We didn’t expect this: HBO announced yesterday that it is canceling “Westworld” after four seasons. The series, which was part of a flood of sci-fi and fantasy series that sprung up in an attempt to fill the cultural void left by the departure of “Game of Thrones,” has seen better and worse days but never became the huge, cross-over hit that HBO hoped it would be. And yet, this move is unusual mainly because its creators, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, were in negotiations regarding the shooting of the fifth season, which they themselves planned to be the last and close all the loose ends of the plot – and after it seemed that HBO was sticking to “Westworld” Even when it was already clear from the end of the first season that she was not meeting the commercial expectations of her, the general assumption was that they would let them reach the finish line. But it seems that they just couldn’t justify the budget outlay on it in light of the complete crash of its ratings: in the fourth season, the series dropped to a ratings low (in the US only) of only about 350,000 viewers, a fraction of the 1.85 million with which they started in 2016 For the sake of comparison, “Game of Thrones” climbed throughout its seasons from about 2.5 million viewers per episode on average to a record 12 million in its final season.
“Westworld”, which was based on a rather forgotten 1970s MDB movie, which in turn was based on a novel by Michael Creighton (“Jurassic Park”). Its plot began in a futuristic Wild West-like theme park populated by intelligent robots who are unaware of their roboticity and the fact that its entire existence exists only to entertain, interest and fulfill the fantasies (sometimes sexual and/or murderous) of the park’s visitors. Later seasons expanded the world of occurrence to the entire Earth, which gradually drifts into a real war between the robots and the humans who wanted to control them.
Despite the problems it had, “Westworld” was a very good series that we loved throughoutsometimes unfocused but specifically in her last season it seemed that she was finding her direction again. Just yesterday we included it in the list of the 15 best TV series of our time, and wrote about it like this: “In its first season, ‘Westworld’ was considered a high-profile TV series dealing with philosophical issues of human existence and spewing pretensions with coverage in all directions. Since then, we have already learned and internalized that the sole and exclusive purpose of its creators is to play with our minds and to have relationships that are not in the way of nature with our brains, and we must admit that in the fourth season that ended not long ago, it was quite delightful. You already know the drill: robots and artificial intelligences, humans who might be robots and robots who might be humans, questionable reality, simulations within simulations, separate timelines, riddles wrapped in enigma wrapped in mystery, every trick in the book to stun and confuse the viewer and make them think . A series that is actually a kind of amusement park torture facility, just like the morbid amusement park where it begins.” Meanwhile, the creators of Westworld have already landed on Amazon Prime with a new project – “The Peripheral”, based on a novel by the father of cyberpunk, William Gibson. Right now it looks like she’s going to be just as confusing and ambitious.