. A series built around the dawn of the personal computer would be a natural draw for me since I actually remember playing around with some of those early personal computers and actually took some training in Computer Electronics Engineering.
However, outside of the big three, AMC series haven't exactly grabbed me. I regretted watching the entire season of Rubicon, and The Killing, Hell on Wheels, and Low Winter Sun never grabbed my interest. Of course I would never watch any series like Turn that portrays the British as completely evil. Small Town Security is just incomprehensibly strange and Comic Book Men is just completely boring.
So while I didn't have high hopes for HCF I still have wanted to give it a try, and fortunately I really enjoyed it. I loved Lee Pace in Pushing Daisies but here he is playing a character that is 180 degrees from that of The Pieman. He plays a wonderfully slimy salesman Joe MacMillan that manages to manipulate a small Texas software firm into cloning an IBM computer.
However, once the show was done, I couldn't stop thinking about it. This has grabbed me in much the same way the big three have. I thinking about Joe's Machiavellian plot, what is his endgame? Was Cardiff just a means to the end of acquiring Gordon Clark? What was so special about the Symphonic, and why did it fail? What will Donna Clark's role in this be? Why was Joe hitting baseballs in his apartment? What happened during Joe's missing year?
I'm really looking to the next episode. If the first episode is any indication, I think AMC has finally produced a series on the same level as the big three.