Rumors of HBO’s next Sunday night blockbuster had been swirling for some time, heightened by the attached of Christopher Nolan’s brother, Johnathon and clouded by news that production had been halted earlier this year.
After the wait and the concerned the final product proved to be well worth it, for me, someone who watched approximately this much of the show:
It has everything I want in a show:
An interesting plot
A show about a theme park based on the Wild West manned by a God like scientist where rich people go to bang and kill things with the potential for a robot uprising? Yup, color me intrigued HBO, color me very intrigued.
A cast that is just recognizable enough
Headlined by Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris and some actresses (Evan Rachel Wood, Thandie Newton) was all fine and good, but it dominates the prestige drama game when it comes to randoms.
- Beetee from The Hunger Games
- Cyclops aka James Marsden who is probably best known for being a stupidly-handsome-should-have-been-leading-man-along-time-ago actor
- THE OTHER HEMSWORTH
- Come on, it even had Liam McPoyle from Always Sunny/Mary from Psych
- Shannon Woodward, shoutout to The Riches and its 20 episode run and she also had a very brooding/unbelievable anti-sorority misfit role on an episode of Psych
- The stoner from the 2004 Chris Evans/Scarlett Johansson/Darius Miles(!!!) classic, The Perfect Score
- Clifton Collins Jr. who might just have one of those faces and an A+ name
- The beautiful Tessa Thomspon, who in Creed taught us literally everything is a “jawn”
It embraced the Reddit age of TV
Lost was the first show I remember inspiring fans theories and deep, thought provoking conversation about where the creators might take us. That treatment was TV has been magnified tenfold by Game of Thrones and that same approach was carried onto Westworld.
When a show’s creator is popping onto Reddit to post unseen footage to one of the 100,000+ subreddits dedicated to the show you know this is the way of the future.
I love theories. I love conspiracies. So, when a show allows me to run with those types of ideas I embrace the stories wrangling the best theories with the same ferocity that I laugh in the faces of the slew of “Did Reddit ruining Westworld” stories.
Multiple timelines? What is the world outside Westworld like? Why aren’t business trying to steal this technologies? Does it take place on Mars? How far a part are the timelines? Who the fuck brings their kid to Westworld?
Nom, nom, nom I could eat up all these questions and the subsequent exploration of these questions and all the others all day long. And luckily for me they were spoon fed to me every Monday by Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald on the The Watch.
Hey dumby, if you like all these things about Westworld then why don’t you watch it?
The Watch is my safe space each Monday as I navigate the slog of a new week, I pop my headphones in when it releases regardless if I’m completely caught on the material being covered.
And at first I fully intended to dive into HBO’s new behemoth, but as we all know, 2016 has been a rough year for humanity and I just didn’t think I was mentally prepared to dive into premiere featuring varying degrees sexual assault and murder.
So, one week of listening to recaps turned into two and so on and so forth. Each week I thought to myself, “I’ll get caught up this weekend,” and that thought process would always end up in the same place, not watching.
After hearing repeated trusted peers talk about what a tough watch it was at times and how the viewing experience wasn’t the same level enjoyability of other HBO shows I came to the perfect method of consuming the best Westworld had to offer: Listen to the synopsis, the theories, the rumors all while taking in none of the visual content.
I get to skip cinematic issues and difficult themes while still getting to be absorbed by the intertwining theories and intellectual exercises it presents.
Thus, Westworld is one of my favorite shows of 2016 for the places, themes, and ideas it allows my brain to explore and the best way to experience that, at least for now, is confining it to space between my ears while letting my eyes take a breather.