AMC relights Halt and Catch Fire

US cablenet AMC has extended one of its in-house scripted efforts into a second season that has been slated to air next summer.

Halt and Catch Fire is produced by the channel’s in-house production unit AMC Studios and follows the lives of three people whose innovations confront the corporate behemoths during the computing boom in the early 1980s.

It was created by Chris Cantwell and Chris Rogers, with Jonathan Lisco as showrunner and Breaking Bad duo Mark Johnson and Melissa Bernstein as executive producers for the first season.

The show struggled to record impressive audience figures, averaging 1.3 million viewers during its first season, but AMC president Charlie Collier said its core fans had persuaded the renewal.

He said: “We have a history of demonstrating patience through the early seasons of new shows, betting on talent and building audience over time. We see that opportunity here.”

Halt & Catch Fire and spy show Turn, also extended for a second run, were both greenlit in 2013 and marked the network’s first scripted efforts to be developed in-house concurrently.