HBO Cancels Westworld
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I can't believe anybody thought that a two-hour movie could be stretched into multiple seasons.
Sadism is a common enough fetish, and given the extent to which other "extreme" sexual fetishes are catered to today with technology it's absolutely plausible that a "sadism simulator" would be popular in a high-tech future society.
There are much worse tales out there, too. (Such as the awful "prostitution ring" of the extremely short-lived Sims Online and was part of why Sims Online didn't make it out of Beta.)
The TV version of Westworld had decades of videogame experience to draw from and did ask some hard questions of "if there was a real-life GTA you could visit, would players do the same sorts of terrible things because there were no consequences?" and takes the cynical answer of "well yes, certainly, at least some of them, possibly many of them". What we glimpse in the show is often many of the worst parts of that because the robots were programmed to see that as trauma much as humans would and are given plenty of reasons to see that sample bias (of rich, "game players") as the default state of humanity rather than a poor, sad reflection of it. (Which is partly what Season 3 is about, confronting some of that sample bias.) (So yes, the show is cynical about human nature, per the OP's comment, but it is partly, too, about confronting that cynicism in the face of a species "superior" to us baseline humans in almost every way.)
I often feel like the show couldn't keep up with the implications of it's premise. For a show that deals heavily in artificial intelligence(s) it feels constrained by it's need to present it's concepts in a way that human viewers can understand. In particular once it expands outside the park.
The show revolves around entities that have the potential to interface with other devices, multiply and expand their personalities seemingly without limit, and commit themselves to solving problems far beyond the scope of human consideration.
Unfortunately there's just not a good way to represent a lot of this for a human viewership on TV, as it would very quickly be overwhelming or hard to interpret when pushed to a logical extreme.
They represent the plasticity of these AI's somewhat by having them jump to new bodies and replicate themselves, but then put a limit on how far these concepts are pushed, and it's understandable, because it would alienate the audience and be hard to convey. So they end up contriving some limiting factors or simply disregarding these possibilities entirely.
It's hard to have consistent characters with consistent motivations when their core personality is forked across half-a-dozen other hosts. It requires a different kind of relating to entities. Something that hasn't yet made it's way into common storytelling conventions. Even traditional motivating plot devices like death become far less weighty or significant when your characters can be easily resurrected without consequence. It becomes hard to care about your characters because they're rarely in danger, and yet their deaths are often depicted with the heavy melodrama of a story about mortals.
Seasons 3 and 4 had basically steady viewership through their whole runs, but each had way fewer viewers than the preceding season. So a lot of people who watched S2 until the end didn't even start S3, and many who finished S3 didn't bother with S4.
I wonder why this is? If viewership dropped through the season it'd be more obvious - people just didn't like the season. But to me this indicates that it lost mindshare between seasons. Was it interesting enough to watch as it was going, but not interesting enough to wonder what would happen next? I've definitely had that happen, where I binge watched a season of a show, but didn't bother (or dropped off quickly) when a new season started, just because I had sort of lost interest during the break and didn't get pulled back in the same way.
This is based on my opinion of the above said show.
I blame Neal Stephenson for this, both in why I spotted the things that I did and where a lot of S2 came from even though it felt so left field for the average viewer.
(I tend to refer to S2 as the "Futurama's Robot Church" season and think it makes a lot more sense when you see it as a struggle between the Robot God and the Robot Devil, and the Robot Devil is not who most people think it is despite S1 laying out a lot of hints.)
I stopped when Dolores ceased to be the best female psychopath on television, but they instead tried to reframe her as someone good. That serie just did not had that something special first one had, so I lost interest.
Thanks for the spoiler! Now I don't need to watch it. Bah!
Tried to cancel my HBO subscription after this announcement. Only way to show disapproval. But it’s bundled with my internet service if I want the tier I’m in currently.
Perhaps it was a bit too well-written; there were certainly times where it felt like the writers were entertaining their peers.
That would have been an interesting setting for sure.
