HBO cancels ‘Westworld’ in shock decision
hollywoodreporter.com
hollywoodreporter.com
We've all seen this happen with some shows, but Westworld was an extreme case.
I think this happens because in the first season the writers and showrunners have to produce an entire work without feedback from the audience. But after that first season, characters take on a life of their own through the fanbase. We expect Maeve to be a bad-ass, we expect The Man in Black to get his comeuppance, etc. This was the fundamental problem with the end of GoT as well. Think of how many episodes we watched Bran sit under a tree doing nothing.
Westworld Season 2+ felt like writers wanting to create a different show and had the Westworld cast as their canvas.
I must have watched Season 1 3 or 4 times. Really incredible.
Second season started out interesting and then became just branding by the end.
It's pretty clear seasons 3 and 4 are influenced by real-world events around devleoping AI tech but it didn't lend anything to the story.
I think Aaron Paul is great but he just didn't fit in season 3. His character is more believable in season 4.
Still season 4 just sucked.
Aaron Paul ending up as a host was a predictable Starbuck moment. Westworld went sideways the same way Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica did - the creators got high on their own supply while the stories stagnated.
I just really enjoyed the "not-too-distant-future" take on technology and society that the show provided, and I was willing to accept a little ambiguity in the storyline to go along for the ride.
Given that this seems to be such a common pattern, I wonder if there's a viable model, where the show's budget ramps down as the audience shrinks. Much like with tech companies, it doesn't have to be binary between a really expensive operation which requires a mass audience to be profitable or fully dead/cancelled.
What if it could gracefully shrink until it was a small, cheap show with a niche audience, until a final season watched only by philosophy undergrads is a series of dialogues about Baudrillard or Merleau-Ponty between a single 'robot' and human character in a blank white room?