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Sci-Fi Television

HBO Cancels 'Westworld' In Shock Decision (hollywoodreporter.com) 110

Posted by BeauHD from the violent-delights-have-violent-ends dept.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, HBO has "switched off Westworld" after its recent fourth season. From the report: It's an unexpected fate for a series that was once considered one of HBO's biggest tentpoles -- an acclaimed mystery-box drama that racked up 54 Emmy award nominations (including a supporting actress win for Thandiwe Newton). Last month, co-creator Jonathan Nolan said in an interview that he hoped HBO would give the series a fifth season to wrap up the show's ambitious story, which has chronicled a robot uprising that changed the fate of humanity. "We always planned for a fifth and final season," Nolan said. "We are still in conversations with the network. We very much hope to make them." Co-creator Lisa Joy likewise said the series has always been working toward a specific ending: "Jonah and I have always had an ending in mind that we hope to reach. We have not quite reached it yet."

Yet linear ratings for the pricey series fell off sharply for its third season, and then dropped even further for season four. Westworld's critic average on Rotten Tomatoes likewise declined from the mid-80s for its first two seasons to the mid-70s for the latter two. Fans increasingly griped that the show became confusing and tangled in its mythology and lacked characters to root for. Looming over all of this is the fact Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has pledged aggressive cost cutting mandate, though network insiders maintain that saving money was not a factor in the show's cancelation. HBO said in a statement: "Over the past four seasons, Lisa and Jonah have taken viewers on a mind-bending odyssey, raising the bar at every step. We are tremendously grateful to them, along with their immensely talented cast, producers and crew, and all of our partners at Kilter Films, Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. It's been a thrill to join them on this journey."
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HBO Cancels 'Westworld' In Shock Decision More

HBO Cancels 'Westworld' In Shock Decision

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  • Is it shocking? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @04:44PM (#63025275)

    It says in the summary ratings dropped. I personally lost interest after season 2 and most people I talked to or read online said the same.

    Great first season though. Hope they do better with the "Fallout" show.

    • Re: Is it shocking? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Krakadoom ( 1407635 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @04:55PM (#63025301)

      Agreed, canceling it is completely fine, it's become a convoluted mess. I was still watching, but not really enjoying the journey as much as I was just wondering what the ending would be. For all I care they can just make a wiki page and explain where this was going.

      • I wanted the robots to win, but I could tell the writers were trying to make the plot into the humans prevailing. Glad it was cancelled..

        • but I could tell the writers were trying to make the plot into the humans prevailing

          Oh boy, you should watch season 4.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by TXJD ( 5534458 )
      Same... first 3 seasons I was pretty faithful, but then interest dropped... This last season was a disaster and I couldn't continue to watch. Just got tiring.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by neubsi ( 1039512 )
      The first season was sublime!

    • I have to admit I was still interested after season 2... but not enough to actually watch season 3. So not really a surprise to me either.

      I think it's probably better they cut off shows that can't seem to figure out an ending earlier rather than later.

    • Same opinion. First season was gripping. Didn't even make it through the last season. Wasn't put off by anything in particular but it was just .. meh.

      • The curse of scifi show worldbuilding is that it's done by writers, not by nerds.

        Do too much and you'll make a mistake the nerds will hate. Like "saving" the robots by uploading them into a flooded computer system.

        Do too little and the nerds won't be interested enough to serve as a nucleation site for broader audiences to latch onto your product.

        Have a nerd do it "right" and it'll devolve into an arcane convoluted mess of injokes that few people will be willing to watch.

        Very few franchises pulled it off wel

    • Meaning that it was always going nowhere, slowly.

      The only question is always would you like a mystery box to be full of wet shit or only half full of old, dried up shit.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by BackwardPawn ( 1356049 )
        His mystery boxes are filled with dead cats. We aren't suppose to know whether the cat is alive or dead until he figures it out himself, but after a season or two, the box really starts to stink.

