Cantwell makes drama out of people failing at work and trying again, with computers as the pretext. One long series proves he can do it patiently and well; whether he can do it outside Halt and Catch Fire is still an open question.
Fi1m perspective
A man in a suit too good for the building walks into a small Dallas software company and talks his way into a job. That is how Halt and Catch Fire (2014) opens, and it is the Cantwell scene in miniature: someone selling a future he cannot yet build to someone who has stopped believing in one. Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) wants Cardiff Electric, which has never made a machine of its own, to copy the IBM PC. Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) has the skill and none of the nerve. Cantwell has said his father was a salesman who moved the family from Chicago to Texas for the computer work, and the series knows exactly what a pitch sounds like.
He wrote it on spec with Christopher C. Rogers, his writing partner since 2010, and the two of them ran it for four seasons of ten episodes, from 2014 to 2017, with Cantwell directing episodes himself. It is, we think, one of the few dramas we know of that got better every year it was on. The first season is a nervous Mad Men imitation with keyboards, and most critics, who reviewed the pilot and moved on, were right about that much. What they did not stay for was the show learning to slow down. By the third and fourth seasons it had become a rare, patient drama about work, failure and friendship, and Mackenzie Davis and Kerry Bishé, rather than the men, were carrying it.
The patience is the thing Cantwell does that few showrunners do. He and Rogers gave episodes to directors as different as Karyn Kusama, Reed Morano and Johan Renck and let them take their time, and Kelley Dixon and the other editors let scenes of people typing run for as long as the typing matters. We did not expect to be moved by someone at a keyboard, and by the third season we were, because the series had spent two years showing us what that person had given up to sit there. Ambition, isolation and starting over are his subjects; the computers are only where the people happen to be standing.
Since then he has spread himself. The Parts You Lose (2019), his first feature, is a small, grounded piece about an unlikely friendship in rural North Dakota, with Aaron Paul. He wrote and produced Paper Girls (2022), an adaptation of a comic, writes comics himself, and has taken on The Terror: Devil in Silver (2026) as showrunner. We would not pretend to know any of these as well as we know Cardiff Electric. Everything we can vouch for was made with Rogers, over four years, on a show that was allowed to find its feet. The Terror will tell us whether the patience was Cantwell's or the schedule's.
Biography
Chris Cantwell is an American writer, producer and director working in television, film and comics. He is best known as co-creator, with Christopher C. Rogers, of the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire (2014–2017), on which he also served as writer, director and executive producer.
Cantwell was born in Chicago, Illinois, and moved with his family to Dallas, Texas, in the 1980s. He studied screenwriting at the University of Southern California. He began collaborating with Rogers in 2010. He directed the feature film The Parts You Lose (2019) and served as writer and executive producer on the series Paper Girls (2022). He has also written numerous comic books, including series featuring Doctor Doom.
