Common sentience

HBO’s ‘Westworld’ is full of potential, but slow living up to it

HBO made a big bet on “Westworld,” the epic, sci-fi-western, A.I.-robot mystery-thriller that currently lives in its coveted Sunday night showcase slot. 

With the network nearing the home stretch of “Game of Thrones” (its most popular program ever), and hot on the heels of the unceremonious death of “Vinyl” (perhaps its most spectacular failure ever), HBO needed “Westworld” to land in a big way, and they spared no expense to make sure it did. But with AMC and FX, not to mention Netflix and Amazon, challenging for the prestige television throne once dominated by HBO, a second-straight high-profile flop could’ve had bigger repercussions than a simple financial setback. A miss here and there can be swept under the rug. A genuine losing streak is hard to shake, within and without. 

So the network needed a new tentpole crowd-pleaser, a zeitgeist-dwelling behemoth. And with solid ratings for its (very good) pilot and fairly widespread critical acclaim, “Westworld” seemed poised to carry that mantle.

Unfortunately, after coming out guns blazing, the show has since pulled in the reins, content to spin its wheels like the gears in the park’s ubiquitous player piano. In fact, the show has taken so much time to set up its world and its rules that a development at the end of the sixth episode feels like the kind of inciting incident that should occur at the end of the pilot to really set the series in motion.  

Adapted from Michael Crichton’s 1973 film, “Westworld” is set in a futuristic Old West theme park where artificially intelligent, hyper-realistic androids known as “hosts” satisfy the hedonistic pleasures of the park’s well-to-do visitors—which mostly means either having sex with them or being killed by them, though sometimes it’s both. 

True to HBO’s formula for prestige drama, the production values are breathtaking and the heavyweight cast includes a couple of Oscar winners: Ed Harris as the enigmatic Man in Black and Sir Anthony Hopkins as the park’s eccentric mastermind Robert Ford. But these revered thespians, sadly, get precious little of interest to do. Hopkins’s mysterious park chief is reasonably compelling because we’re always wondering just what he’s up to, but you’d think he’d be up to more after six hours of story. Poor Harris’s wily veteran park visitor is a growling, swaggering cliché, hot on the trail of a MacGuffin. 

The best thing about the show, by quite a wide margin, is a pair of hosts—the rancher’s daughter Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and the brothel madam Maeve (Thandie Newton). Both are routinely abused by the park’s visitors (and sometimes its staff), only to have their memories reset each day. But both—thanks to some code tinkering by Ford—are beginning to remember. This revelation leads to the aforementioned development, the one that should’ve come much sooner, and this may well be what transforms “Westworld” from a pretty good show to the truly great savior HBO needs it to be. 

But it also highlights a difficult obstacle the show must overcome. Wood and Newton are magnificent in their roles, and that goes a long way, but so far it’s a tad difficult as a viewer to fully invest in the feelings of robots—ones we’re told don’t actually have feelings—no matter how human they look and act. That’s why the slow-burning realization that they’re approaching something resembling real sentience is a good sign. Not to get overly philosophical, but if they acquire both agency and memory, they’re essentially indistinguishable from real people. And that raises the stakes immeasurably for the audience. 

“Westworld’s” solid pilot ratings have dipped thanks to the return of “The Walking Dead,” but HBO recently renewed it for a second season. Creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy should go have lunch with Damon Lindelof, co-creator and showrunner of “Lost” and “The Leftovers.” They’d do well to pick his brain about “Lost,” hear about his regrets over getting too bogged down in mysteries and mythology, hopefully learn a thing or two about avoiding that fate. And they could glean inspiration from “The Leftovers,” which survived a wildly uneven first season before Lindelof and company deftly retooled it, fixed what wasn’t working, doubled down on what was, and came back in season two with the best drama on television.

Unfortunately, “The Leftovers” had already lost too much of its modest audience by the time it got great, and it’s set to end with a shortened final season. But now that “Westworld” is revving up its narrative engine, hope remains that it can finish strong this season, make some creative adjustments during the break, and come back a true contender for the crown soon to be relinquished by “Game of Thrones.”

For more from Matt, read his review of “High Maintenance.”