        I watched season three, but it wasn't very good. I never bothered with season four. Didn't realize this was one of Abrams' shows, but it makes sense.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Season 3 really killed the show. Season 4 was a marked improvement, not up to the standard of season 1 but quite enjoyable. By then too many people had lost interest and they couldn't bring them back, despite season 4 being fairly stand-alone.

      • As I was saying before some Jar Jar buttfan felt the need to try to silence the reality...

        It was a Jar Jar Abrams production... Meaning that it was always going nowhere, slowly.

        The only question is always would you like a mystery box to be full of wet shit or only half full of old, dried up shit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Revek ( 133289 )
      No its not shocking in the least. If everyone is dead where are you going to go with that?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Season 1 was pretty stellar. From the first few episodes of Season 2 it was clear to me they were done for.

      This seems to happen a lot today: The story is told, but some money-grubbers cannot let a good thing stand.

    • Yeah I feel the same. Really the first season was spectacular television ,but somewhere around season 2 the thing just gave me a headache trying to keep track of all the threads.

      I get what they where trying to do, but it was just too hard and like a lot of people I kind of lost interest. I suspect I'm not the only one.

    • I loved seasons 1 and 2, and I think 3 went very wayward. It was too action-oriented and flashy, not thought-provoking enough. But I think they righted the ship in season 4, which was quite good to me (not as good as season 1/2). But they already lost a lot of viewership during season 3.

      No matter what, season 1 stands to me as probably the best single season of TV I've ever watched. If it had been in a movie theater I would have sat planted there for 10+ hours to watch it all.

      • Season 4 in my opinion was even much worse than 3. I was mostly not enjoying anything, and just waiting for the episodes to be over to know the conclusion. Plus some parts were confusing and i didn't have the motivation to try to understand.
        • Sadly they thought being confusing meant they were somehow being witty and complex. When in reality, they were just being confusing. That was actually part of the story - as much misdirection as possible to hide what was going on. I got bored with it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      The only thing that's really shocking is that they renewed it after season 3.

    • Ditto. They finally beat the dead horse into submission.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Torodung ( 31985 )

      Lost interest midway through season 3, because "Westworld" wasn't Westworld any more. It was characters from Westworld in Realworld (TM).

      You know, keep it in Westworld and you've got a pretty good show. Keep the name and go somewhere else entirely? Clusterfsck.

  • if "shock decision" == "smart move" (Score:5, Informative)

    by ozmartian ( 5754788 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @04:50PM (#63025283) Homepage
    Season 1 was some of the best TV ever, Season 2 started the suckiness and Season 3 was a pile of doodoo. No idea about Season 4 as I lost interest after two eps of S3. Sad that it went from amazing to mediocre. Nothing shocking, ratings speak for themselves.
    • Give S4 a chance. Ignore S3 existed and try it. A bit of a rough start but they turned it around IMO

    • Re:if "shock decision" == "smart move" (Score:4, Informative)

      by Vrallis ( 33290 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @05:48PM (#63025431) Homepage

      Agree completely. Season 4 actually wasn't too bad, definitely far better than 3, possibly better than 2. Season 1, on its own, was a masterpiece.

      Sadly the entire series felt like they really only planned for one season, and after it was such a success they had to pull the rest out of their asses.

      In comparison, look at Mr. Robot. While they both had vaguely similar first seasons in terms of a huge twist of timelines and what was real and who was who, Mr. Robot obviously had a plan for every season before they ever shot the first scene. While the first season was still the best, Mr. Robot still kept everyone in suspense and guessing the entire way through with full audience engagement.

      • Hell yeah, Mr. Robot was fantastic beginning to end. And did wonders for Kali Linux lol.

      • Sadly the entire series felt like they really only planned for one season, and after it was such a success they had to pull the rest out of their asses.

        This is a major problem with western writing. Everything needs to be serialised for a future season in case it was a success the first time around. No one is ever happy just letting an excellent story be, it needs sequels for the monies!

