AMC's 'Halt and Catch Fire' improves in season two

AMC's computer-industry period drama, Halt and Catch Fire, returns for its second season at 10 p.m. Sunday a fresher, better, stronger series.

Viewers who missed it last year may want to give the drama - and its handsome cast led by Lee Pace, Scoot McNairy, Mackenzie Davis, and Kerry Bishé - another chance.

In its first season, Halt tried to capitalize on the public's fascination with the birth of the PC era and the geniuses who created it, men such as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates.

Yet the first season focused not on the people who created the PC, but on the ones who reverse-engineered IBM's revolutionary machine and made the first PC clones in the early 1980s.

Who wanted to be told the story of the also-rans?

Worse, even though it was distinguished by solid writing, compelling characters, and great performances, Halt and Catch Fire came out of the gate slowly, building up steam over far too many episodes.

It never caught fire, spending so much time on minutiae that it alienated all but the most hard-core techno-nerds.

So it was no surprise that Halt failed to deliver either positive reviews or good ratings. Yet, AMC, which had been riding high on the extraordinary success of its recent lineup - The Walking Dead, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad - shocked critics by renewing Halt.

Before trotting it back out for its second turn around the track, producers have made some welcome adjustments to the show's pacing, structure, and characterization.

Halt ended last season on a bizarre downer: Tortured entrepreneur Joe MacMillan (Pace) and his partners, computer geek engineer Gordon Clark (McNairy) and rebel punk-girl programmer Cameron Howe (Davis) have created a great product: a laptop faster than IBM's PC.

Yet Joe torches the first shipment, Cameron quits to form a start-up, taking Gordon's wife, Donna, (Bishé) with her. Gordon is left holding the bag.

Set nearly two years later, the new season pays proper attention to the two female characters: They've left the boys in the dust with their new gaming company, Mutiny, which promises to revolutionize a brand-new world: the Internet. Gordon is pretty much a stay-at-home dad, and Joe seems to have become a gold digger. He's engaged to marry an oil heiress (Aleksa Palladino), whose father (James Cromwell) insists Joe prove himself by helping run his company.

But Joe remains obsessed with tech: He'll soon find his way back to his old friends.

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Halt and Catch Fire

Season Two premieres at 10 p.m. Sunday on AMC.

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