‘Westworld’ Is The HBO Show About The Glorious and Grisly State Of Modern TV (And HBO’s Complicity In Creating It)

Westworld might be the “most HBO” show the network has ever produced. It’s got a complicated plot hung around a sky high concept. The cinematography, visual effects, set dressing all scream opulence. The acting is stellar and the drama constantly pivots around shocking moments of sexual violence. But what really makes this the pinnacle of HBO drama is the fact that the show, for all its glorious fancies, comes with a heaping dose of meta commentary. We’re not just watching a show on HBO, we’re watching a show concerned about the television landscape that HBO has created.

Since the premium cable service put forth its first truly meaty original drama Oz in 1997, it has become synonymous with groundbreaking storytelling. Their slogan was “We’re not TV, we’re HBO” and they meant it. Every drama produced between 1997 and 2009 — the era of said tag line — swung for the fences in a way that made other network offerings look like they were bunting in the little league. Now things are different. In a year where we saw Jon Snow rise from the dead and Vinyl fall, it feels as though HBO is both hitting its zenith and tipping away from leading the zeitgeist. This isn’t HBO’s fault; rather, it’s a product of our Peak TV age. HBO no longer exists in a world where they are the only network striving to make truly nuanced, ground-breaking television with a cinematic flourish. For better (viewers) or for worse (HBO), TV is HBO now.

Westworld is inspired by the classic thriller which shares its name. The 1973 film, written and directed by the famous novelist Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Disclosure) about a fantasy world where the rich “guests” can live out their wildest fantasies in the old west free from concern about the lives they touch. See, the people inhabiting the world, the “hosts,” are all lifelike A.I. creations. The show follows what happens when a literal bug starts infecting these hosts with rebellious self-awareness, but it also follows the drama behind-the-scenes. The “writers” and programmers of the show are constantly tweaking the experience and watching nervously as their creations start wrestling out of their control. (Something even old fashioned writers face as readers misinterpret their words’ meaning on the page.)

There’s a ponderous interlude in the pilot where Anthony Hopkins’s Dr. Robert Ford — the genius behind the mechanics and concept of the show’s playground — laments to his second-in-command (played by Jeffrey Wright) that the human race has evolved to perfection. Westworld exists in a future where humans have solved all their problems, save for raising the dead. He says, “We’re done. This is as good as we’re gonna get.” And maybe that’s what’s on HBO’s mind. Maybe their tried and true model of storytelling is as good as it’s going to get.

One of the biggest criticisms Westworld has received so far is that it’s a show about a fantasy world and that specific fantasy world features a lot of sexual violence against women. HBO might have always won points for its drama’s cinematic quality, but it’s also dealt with years of backlash for gratuitously featuring sex, violence, and rape in an effort to titillate its audience. Game of Thrones in particular found itself at the center of a firestorm a couple seasons back, but it seems to have become self-aware of its early missteps. Nevertheless, Game of Thrones, True Detective, and The Night Of all continue to push forth an idea that HBO is a place where women exist to be victims — and Westworld the playground seems designed to double down on this. But is that going to be the ultimate message of Westworld the show? This show already seems too self-aware for it to be that simple.

So far, Westworld is about a fantasy world where the guests take ghoulish joy in raping and murdering; one character brags about the two weeks he spent at the park going “straight evil” were the best of his life. A shocking bit of sexual violence takes place in the first fifteen minutes and towards the end of the pilot we see a well-seeming couple laughing almost maniacally as they watch two hosts die in the street. They gawk and point as one twitches into oblivion and then track down a photographer to take a photo of them beside their prizes. So Westworld offers more depictions of humans gone bad, but that’s the point. We’re meant to empathize with the victimized A.I. creations coming into self-awareness even though we, as HBO audience members, are far more like the villains in question. We buy our HBO subscriptions and gawk at the programming as a means to escape. But what does it say about us — about the guests visiting Westworld — that our fantasies so often blend with the macabre?

You can even see Ed Harris’s “Man in Black” as a fanboy gone rogue. He’s (so far depicted as) a guest who knows the quirks of Westworld inside and out and is on an almost desperate mission to discover a “deeper level” to the park. It’s not a vacation for him, but a puzzle to unravel. We watch him cannibalize the hosts in a quest for some kind of clue, a strange secret pattern, that will help him win. It’s an eerie reflection of any fan who has found themselves digging too deep into the work they love, searching for meaning that the creators may not have intended to be there. Something I may be doing myself in this very piece. Television is no longer just a form of escape. It’s art, it’s exploration, it’s a puzzle, it’s a corporate advertisement, and it’s a mirror we see ourselves in. It’s a medium evolving too rapidly for us all to keep a solid handle on — and that’s precisely what Westworld seems to be about.

The Westworld pilot is good, but I’m still holding my breath before I’m willing to commit to saying that this show will be great. The foundation of an epic, self-reflective universe (a la Game Of Thrones) is there, but it will be up to the showrunners to keep control of the elegant playground they’ve created. This series has the potential to be an exquisite work of art that offers commentary on HBO’s entire back catalogue or, like the world we see in Westworld itself, the story could spiral out of the writers’ hands and erupt in violence, chaos, and bleakly hollow delights. Westworld could be that or it could dramatically deconstruct all that HBO has been before. Westworld could indeed be the show that sets a foundation for all HBO can be in the future.

We just have to wait to see how Westworld evolves…

Westworld debuts on HBO this Sunday, October 2.

[Where to Stream Westworld]