        I think the most retarded example of that was from a series way back when called Prison Break. Season 1: Was about a guy breaking out of prison. Great story. Done. Nothing more to add. He got out at in the end (woopse spoiler). Hurrah. Season 2 announced. WTF? Is he in priso

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by vivian ( 156520 )

      Unfortunately there is too much imperative to milk any idea for as much as they can and script writers are the main culprits here. Too many TV shows fall into this trap. I'd much rather watch a limited series where I know there is a definitive and well written ending, rather than endless subplots and convolutions until you get bored of the mess and quit, or the show gets cancelled - where if you are lucky there's a hurriedly written episode to cap it, but no proper development of the story arc to that endin

    • Season 1 was some of the best TV ever

      The first half of it... it got hella-slow towards the end.

      I watched two episodes of season 2 and decided not to go on.

      • Pretty much. When they changed to the Asian setting, it felt like an obvious air freshener in a stale room, rather than a chance to keep doing something truly original. I saw Heroes back in the day, but when they changed from people discovering and dealing with their powers to "let's keep chasing the BBEG" I lost interest.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Watching season 4 right now, actually. To me it's pretty decent sci-fi. It's moved FAR from the first season, but the fourth season actually makes sense (compared to seasons 2 and 3). I'm still three episodes from the ending, though. It has time to crash and burn yet.

    • Yep. Season 1 was just wow, I had never seen anything like this before. The constant sublime pondering of what it means to be human, the beauty, the perfect pace. But then the season finale happened and gave a clear signal that this was still just more of the same old american TV, perfect in form, but no real plan for an actual story line. Just faking it one episode at a time and hoping to somehow make it in the end. A huge disappointment, all of that suspence built up for nothing. After that I tried to wat

      • See, I felt like season 2 was a good continuation (although 1 was mind-bogglingly good). Season 3 felt to me like that's where they lost the narrative direction. Season 4 brought them back onto a more coherent narrative arc, enough so that I was hoping to see their vision for how the story would end ("the final test"). If they don't get picked up by another studio I hope the writer's find some venue to share their final vision.

    • You can only milk a dead horse for so long. They simply ran out of ideas.

  • Uhh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @04:51PM (#63025285)

    HBO said in a statement: "Over the past four seasons, Lisa and Jonah have taken viewers on a mind-bending odyssey, raising the bar at every step.

    Yet linear ratings for the pricey series fell off sharply for its third season, and then dropped even further for season four.

    I think someone had their bar graph upside down.

  • why would you want to root them?

  • Shows (even good shows) so very rarely stop before they become significantly worse.
    I bet that Squid Game is going to have a watchable 2nd season and will run for about 6 seasons anyway.
    • Squid was a pretty standard Korean TV Drama, I'm not sure why it caught on in the US but it really wasn't anything special.

      • The combination of the feel of Survivor reality TV and Battle Royale was still fresh for most of the audience, it was just waiting for a high budget series to break out. Kaiji for normies.

  • Everything old is new again (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Crowded ( 6202674 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @04:54PM (#63025297)

    Thanks, HBO. That was cool with Outsider and Lovecraft Country. Is Google helping you decide what to kill?

    You know, for all the crap Netflix has done wrong, seasonal story arcs where we don't end up with cliffhangers then canceled was a pretty "well duh" move forward for shows.

    The only show I can think of that they did this with was Marianne - and that was dumb, but it looks like we're back to the Firefly days . . .

    What do you expect from corporate wonks? We have Kit-Kat 'thins' now. Truly, there is no low to which they won't go.

    • for all the crap Netflix has done wrong, seasonal story arcs where we don't end up with cliffhangers then canceled

      Ahh, if only that was true...

      Dark Matter.

      • I thought the offed up season where *every dynamic* changed was a kill/rebirth by someone else . . . who knew?

    • What are you on about? Netflix constantly cancels series that in the midst of a cliffhanger. Sense8, Pretty Smart, and American Vandal all come to mind.

