The intro to amc's new series halt and catch fire Halt and Catch Fire is an American period drama television series created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers, that is scheduled to premiere on AMC on June 1, 2014. A sneak peek of its pilot episode was made available in May 2014. The series is set in the early 1980s and depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution. The show's title is an inside joke: it refers to a fictional machine code instruction Halt and Catch Fire, one of a large number of humorous instructions collected by machine language programmers since the 1960s.