Lee Pace to lay hands on more dead things in AMC's show about early-'80s computers

Only a day after telling Jamie Bell he’s got exactly the charisma they’re looking for in a cabbage farmer, AMC has cast Lee Pace in the lead of its other previously announced period drama, this one about the early-’80s boom in personal computing. The former Pushing Daisies star will play the iconoclastic, “visionary” computing engineer at the center of Halt & Catch Fire, a former IBM salesman who turns up at a Dallas-area tech company to work with Mackenzie Davis’ “talented but volatile computer programming graduate student” on creating the technological innovations that “directly confront the corporate behemoths of the time.” For example, pursuing their visionary, volatile ideas that every typed command should cause the computer to stop whatever it’s doing immediately and burst into flames, to punish stupid consumers. Or maybe Halt & Catch Fire is a common idiom for something in the tech world—what do we know? We didn’t go to no computer school. That’s why we write things on the Internet.