  • Fuckin' season three (Score:3)

    by paul_engr ( 6280294 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @05:00PM (#63025309)
    Season three was incoherent nonsense. Season four turned it around and it layed the groundwork for a final season I legitimately looked forward to. Fuckin' discovery merger. HBO is dead.

  • I binged through the entire first season during an acid trip and it was such a wild ride. When S02 came along, I was very excited but I lost interest after the first episode, cuz the show became hot garbage.

  • Finally! (Score:3)

    by Hank21 ( 6290732 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @05:08PM (#63025335)
    Love the actors and production quality. Heck even the story was pretty good - well in season 1 and 2. Then it became monotonous. It hurt my brain to watch. It made me try to think but in the end there was no payoff for the effort. Season 4 was too little too late. Season 3 was a fever dream of stupidity.

  • It's not shocking, that show fucking sucked (Score:4, Interesting)

    by metrix007 ( 200091 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @05:14PM (#63025349)

    Seasons 1 and 2 were playing the same game as 'Lost', dropping clues and riddles that never lead to anything. Seasons 3 and 4 were basically their own independent story arcs.

    The show had nothing intelligent to say, and had 5 minutes of fame because of nudity and violence - but with robots!

    Let it rest in peace, and let's get some good sci-fi instead. Maybe promote that Babylon 5 reboot to HBO Max and give it the budget it deserves.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hank21 ( 6290732 )
      >Maybe promote that Babylon 5 reboot to HBO Max and give it the budget it deserves. Yes please. But not if they are gonna just use it for it's name and replace the rich story with garbage.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by suss ( 158993 )

        Or turn it into a soulless mundane husk, like they did with the Quantum Leap "reboot".

    • The show had nothing intelligent to say, and had 5 minutes of fame because of nudity and violence - but with robots!

      We must have been watching completely different shows then. Maybe you missed all the discussion about how Ford and his partner knew the robots could become sentient but they each had opinions on if it happened from external or internal stimulus. That was absolutely fascinating. Same with watching Maeve seeing her speech decision tree in real time and causing her to freeze up. The reveal with the man in black. The episode narrated by Akecheta in the Lokota language explaining his life before becoming sentien

      • There were some fun moments for sure, but as a cohesive story told over season(s), I don't think it was well done, and I don't think it really did anything that hasn't already been done better elsewhere.

  • Modern shows (Score:5, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @05:18PM (#63025367)

    You can't tell who is good or bad, might as well live in real life.

    • Maybe they expect a more intelligent audience that realise that good and bad are not necessarily black and white and highly dependent on perspectives.

      Personally I like this kind of TV, not the recent Westworld specifically but rather shows which aren't catering to dumbest common denominator with completely obvious good and bad stamped on people's foreheads. Recent example: "The Marksman". I wasn't expecting much from this Liam Neeson "action" film and it still failed to deliver, but one thing was clear:
      bad

  • I thought that lst season's finale was the show finale? If it wasn't they sure wrapped up all the loose ends.

  • At season 3 it disappeared up its own ass. It's a pity it didn't reach its fifth season but really it should have wrapped up before it got that far.

  • Who was shocked? (Score:3)

    by dynamo ( 6127 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @06:14PM (#63025487) Journal

    I loved this show, especially seasons 1 and 4, but at the end of four.. there is literally nothing left to build on. It was the clearest end to a series I've ever seen. I can't imagine where they had planned to take it from there, but it couldn't really have been in the real world. I can't say much more without spoilers so I won't.

    • I had to do some reading up but Dolores has all the human simulation data from season 3. So in theory she could recreate humanity.

  • If they wanted more season they should have written a better the last two seasons.

  • Declining quality... (Score:4, Informative)

    by FritzTheCat1030 ( 758024 ) on Friday November 04, 2022 @06:21PM (#63025503)
    Every season of the show felt like a completely different series. After a more than 2 year break between seasons 3 and 4 and yet another wild tonal shift, when the new season started I had absolutely no idea what was going on...and I didn't care. Stopped watching after the first episode. I've heard people say it ended up being better than season 3, but I just don't have any interest in it any more.
  • The original story line ended with season 2. They should have stopped there.