But, I just did a re-watch of it these last couple of months and I finished season 4 this weekend; Doloris clearly states it was going back to West World (wild West) in the last episodes. And the whole World was being re-built (from memory?) in order to play one last game [0].
To think this launched at the same time as Game of Thrones, which I never bothered with as it's just a mangled recount of the sordid dynasties and ruling classes of of former empires, but Game of Thrones was asking some much needed questions in regards to the implications of a Society more heavily reliant on technology. And while AGI will likely never come to fruition in my lifetime, 90s kid, it's still a rather good juxtaposition if it will just accelerate our demise and lead to our hasten extinction in this headlong pursuit and seemingly more dystopic existence.
Sidenote: The Cyberpunk theme of season 3 was visually interesting, with some solid premise (the importance of free will rather than a dictatorship via technocracy) but woefully bad as a whole in it's execution. Zero HP Lovecraft's gig economy app was heavily influencing the RICO app plotline for sure.
That idea sounds exhausting to experience after seeing how the writers have handled things lately. I love dialogue-heavy shows, but the last two seasons of Westworld were needlessly ponderous and often melodramatic without a density of stimulating ideas to sustain interest.
More often than not later episodes felt like never-ending exposition. You're just sitting there being told what IS or how the character feels without experiencing anything for yourself.
Seemingly this final scenario (a simulation) would be super-fluid and un-moored from the internal consistency of a real-world setting, and that makes it hard for the viewer to give a damn about anything because the rules are so far beyond anything they can predict. So I was gearing up a full season of characters talking in a lofty manner with a diminished amount of substance at the core.
GOT launched in 2011, 5 years before Westworld.
I stand corrected, I just recall everyone trying to get me to watch GOT and I was just exhausted telling them I wasn't interested in it when we spoke about WW. Since WW dealt with more pressing issues: the Human condition, and it's ever greater reliance on tech, and our collective extinction due to the aforementioned being inevitable unless we have a consciousness shift.
Fair enough, but while you still have it check out Succession and Barry. Not at all similar to Westworld, but both great shows.
SPOILERS!
They killed every every. single. human. Total extinction. How is that not the end of the show? Everyone is dead. All these great characters with multi season arcs just lying around in random ditches. Everyone is dead. It felt like a conclusion to the show.
Not that the writing needs defending, got pretty bad after season 1.
And that the brought-back people who (thanks to her learning/evolution into the Maker) are no longer forced on rails, are us, collective memory and all, squandering our apprehension of the gift of free will.
Yes, absolutely.
Joy and Nolan are pretty awesome. Hope Fallout turns out great!
Sorry, I'll go away.
Actually, season 2 Episode 8 is pretty damn excellent, maybe watch that one. It's mostly removed from the rest of the plot iirc and follows a 'native american' robot's story.
S3 is rough. You can see what they were trying to do, but they failed in the end. I wouldn't say it isn't worth watching, just know it's a steep decline in quality.
I quite enjoyed S4 and thought it was a return to form. It wasn't quite S1 levels of good, but it was a marked improvement over both S2 and especially S3. The finale was a little disappointing, but they clearly knew cancellation was a possibility and wrote it in a way that the story could be considered complete after S4 while also leaving it open for a final S5. So no real cliffhanger, at least.
I think the show gets a lot of flack because people were expecting a modern Western, and then it morphed into just modern Sci-Fi.
While there were certainly parts where the writing lacked, the acting never did.
So far it's like the good parts of Westworld in case the latter seasons of Westworld worries you.
Since the book doesn't really have any A.I. characters I don't think it's much like West World unless they changed a lot in the adaptation.
- Future London relies on too much flashy CGI instead of building the setting more subtly
- Flamboyant villain with stock henchman character
- Relationship complications that weren't in the book (although the book characters were a little flat)
- The near-future South is too Hollywood with very clean-cut characters and silly things like hover-Roombas (in the book the near-future parts struck me as far more grungy)
- The show relies on cheesy exposition whereas the book made you fill in the blanks yourself