  • I was into it into season 3, where it slowly started losing me.. but four episodes into season 4 I gave up. It was a much more interesting show dealing with the morality of sentient robots than whatever convoluted garbage they were doing with reality in season 4. Bringing back actors as other characters was not at all intriguing.

  • but its a hbo show so its going to be some over dramatic nothingburger with sofcore porn sprinkled in every 40 seconds, never understood why people dedicate their lives and pay extra for shows that end up being shitty lord of the rings but with titties

    on the other hand I don't understand why people keep going to marvel movies either, is it really that entertaining to be subjected to audio visiual noise pollution for 2 hours? (spoiler to every marvel movie, people trying WAY to fucking hard have a dramatic m

  • I've thought about this show a big fat zero times when not watching it, unless someone else brought it up. Given the generally stellar quality of HBO, I was disappointed that Westworld was its first big foray into sci-fi. Their catalog is the absolute top of the heap when it comes to historical dramas, but I guess the same mojo doesn't work going into the future.
  • First season was fantastic - a rare look into how emerging intelligence might interact with humans. At what point is a "smart" toy, too smart to be a toy. It was unusual in that the robots were not "better" than humans in every way. Brilliant series.

    Second season had so many plot holes that it was difficult to watch. One of many - why are they driving through the park rather than flying over it?

    Third season was just bad. So bad in so many ways. My personal pet annoyance was the computer that was a bi

  • While I agree with all of the sentiment here that season 3 was a garbled mess and didn't do the franchise any favors, season 4 was definitely trending back upwards from that low point. And while I agree that I really don't have any idea where a season 5 would have gone... I certainly could not have foreseen where season 4 was gonna go either... and it surprised me in a good way. I hope they will reconsider, or provide some alternative way to for Lisa and Jonah to conclude their storyline, even if it doesn't

  • Not shocked in the slightest, the last season was all over the place, confused story line that really devalued any attachments you formed in previous seasons. I think the end came one or two seasons too late

  • It's tough to retain audiences when shows have 18-24 months between seasons. There has to be a better way to produce this kind of content that puts a new season out on a consistent and timely pace. I'm sure there's all kinds of explanations, cost, talent availability, elaborate location shooting, FX, etc, but at some point look at TV from the 70s or 80s when they put out 20-some episodes of a show on an annual basis. Many had a ton of outdoor location shots, car chases, and so on, not just in-studio stuf

  • Cost Cutting (Score:3)

    by bobbutts ( 927504 ) <bobbutts@gmail.com> on Saturday November 05, 2022 @10:04AM (#63026431)
    Cool, I'm cost cutting too. First to go is any subscription to video content.

  • I remember J. Nolan and HBO talking about potentially 10 seasons and being a worthwile successor to GoT before the season 1. But there's just not enough meat behind the story lines (pun intended). Remember, WW was just two movies from the 70s with the first one being the much more memorable one.

  • All successful shows go through the same phases:
    1.) Great director and great writers create a smash-hit.
    2.) Producers looking at KPIs realize it's a smash hit and that it is going to be around for a while.
    3.) Long-running shows have to be turned into soap operas so that they don't move too fast along the story arc and run out of plot.
    4.) Soap operas do not require good directors/writers and mediocre directors/writers cost way less.
    5.) Mediocre directors/writers produce mediocre content.
    6.) All but the

  • Season 1 of westworld was so good I felt like we hit a high water mark in terms of what would be shocking to society. Any attempt to top it would be grotesque or comical... as indeed it was.

    However it did inspire my own series... which those dumb shit execs at HBO are going to view as the second coming of Hitchcock after their dumpster fires with GoT and WW. Eventually media companies will bleed so much cash that stories will actually matter at a time when their own film houses are utterly full of woke ha

  • Write up the scripts as a book. Release the four scripts as script books, for the fans, but do every season plus the fifth as a series of novels. That will give closure to those who are still watching and provides the material needed for a season five if someone else picks it up.

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